ZWEI DAMEN AUS DER DDR

Le culture di Angela Merkel e di Christa Wolf

Культу́ры Aнгелы  Меркель и Кристы Вольф 

Les cultures d’Angela Merkel et de Christa Wolf

Die Kulturen von Angela Merkel und Christa Wolf

The case has made it happen that, at the same time, in a moment when the general attention of the World was concentrated on Germany  because of the European crisis, which emphasizes the central role that this country  is playing more and more within the European Union, the death of the famous German storyteller Christa Wolf has recalled to the public opinion that the history of Germany is not composed just of the  one  of the Federal Republic of Germany, but includes also the one of the former German Democratic Republic (DDR), which was not  a limited construction of the Communist period, but included also the remnants of several ancient German traditions, such as the ones of the first Germans ( who assembled themselves in Mecklemburg), of the Slavic invasions in the Middle Ages (Leipzig is Lipica) , of the important cultural heritages of Saxony and of Prussia, i.e., of Luther, Kant, Hegel, Goethe, Marx and Nietzsche, a.s.o..

This helps us to utilize this opportunity for bending upon the intricacies of German identity, a composed one, including Central European, Atlantic and Eastern European influences, and, hence, a typical expression of “Europes’ two Lungs”.

The Western press is trying, in these days, to give us an explanation to the pèresent attitude of Germans rowards economy, which appears incomprehensible to the limited cultural background of both Western politicians and intellectuals, having recourse to their stylized German stereotypes: the rigidity of Lutherans, or  the roughness of Prussians.

In reality, the ideal of the defence of stability as the cornerstone of Euro goes back towards the pre-modern ideas of social harmony, typical of the German Bildungsbuergertum; it was emphasized by Juenger's ideological construction in “Frieden”, where he described  the adventure of the European construction as the result of a sort of  “Katharsis” of the German and European "hybris" during World War II, and was "codified" by the theories of “Ordoliberalismus” at the very beginning of the Federal Republic.

Angela Merkel's personal history is rather singular, so to point out at the fact that also Eastern German mindset is not so much different from the one of Western Germany.

She was the daughter of a Lutheran pastor who decided to migrate from Western Germany to the DDR (a thing which today seems unbelievable, but which was done by several German intellectuals, such as Thomas Mann, Hermann Bloch and Stefan Heym).

She was a  scholar in physic, and was politically engaged on the “Front der Jugends” (FDJ). This FDJ was a strange phaenomen. Whilst, as it is not so much known, in Eastern Germany the appearance of multipartitism was maintained under Communism, albeit the nationalist NDP, the liberal FDPD and the Christian CDU had just  a decorative role vis-à-vis the dominating communistic  “Sozialistische Enheitspartey” (SED), the joint youth organization of all political parties, the FDJ, was conceived since the beginning as a unitarian movement, including, expressly, many Christian intellectuals.

Angela Merkel was one of these youths.

During the transition phase which led from the DDR to the unification into FRG, Angela Merkel entered the Eastern Christian CDU Party, obtaining the confidence of Tomas de  Maizière, the CDU politician which had ruled the party  during the DDR period under the hegemony of SED.

When the “Eastern” and the “Western” CDU  merged, Angela Merkel entered into the  Helmut Kohl'sstaff , and became his successor not much later. At the end, Merkel’s politics results to be not so much different   from the one of Kohl.

What is different, is the public opinion in Germany of today, which, as a consequence of 20 years of globalization, has  forgottena bit the “cultural” roots of the German stability policy, and is much more keen to rough simplifications (such as “the virtuous German” against the “disorderly South Europeans”).

Also for what concerns Christa Wolf, it is our impression that a lot of today’s prejudices constitute a serious hindrance for a serious comprehension of her life and of her work.

The only relevant question seems to be, today, the dispute among those, who attack the late storyteller for having carried out the whole of her work in the former DDR, and to have hoped that this would have evolved slowly towards democracy, and the others  who, on the contrary,  praise her because, in the last years of the DDR, she wrote some works which were not aligned with the orthodoxy of those times, and had even some disputes with the ruling Party.

This polemic is not appropriated according to us,because  denotes a double standard of morality. If nothing has prevented Angela Merkel, who had lived all of her previous life as a militant of a DDR official organization, to become the  Chancellor of the reunified Germany , why should Christa Wolf be condemned for having worked as a DDR storyteller, even as a critical one?

The point is that, albeit, obviously, DDR was by far very distant from the cultural and political standards of today, it was not completely insulated from long term German cultural trends.

So, some of the tendencies which were allowed, and even sponsored, by the DDR cultural policies, such as socialist Christian movements and a literary classicism, had their roots by far before World War II, and had tight links with the culture and politics of Western Germany.

An example is that FDJ existed also in the West, but was banned at an early stage. Another example is that many authors, including Wolf, continued to produce works linked to the classicist German literature, such as Christa’s Cassandra, which, from one side, are connected to the German “Classics” (which, by the way, lived in the “Eastern” Weimar), and, from another point of view, also the “Western” Adorno found, in Goethe’s work the basis of European and German identities also for the future.

The difficulty to understand today’s Germany is a further evidence of the fact that, without a much deeper knowledge of Europe’s different cultural roots, it will be impossible to find out a common cultural and political project, and, hence, a criterium for deciding upon a common European Governance.