Abstract
There has been a recent flurry of books published for a non-specialist audience on East Germany – in both English and German – including those by Katja Hoyer, Dirk Oschmann, and Steffen Mau. While Ines Geipel's Behind the Wall, expertly translated by Nick Somers, starts from the same premise as many others, namely to explain and understand behaviours and attitudes in contemporary eastern Germany, this book is notably different. Geipel's narrative is a striking combination of family biography, personal reflection, historical account and psychological interrogation. It combines insights and quotations from philosophers, historians and psychoanalysts – amongst others – with the story of how a tradition of silence and forgetting developed over three generations in her family. This family tradition is, in turn, used as a prism through which to view and psychologize present-day developments in eastern Germany, most notably the rise of right-wing extremist parties and associated violence.
Geipel begins and ends with her brother, whose premature death from a brain tumour motivates her to commit her thoughts to paper. In many ways, there is little of Geipel herself in the narrative – readers will hear of her athletics career only in passing, for instance – but instead it focuses primarily on three generations of male protagonists in her family. First is her maternal grandfather, who joined the Nazi party in 1933 and rapidly rose through the ranks, becoming an SS officer and party bureaucrat in Riga at the time when almost all Jews in Riga were murdered in the forests outside the city. Second is her father, a musician and choirmaster who threw himself into the building of socialism in the 1950s and 1960s, training as a Stasi special agent from 1973 and undertaking undercover missions under eight different pseudonyms. As revealed in his 800-page Stasi file, he was considered by his handler to have ‘no inhibitions’. Third is her brother, an artist and photographer, who lived his life through his photographs, unable to speak about or engage with his family history. Geipel and her brother were the closest of siblings and best of friends, united by the psychological and physical violence inflicted upon them by their father. Yet in later years, what she saw as his denial and averted gaze – which he considered ‘positive suppression’ – drove a chasm between them; it is this chasm that she attempts to untangle.
On the one hand, this is a book that highlights the patriarchal societies of the Nazi period and the GDR, both of which were strongly shaped by male authority figures. On the other hand, it is one that examines the implicated responsibility of those around such figures; Geipel, for example, admonishes ‘Our strong mothers and their miserable lack of responsibility, who did not stop their husbands’ violence but often enough let it happen, looked away, kept quiet, lived with it or even participated themselves’ (125). Her brother even found safety in their parental home, where he and his mother were bound by silence about the past. Geipel uses this family scenario as a starting point for the examination of wider societal silences and myths. The heroic narrative that emerged around Buchenwald in the GDR, for instance, looms large in the book, and is frequently drawn upon as a shorthand for the lack of honest examination of the past, both in the GDR and after unification. Likewise, the continuities in her own family and in society at large across the caesura of 1945 and 1989 are shown to be enabled by silence, with elites from previous regimes managing to maintain their former networks and influence under radically different political circumstances. Above all, the violence of the early 1990s and the growth of support for right-wing extremist parties occupies much of Geipel's attention and is also linked to a widespread unwillingness to confront the past in the East. Indeed, in her words, Pegida and the AfD ‘absolve the East from having to face up to its own history’ (172).
This is a powerful and provocative book, which will engage specialists and non-specialists alike. It provides a personal and searching account, in which the fragile comfort of childhood reminiscences intermingles with the lasting impact of familial support for two dictatorships; not only does the personal become highly political, but the political also becomes exceptionally personal. Rich in imagery and poetic language, the book asks as many questions as it provides answers, but Geipel's message is clear: this is an appeal for a constructive culture of debate about the past and its relationship to the present.