REAPPRAISALS OF THE WRITERS UNION began as soon as it had dissolved. Many arrived during the first phase of the Literaturstreit (literature dispute), a controversy sparked by Christa Wolf that quickly became a debate over whether or not East German culture had possessed any value beyond propaganda. In the summer of 1990, Wolf published “Was bleibt” (What Remains), written in 1979 but withheld because of its content. It recounts a day in the life of a prominent author (a stand-in for Wolf) who is dealing with the mental anguish caused by living in a police state. It was written during Wolf's deepest disillusionment during the Biermann affair; under constant Stasi observation in real life, she describes the distressing impact of surveillance. When finally published, the book generated fierce criticism. Many critics, especially West Germans, savaged Wolf for her “self-centered” concerns, the privileges she enjoyed, and the role her books played in obscuring the realities of the dictatorship. To them, it smacked of hypocrisy. As Ulrich Greiner incredulously asked in Die Zeit, “The state poet of the GDR was supposedly spied upon by the state security service of the GDR? Christa Wolf, the National Prize winner, the most prominent author of her country, SED member until the last moment, a victim of the Stasi?”

In this heated context, East German writers offered their views on the SV. Renate Feyl observed that after the Berlin Wall, it had functioned as an ersatz public sphere, “a small form of publicity behind closed doors,” but by the 1970s it was “more and more of a travel agency” for literary bigwigs. Richard Pietraß remembered the opportunities it had provided for writers to interact with colleagues, commenting: “If we were able to do anything in the union, I guess we got some promising things started. Unfortunately, it just as often came to blows.” Helga Schubert judged that its two biggest benefits were a tax ID number designating her as a freelance author and the ability to travel to the West, privileges that she assessed were a way for the state to influence writers. Feyl mentioned critical discussions, and Pietraß acknowledged the start they had made in achieving change, but to these authors the lasting memories were privilege and disappointment.

Strategy is the highest level of a tripartite view of warfare (in which the operational and tactical levels are the other two). It is concerned with the creation of plans and decision-making in order to lend success to military operations. The word is Greek in origin, the strategos being the commander, the brains behind what the soldiers (and sailors) are told to do. In the modern day the word is used to describe any kind of idea or process for achieving an end: for example, a “sales strategy,” or the way for one sports team to defeat another. Key to its meaning, in my interpretation, is that it is in the realm of the mind. Strategy involves knowing what you want to do, or at least devising an approach in order to achieve a goal. This means understanding not only your own mind, but also that of your opponent. A leader's strategy requires a vision of what needs to be achieved, for only then can this be broken down into means and approaches to that end. I have linked this to ideology because every cause needs some kind of justification (even that of naked greed) if it is to appeal to followers. Most leaders, if they are canny, will seek to demonstrate the highest possible ethical grounds for their intentions, for their aggression might bring down upon them a weight of criticism that impairs the effectiveness of their plans.

The reason I have chosen the Normans to provide examples for strategies of warfare is not that I believe them to be some sort of super-race (although they themselves, and some historians subsequently, might represent them as such), but because I know their history well. This is the result of having been taught by that great “Normanist” R. Allen Brown, some thirty years ago, and also of my own inclination to follow their adventures from the borders of Scotland through France and Italy and across the seas to Greece and Syria. When we view this broad span of Norman conquests, it is impossible not to wish to investigate the strategic considerations of these ambitious campaigns, far from the rolling hills and orchards and meadows of fertile Normandy, with its long sea coast, but poorly provided with harbors, and the great diversity of landscapes and seas of the regions which they eventually reached.

“I REGRETTED THAT,” Rosemarie Schuder told me. The historical novelist, just shy of her eighty-fifth birthday, paused and looked away as I asked about the expulsion of nine members of the East German Writers Union (Schriftstellerverband der DDR, SV) in 1979. It was unclear from her answer whether she, a member of the union's Berlin branch that carried out these actions, meant to imply that she regretted supporting these steps (she did not participate in the meeting) or regretted not doing enough to prevent them. Either way, her answer gave me pause. Here was an author who, despite refusing to join the Socialist Unity Party (SED), had risen to become one of the few female members of the SV presidium, its main leadership body. Her literature and activism had been dedicated to peace and social justice, as she eventually headed the union's Solidarity Commission, and her membership in the East German Christian Democratic Union was a testament to her commitment to Christian ethics and human dignity. No evidence exists of collaboration with the Ministry for State Security (the secret police or Stasi), a relative rarity for presidium members. In brief, she was someone many considered a good person, a view her kindness during our interview bore out. Yet the fact remains that she had either supported expelling nine colleagues or at least had done little when others did so, thus ending the literary careers of the affected authors in the German Democratic Republic. The question is why?

