A legacy Dispute

Eurozine Newsletter 12/2019

It is hard to argue with the latter statement. So I won’t. But I insist that a broader perspective does include the dissident legacy, while also allowing for a more fluid inquiry into historical failures.

Nevertheless, Assmann’s demand is well founded. Eastern Europe’s new authoritarians are positioning themselves not against the Soviet Union, let alone Nazi Germany. Their designated enemies are in fact the dissident intellectuals of the Soviet period and their latest offspring, ranging from human rights activists through investigative journalists to any grassroots citizens’ initiative — in other words, anyone who questions the status quo.

Assmann herself points out in her book Der europäische Traum: Vier Lehren aus der Geschichte the ‘asymmetric European remembrance’ which never reconciled the eastern past with western narratives. This is a blind spot — dare I say: a floating gap — that the new authoritarians exploit, given that 1989 is on the brink of sinking beyond the horizon of primary communicative memory.

Assmann’s critique is often bitter, perhaps unjustifiably so. And yet nobody understands better than her, the brilliant theorist of collective memory, what is at stake in the process of transforming ’89 from experience to history. This explains her powerful demand to explicitly recall the endowment of the dissident tradition.

It is not some minor detail for the entertainment of the anointed. It is the last powerful example in these cultures of a plausible public morality. The current age denies responsibility, both as a necessity and a possibility. The bequest of those who resisted earlier tyrants, even without any prospect of success, is indeed the only means left to avoid the narrative of inevitable regression.

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