Goodbye Stalin

I had an earlier post on the phenomenon of Ostalgia for the DDR.  Now Zizek asks in The London Review of Books why it is acceptable to express nostalgia for the repressive DDR but unacceptable to display a similar sentiment for Nazism:

Till now, to put it straightforwardly, Stalinism hasn’t been rejected in the same way as Nazism. We are fully aware of its monstrous aspects, but still find Ostalgie acceptable: you can make Goodbye Lenin!, but Goodbye Hitler! is unthinkable. Why? To take another example: in Germany, many CDs featuring old East German Revolutionary and Party songs, from ‘Stalin, Freund, Genosse’ to ‘Die Partei hat immer Recht’, are easy to find. You would have to look rather harder for a collection of Nazi songs

Zizek answers his own question with an interesting quasi-psychanalytic analysis where he sees Stalinism as a perversion of the liberating impulses of the October Revolution whereas German fascism was a displacement (in a Freudian sensce- Verschiebung) of the class struggle to a racial conflict:

Nazism displaces class struggle onto racial struggle and in doing so obfuscates its true nature. What changes in the passage from Communism to Nazism is a matter of form, and it is in this that the Nazi ideological mystification resides: the political struggle is naturalised as racial conflict, the class antagonism inherent in the social structure reduced to the invasion of a foreign (Jewish) body which disturbs the harmony of the Aryan community.

Then there is this:

If Heidegger cannot be pardoned for his flirtation with Nazism, why can Lukács and Brecht and others be pardoned for their much longer engagement with Stalinism?

I know there have been many books written about  Heidegger and Nazism, but what about Brecht and Stalinism?  Reading though his collected poems there are many poems celebrating Stalin  - but most of these were written during the war.  I find little recognition of the contribution of the United States - the country that gave him sanctuary - in defeating Hitler.  On the contrary , I found this shameful stanza from his long poem Kriegsfibel:

In jener Juni-Früh nah bei Cherbourg
Stieg aus dem Meer der Mann aus Maine und trat
Laut Meldung gen den Mann an von der Ruhr
Doch war es gen den Mann von Stalingrad

In some pieces - such as Die Lösung (The Solution -1953) after the June 17 uprising in East Berlin  - Brecht expresses ambivalence, or even skepticism, aout his new country.  But there does seem to be a huge blind spot in his later works for the true nature of "real-existing socialism" (i.e. Stalinism).

Comments

[ludwig]

Well, this is a fair argument. But besides the clear ambivalence in people like Brecht towards the communist dictatorship (Brecht, after all, was living in East Germany only 11 years and as an old man), I think it's important to compare the level of repression in East Germany with Nazi Germany. Certainly there was a lot of repression in East Germany, especially in the first 25 years. But was it comparable to the Nazis? And in the spirit of empathy with historical actors, was it not reasonable to conclude that some level of repression would be necessary to wean Germans away from their Nazi/barbaric past? Indeed, if the paramount goal was moving away from the Nazi past, which side (West or East) was taking the more decisive steps?

I'm not excusing communist apologists--they are justly condemned. But I think a lot of admirable people (Arnold Zweig and Brecht included) had decent reasons to make the commitments they made.

[david]

Ludwig,
I agree with your statement that a number of anti-fascist intellectuals like Brecht initially embraced the DDR as "the better Germany". Many of them later became disillusioned. I cannot go along with the idea that a "level of repression" was required to wean people away from Nazism.

As for which side was took the most decisve steps towards democracy, I'll defer to Gregor over at the Denkpass blog, who grew up in the DDR.

David

[ludwig]

Well, you're of course absolutely right about which side was moving towards democracy. I just inclined to give these intellectuals the benefit of the notion that in the first 8 years or so (at least up until the 1953 uprising) the nature of the regime wasn't crystal clear (ie, whether East German socialism could be different than Stalininst socialism).

[Aristotelis]

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