The American view of the East German dictatorship is often saturated with Cold War images, chief among them the Berlin Wall and Stasi. The coercive side of the dictatorship was very real for millions of citizens whose lives were adversely affected by SED rule. Yet it is also true that the dictatorship could not have functioned without the participation of authors like Schuder, a woman who experienced the horrors of the Nazi regime as a girl and adolescent and who later married author Rudolf Hirsch, a German man whose Jewish heritage would have likely ended in his death had his family not fled to Palestine. How is it that someone who had known the terror of the Third Reich could support a second German dictatorship? Someone who could criticize the SED's authoritarian nature and yet rise to the pinnacle of the most powerful professional organization for the country's writers?

Bantock continued to balance lectures at the University of Birmingham with his duties at the Birmingham and Midland Institute. Publications included his ‘Choral Symphony’ for unaccompanied voices, Atalanta in Calydon (a setting of Swinburne); Lucifer in Starlight for six-part unaccompanied men's chorus; the ‘poem for orchestra’ Dante and Beatrice, which Bantock premiered at the Queen's Hall on 24 May; and ‘Jaga-Naut’, the second of the Two Orchestral Scenes. He also completed the scoring of Fifine at the Fair and his incidental music for Macbeth and began a serenade for strings, In the Far West. Part I of Omar Khayyám was performed by Henry Wood at the Sheffield Festival on 28 April, and Bantock conducted the premiere of the Overture to a Greek Tragedy at the Worcester Festival on 13 September. He was still in touch with Wallace, managing ‘an hour's chat’ on 22 April, talking with him (along with Elgar, Corder, McNaught, Austin and Mackenzie) at the International Musical Congress a month later, and meeting Wallace and his wife for lunch in June. Wallace's Three Songs – settings of William Blake (‘The Sunflower’, ‘Love's Secret’, ‘The Shepherd’) – and Spanish Songs (his own texts) were published, as was Newman's English translation of Albert Schweitzer's J.S. Bach.

251 GRANVILLE BANTOCK TO ERNEST NEWMAN

Dear Ali Ibn.

I will expect you in my room tomorrow evening (Monday) any time from 7. PM to 7. 30, so that we can have a chat before the Lecture.

I understand that von Hase will be staying with you on Thursday night, & he will come to me on Friday. I saw him in London on Saturday, & found him in excellent spirits.

I am glad you escaped safely from Sidney Street. I missed you at B & H on Friday by about 5 minutes. It was odd about meeting those two aunts on Thursday. Yours.

Peciv. X.

252 GRANVILLE BANTOCK TO ERNEST NEWMAN

Dear Ali Ibn.

Here is Corbett Smith's letter.

I have just remembered that I have omitted to fill up the Form myself for the N.L.C.

The year 1899 saw the completion of Bantock's Helena: Orchestral Variations on the theme H.F.B. (premiered in Antwerp) and the unpublished orchestral poem Thalaba the Destroyer (like The Curse of Kehama, based on the poetry of Robert Southey). At New Brighton, Cowen (28 May), Stanford (25 June), Parry (9 July), Elgar (16 July), Corder (23 July), Wallace (30 July), German (20 August) and Mackenzie (3 September) all came to conduct concerts promoting their music; other highlights included a complete performance of Rubinstein's seven-movement ‘Ocean’ Symphony (11 June), an all-Berlioz programme on 2 July and an all-Liszt programme on 10 September. Although Bantock continued his plans to relaunch the New Quarterly Musical Review, this project was eventually abandoned. Wallace began work on his Pontius Pilate overture, and his Sister Helen was premiered at the Crystal Palace on 25 February; he also delivered his paper ‘The Scope of Programme Music’ to the Musical Association on 9 May and finally completed his Creation Symphony, which was premiered at New Brighton (conducted by Wallace) on 30 July together with his popular Freebooter Songs. Newman published what was to be the first of a series of books that made a significant contribution to Wagner scholarship, A Study of Wagner.

53 GRANVILLE BANTOCK TO WILLIAM WALLACE

Mio Wallachio!

