Post‐Totalitarian Narratives in Germany: Reflections on Two Dictatorships after 1945 and 1989 1

Abstract

Abstract The concept of totalitarianism was a more complex and analytically fruitful term than many of its critics suggested. In the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) after 1949 it figured prominently in efforts to confront the realities of radical anti‐Semitism and the Holocaust. In the German Democratic Republic (GDR or East Germany), the dismissal of the concept went hand in hand with an official anti‐fascism that gave only modest attention to the specifics of Nazism's anti‐Jewish hatreds. The essay examines key figures and texts of the founding era of the political culture of both West and East Germany such as Konrad Adenauer, Kurt Schumacher, Theodor Heuss, in the West, and Walter Ulbricht and Paul Merker in the East. The concept of totalitarianism enjoyed a certain renaissance in post‐1989 Germany as scholars sought to compare and contrast the Nazi with the Communist dictatorship. While such post‐1989 examinations revealed a great deal about the East German regime, important elements of the anti‐Zionist and at times anti‐Semitic dimensions of the Communist dictatorship received short less attention. In some commentaries about the Communist past, a desire for reconciliation between the previously divided states displaced a willingness to look at this particular aspect of the GDR. While there were crucial differences between the Nazi and the Communist dictatorships, both were variants on a continuum of totalitarian rule.