1989 was not the end but the beginning of history

Anyone who doubts whether, in the 32nd year of reunified Germany, it is still necessary to remember and deal with the SED dictatorship and the division of Germany will find enough evidence in the present that this question must be answered in the affirmative.

When the Wall was commemorated, a strange reluctance to use names is the order of the day in many statements: Sentences that put the Wall in a causal relationship to the socialist world view that it brought forth were and are scarce. Not to mention the thoughtless adoption of the term "Wende" and thus the political framing of Egon Krenz and the SED.

The use of tanks and the building of the Wall were not accidents at work, but rather a condition for the existence of socialism. The knowledge of lack of freedom, arbitrariness and suffering under the SED regime must be passed on to present and future generations. Precisely to be able to appreciate how valuable and how little a life of freedom is a matter of course. And in order not to tread the wrong political path again in the present and in the future.

Our country is shaped by this second German dictatorship and decades of division. For those affected by political persecution, the downplaying of the SED dictatorship is downright unbearable. For our society as a whole, forgetting about history is a form of political illiteracy.

Several cities in the east of our republic are currently applying for the location of a “Future Center for German Unity and European Transformation”. The commission “30 Years Peaceful Revolution and German Unity” proposed such a center.

As right as it is to locate it in an East German city: its claim and its charisma must be all-German. It is not just an East German concern to talk about what it can and must achieve. We need a pan-German debate on this.

Especially in view of the Russian war of aggression in Ukraine, concerns were raised that a national navel-gazing could take place. And demands to give the future center a pan-European perspective and one that is also more strongly oriented towards Central and Eastern Europe. It's not an either/or.

We need both: internal unity and anti-totalitarian consensus. Pan-German and pan-European. That's what this center has to be about. Putin's declaration of war, also historically political, must be followed by a historically politically founded defense of our liberal order. At national and European level, a common future needs a common memory.

This also includes the history before 1989: June 17, 1953 as well as Budapest 1956, Prague 1968, Charta 77 and especially Solidarnosc in Poland. What are the common, sometimes different experiences with dictatorship, revolution and transformation? What do we owe to our Polish neighbors, who much earlier found the courage to rebel against the communist regime in their country? There is a lot that still shapes our present. A past that has not passed.

Anyone in Germany who mentions August 23, the date of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, as a historically significant day usually looks into questioning faces. The fate of Poland, the Baltic states and also Finland up to the attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941 is hardly visible. In addition, it was not freedom that came east of the Iron Curtain in 1945, but a new dictatorship.

The European Day of Remembrance for the Victims of Stalinism and National Socialism is taken much more seriously by our neighbors in Poland and the Baltic States and celebrated more consciously than in Germany. The non-aggression pact and its disastrous consequences are remembered there to this day. There, the experience of two occupations and dictatorships is much more present in consciousness, while here the experience of the Soviet occupation and the second German dictatorship is misjudged as supposed East German regional history.

A split memory, however, leads to split politics. The Germans in the Soviet occupation zone and in the GDR had to bear the heavier part of Germany's post-war history. Internal unity is also a question of the relationship between majority and minority. Something supposedly exotic and deficient is often attributed to the smaller part of the country, while the larger part acts as a benchmark.

This applies no less to Western Europe on the one hand and Central and Eastern Europe on the other. The freedom in the west of our country is not an own merit. The fact that the second German dictatorship was experienced only in part of our country is a quantitative finding.

A qualitative argument against the relevance of these experiences for the anti-totalitarian consensus that is so urgently needed does not result from this. Anti-Americanism and German romanticism have their share in the careless dismissal of the justified security interests of our Polish and Baltic partners as "sensitivities" and defamed as "saber-rattling".

When it comes to history and struggles to interpret history, it is about the question of the system, about our free-democratic basic order. Anyone whose freedom has been robbed by a wall that has been described as an anti-fascist protective wall cannot applaud euphorically, but takes a very close look to see whether those who are against something are also for what matters: namely our freedom- basic democratic order.

It is no coincidence that a revisionist view of history, which is not dissimilar to that of Putin and has an ambivalent relationship to the Hitler-Stalin pact, for example, can be found among some who today boast of anti-fascism themselves.

The past seven months have cruelly reminded us that 1989 was not the end of history but the beginning of it. The enemies of freedom use history tactically. The defenders of freedom need historical awareness as a tool to make our democracy defensive both internally and externally.

Linda Teuteberg is a member of the German Bundestag, a member of the federal executive board of the FDP and deputy chairwoman of the association "Against forgetting - for democracy".