A Happy New Year! I am writing to you on a matter to which I know you will give your best consideration. It will be necessary for me to engage a conductor for a good Military Band (not Hungarian) at the Tower this season, and I would like to offer you the post, if you can see your way to accept it. Briefly, the conditions are as follows: – (a) The season to commence at Easter, & to last for six months during April, May, June, July, August, September, with a probability of continuing the period; – (b) The post would in your case, carry with it that of deputy conductor for the large or combined orchestra at Sunday Concerts, Choral Society, etc; – (c) The terms would be four guineas a week; – (d) The Military band uniform will be dark blue, and as quiet as possible.

The relationship between the Catalan counties and the papacy was intense from the time when Sunyer, monk of the abbey of Cuixà in the Pyrenean region of Conflent, traveled to Rome in 950 to seek papal protection for his monastery. At the beginning of the preceding century, the Carolingian empire had organized into several dependent administrative units the Roman-Visigothic population of the northeastern part of Iberia which had remained free from Muslim power or, in many cases, had regained freedom from it as a result of Frankish campaigns which brought Christian control over the cities of Girona in 785, and Barcelona in 801. The restructuring of the region affected also some less thoroughly romanized groups which had originally dwelt deep in the Pyrenees and whose members were called hispani by contemporary Carolingian sources. Once the western empire entered an irreversible decline as an effective continental power in the second half of the ninth century, these borderline districts facing al-Andalus became political units autonomous to all intents and purposes from increasingly powerless emperors – a development which was shared by many of their counterparts in other parts of the Carolingian world. The Catalan counties followed the course from dependent administrative centers into fullyfledged self-ruling political structures, as did other territories in the empire.5 This complex and multifaceted process underlay their history from the late ninth to the mid-eleventh centuries. It basically meant the gradual strengthening of so far incipient feudal relations at the bottom and at the top of society, at the rural base and among high political circles.

Modern historiography on these eastern Iberian counties at that time has concentrated mainly on the transformation, or to be more precise on the “mutation,” of allegedly “free” peasants into serfs which had taken place in the latter stages of the period; this thesis implies the absence of any previous feudal features in social relations and a tacit agreement on the ascription of Carolingian and early post-Carolingian southern Pyrenean counties to “Late Antiquity.” The line of thought shared by this type of study has clearly followed the path opened by the seminal but rather schematic, and somewhat misleading, book by Pierre Bonnassie.

In 1227 a priest, known today as Henry of Livonia, finished writing a history of events in his part of the world (the modern Baltic states of Latvia and Estonia) during the previous thirty or so years. His chronicle, by far the best of the written sources for the conquest and conversion of the pagan peoples of the region by military and missionary forces largely coordinated by the recently founded Latin church of Riga, is one of the most important of all sources for the conduct of war in the European Middle Ages. What Henry wrote about sieges and battles is undoubtedly valuable; these encounters were the action highlights of war and as such have long been of interest to medieval chroniclers and modern military historians. But rather less attention has hitherto been paid to what he wrote about the more mundane subject of raiding – almost certainly the most common form of warfare throughout the Middle Ages, and probably throughout most of world history too. As the first European author to describe what previous chroniclers had either disregarded as unremarkable routine or had, in twelfth-century England, treated rhetorically as barbaric atrocity, his insider's account of the early thirteenth-century conquest of Estonia, an unusually dispassionate narrative of raid and counter-raid, offers revealing insights into the obscure subject of the conduct of war in earlier centuries.

Henry and the Church of Riga

Nothing is known about Henry's earlier life apart from what can be inferred from his chronicle. This suggests that, no matter whether his parents were German or not, he was educated in north Germany, perhaps in the Magdeburg region and/or the monastery of Segeberg in Holstein, and that he entered the Baltic region in the service of Albert of Buxtehude, bishop of Riga/Livonia, probably in 1205, the year from which his narrative became noticeably more detailed.3 In 1208 he was made a priest and was sent to minister to the newly-baptized Letts living in the valley of the Ümera (Jumar), a tributary of the river Gauja (Aa), to the northeast of Riga. Here, right on the frontier of Latin Christendom, he was, in his own words, “exposed to many dangers.” In 1211 Estonian raiders burned his church down; in 1223 they plundered or burned his crops, houses, and belongings and stabled their horses in his (by now stone-built?) church.

