A deposed elite and the issue of responsibility: How Communist-era politicians are coping with their reputation as perpetrators in Leipzig, Germany.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

The goal of my fieldwork in Leipzig was to determine how former East German politicians are coping with their politically-tainted past. Regardless of whether they are responsible for any past abuses, East German politicians are widely suspected of having had close contact with the Stasi, or secret police. The Stasi represents all that was wrong in East Germany: stringent travel restrictions, political repression and a poor consumer market. The case of ex-politicians is an opportunity to explore how members of a deposed elite relate to the issue of responsibility. Do they see themselves as responsible for past abuses or only for past successes? And what does their sense of responsibility teaches us about their sense of self, and more broadly, German identity?.
I argue that ex-politicians are in a double-bind. They distance themselves from the tainted past while striving to affirm their socialist ideals. I explore how they invoke sentiments of estrangement and identification across different spheres of life, including their relationships with former colleagues, career prospects and opinions about German unification. I then contend that their struggles with the tainted past are paradigmatic of the identity struggles of their compatriots. German identity is no longer symbolized exclusively with reference to the figure of the victim (in West Germany) or the resistance fighter (in East Germany). Daniel Goldhagen's <italic>Hitler's Willing Executioners </italic> has struck a chord in Germany precisely because it resonates with this shift in national identity. Rather than suppress the presence of the perpetrator in society, as was the case in the aftermath of World War II, accomplices to evil are presumed to be present in large numbers in Eastern Germany.