“Presenciando un naufragio”: las figuraciones alemanas al afrontar el pasado para enfrentar el futuro

Abstract

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, East Germans fashioned new orientations for themselves through storytelling on all scales, from the most personal to the most official and public. Members of the opposition in the former German Democratic Republic were particularly successful in fashioning an authoritative official version of the East German past. To some extent such narratives, identifying victims and distributing blame, stood in place of legal processes, which were perceived as unsatisfactory. These official narratives, designated by the word Aufarbeitung, were understood to deliver an absolute form of truth, in contrast to deceptive public narrations practised in the GDR. The rhetoric of Aufarbeitung projected an attentive public which would receive the accounts, and an identification of that public with the German nation as a whole, even though the narratives were chiefly concerned with East Germans. These narratives were taken by some to amount to a metaphysically transcendent reality, History, circumscribing the horizons of human action. The moral value lent to this History was the greater because of an explicit contrast drawn between the long denial of a guilty past on the part of West Germans after the Nazi period, and the immediate Aufarbeitung undertaken for the GDR past.