The German Basic Law

CONSTITUTIONS ARE AMONG the most important yet peculiar political inventions of the modern age. They are agreements that, in most respects, do not differ at all from other political agreements or declarations of intent. Nevertheless, and strangely enough, constitutions make it possible for political orders to be established, directed, maintained, and controlled. Unfortunately, the establishment of a constitution is not always sufficient for its implementation, and there are many examples of constitutions that have not succeeded. They are, generally, declarations of intent written at a specific historical moment such as the end of a war, a revolution, or even the death of a long-time ruler. Furthermore, it is not the “will of the powerful” that implements the constitution. This is important because otherwise, the powerful would simply make use of constitutions to perpetuate their advantage over the weaker members of society. Following Hannah Arendt, successful constitutions might be understood as examples of “communicative power.” They exercise a unifying force and bind everyone in a given polity (including the powerful) to a common structure by “founding a new authority” (Arendt 2006, 174). This force and authority cannot be reduced to the amount of resources the “willing” have at their disposal.

The Basic Law has been the constitution of western Germany for more than sixty-five years now, and of eastern and unified Germany for over twenty-five years. Debate about a new German constitution is almost entirely absent in German politics today, despite the fact that the global economic crisis, the threat of international terrorism, and the development of the European Union have presented and present challenges that were unknown to the authors of the Basic Law. On the contrary, the political parties mutually accuse one another of violating the foundations of the Basic Law with respect to particular policies: for instance, in the areas of domestic security, military operations abroad, fiscal policy, or the increasing integration of Europe. This situation is fundamentally different from the debates in 1989/90. At that time, the controversy over the constitution of unified Germany and especially over the establishment of a common constitution was one of the central issues both in the public sphere as well as in the unification negotiations between the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic.

Images of Unification

IMPORTANT EVENTS EVOKE Important images, images that can shape the public's imagination for a long time and that can in turn influence the way political theory thinks about these events. The fall of the Wall and the events leading to it, as well as the events emanating from it, are no exception to this rule. They are truly historical events that are deeply ingrained in the consciousness of everyone who personally experienced that moment, and even in the consciousnesses of many who were not yet born. The pictorial evidence is there to document these events: The pictures of the mass demonstrations all over East Germany, the actual fall of the Wall and the people hacking away at its sturdy concrete are ubiquitous. They are on par with pictures of the John F. Kennedy assassination, the first man on the moon, the last helicopter out of Saigon, or, of course, 9/11.

Alongside these images, which have captured the imagination of the entire world, there are many images that were equally important to the immediate participants yet not equally well preserved in collective memory. The photos of Chancellor Kohl and General Secretary Gorbachev during their pivotal negotiations might be one example of this second order of images, with Kohl's roomy cardigan providing proof of the friendly and remarkably informal atmosphere of these high-level and highstakes negotiations. And then there is “Zonen-Gaby (17),” who graced the cover of Germany's leading satirical magazine, Titanic, at the time of unification. “Gaby,” with a “typical” East German hairdo and outfit, happily showed a peeled cucumber, with the headline reading “Zonen- Gaby (17) in Bliss (FRG): My First Banana.” The image quickly became an icon, and even today, twenty-five years later, it is still by far the bestknown satirical pictorial comment on unification from inside Germany.

There is just one problem with the icon: “Zonen-Gaby” was actually Dagmar from Worms in West Germany. The fact that she was thirty years old instead of seventeen is a minor issue; more importantly, the quintessential East German look was achieved by outfitting a West German woman with appropriate clothing. This has some symbolic meaning for the entire process of unification, as even making fun of East Germans worked perfectly well for a West German magazine without any involvement of a real East German at all.

DESPITE THE COLLAPSE of the SED regime and unification, the German Democratic Republic continues to live on in the social imaginary, especially in contemporary German cinema. Since 1989 a plethora of feature films set in the GDR have graced the silver screen, and while they employ different perspectives, conventions, and aesthetic approaches, they share a fundamental interest in the past that coalesces them into a genre. Genre is notoriously difficult to characterize definitively. Predictable storylines, recurring characters, and familiar visual cues form a distinct connection between texts, but “genres do not consist only of films, they consist also, and equally, of specific systems of expectation and hypothesis which spectators bring with them to the cinema, and which interact with films themselves during the course of the viewing process” (Neale 2000, 46). Genre encompasses more than a set of texts with shared formal characteristics and themes. It is also a discursive network, in which the expectations of multiple and often competing stakeholders (filmmakers, viewers, and critics) are presented, interpreted, negotiated, and contested. Genre is distinguished by a continuous process of transformation, which entails a messy course of articulation, disruption, and renewal rather than a smooth evolution. Rick Altman (1999, 195) has suggested that “genres are regulatory schemes facilitating the integration of diverse factions into a single unified social fabric. As such, genres operate like nations and other complex communities. Perhaps genres can even teach us about nations.” The history-film genre can be seen as a bellwether of how the German nation seeks to integrate competing discourses on the GDR past into a single unified social fabric.

