At Home with the Stasi: Gedenkstätte Hohenschönhausen as Historic House

Abstract

A survey conducted in 2007 by the SED-State Research Group (Forschungsverbund SED-Staat) among young people from across Germany revealed a worrying level of ignorance regarding the political history of both east and west. Students from both sides of the former divide were unable to give the year of the building of the Berlin Wall or place Erich Honecker and Konrad Adenauer as, respectively, past leaders of the GDR and the Federal Republic. This lack of factual knowledge was coupled, particularly in the case of east German students, with what the authors of the survey viewed as an overly positive impression of the GDR education, health and welfare systems and too little awareness of the repressive nature of the state. This image of the GDR was attributed to the picture painted by parents and relatives, who had experienced the GDR firsthand and who overemphasize the social aspects of the state and make no reference to its dictatorial character (Deutz-Schroeder and Schroeder, 2009, pp. 17–31, 199–204). The authors of the survey considered this to be not only a distortion of history, but also a threat to democracy and therefore to the political stability of the Federal Republic (Deutz-Schroeder and Schroeder, 2009, pp. 199–204). Communicative or family memory was, in this respect, felt to be an inadequate method of passing on a ‘correct’ image of the GDR that might strengthen democracy and legitimize the Federal Republic as the superior form of society.

This research was carried out as part of the project ‘Reconstructing the Stasi’, generously supported by The Leverhulme Trust.