Over the last few decades the history film has gained increasing credence as a valid source of historical knowledge. Robert Rosenstone (1992, 1138) offers a broad definition of the history-film genre by suggesting that its primary salient feature “is its willingness to engage the discourse of history—that is, the facts, the issues, and the arguments raised in other historical works.” Like many historians and cultural critics, however, Rosenstone (1995, 11–12) presents a twofold classification that segregates what he calls standard or mainstream history films from the serious inquiry found in postmodern history films.

Introduction

THE GERMAN CARTOONIST Felix Görmann, known as Flix, published a book in 2009 combining a two-year-long series of weekly recollections in the Berlin daily newspaper Tagesspiegel. The subject matter of these reflections involves personal experiences—Görmann's own and those of friends—regarding the German Democratic Republic (GDR) before 1989. Unlike many movies and TV shows about daily life in the former GDR, the stories presented in Flix's cartoons neither romanticize nor condemn the Communist regime, nor do they overemphasize the Stasi secret police. The authentic episodes illustrate people's ambivalent experiences with the GDR from both sides of the Iron Curtain.

These cartoons can be seen as part of a new culture of remembrance that stands in opposition to lingering ideological positions that either glorify or totally renounce the political system and social aspects of the former GDR. Surrounding the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, a lively debate about memory culture surfaced in German public discourse. The main points discussed by prominent politicians and intellectuals as well as in the media centered around the question of whether the GDR was a totalitarian dictatorship, terrorized to the end by secret police, or rather a more liberal dictatorship, given its investments in public health care and preschool education, to name two examples. A considerable part of the population of the former GDR is unwilling to regard itself as having belonged to a totalitarian society. More than twenty-five years after the fall of the Wall, they still recall happy memories of everyday life in the GDR, which they then conflate with a nostalgic view of the old political system.

The different sides of this debate will be summarized here from three perspectives. First, I will identify the key points of the ongoing discussion regarding the political and social system of the GDR. This debate not only highlights the various ambivalent evaluations of East German society but also raises the question of how to present this topic in history and political-science classes in schools. Second, I will discuss the most important results of two empirical studies demonstrating what current middle and high-school students in Germany know about the GDR and what their political opinions are.

AFTER THE FALL of the Wall in 1989, Germany entered a veritable exhibition boom. The frenzied pace of exhibition and museum openings peaked at the turn of the millennium, when an average of more than one new museum opened its doors to the public every other day (Rauterberg 2002, 43). The end of the Cold War brought a windfall to economic and cultural globalization. At the same time, new digital technologies revolutionized the way we communicate, trade, and go about our lives. While digital technologies also impacted museum culture, where they enabled the creation of new immersive environments, object-based history exhibitions and art exhibitions soared as well, attracting ever more visitors through special events and other innovative programs. This explosive growth, in some respects a permutation of what came to be known globally as the “Guggenheim effect” of the 1980s, had specific resonances in postunification Germany. After 1989, the reconfigured state and its regions turned to the medium of exhibition to work through the divided past—including the differently lived legacies of World War II, Nazism, and the Shoah—and to reflect on the transformation of the present. Across the newly unified nation-state, museum and memory culture during the 1990s worked with an array of new exhibition concepts in regional museums and Gedenkstätten (memorial sites) devoted to Nazi militarism and perpetration. The Topography of Terror exhibit in Berlin that opened in 1987 on the site of the former Gestapo headquarters, for instance, has since grown into a full-scale museum and documentation center. While still considered a “difficult heritage” overdetermined by trauma, mourning, guilt, and shame, the history of Nazism and the genocide of European Jewry now have a firm place in virtually every contemporary regional or history museum in Germany. The aesthetics of these proliferating exhibitions, however, have varied greatly, from the Topography of Terror's sober documentary style, to the experiential, Erlebnis-oriented presentation at the Historisch-Technisches Museum Peenemünde, to the concept of the Nazi Bunker Valentin in Bremen-Fargo as Denkort, “a place to think but also to remember” (Heckner 2016, 369).

In her review of recent site-specific exhibitions with a focus on Nazi militarism, Elke Heckner (2016) sheds light on the installations of the Bremen Bunker, the site of a former Nazi submarine wharf.