In response to this interesting and thoughtful review, I would like to
raise a question for debate: the supposed political associations of
historical scholarship exploring the balance between conformity,
compromise and repression in the GDR, and historical scholarship
exploring the balance between enthusiasm and terror in the Third Reich.

I am glad that Bruce recognises that: "Scholars are well aware that to
explain is not to exonerate", but he should be very careful of going on
to make statements such as "yet the explanations of the GDR
dictatorship in the spate of English-language monographs that have
appeared in the last few years nevertheless flirt with exoneration."
Since he quotes my own work on the GDR in no less than three of his
five footnotes, making me stand more or less single-handedly for this
position (accompanied in one footnote by a former graduate student and
close colleague), I wish explicitly to distance myself from any such
snide insinuation. I am not "flirting with exoneration"; I am simply
trying, as a historian, to describe, analyse, interpret and explain
what I find.

But I do think the issue here goes way beyond my own position, and
raises a theoretical and historiographical question of far wider
relevance. And I find Bruce's mode of argument quite problematic on
this issue. It is an argument one frequently finds - so I shall make
his review, too, stand for a broader position - and, because it has
implications for the direction of historical scholarship, it is worth
responding to in some detail.

Perhaps it is simply because the GDR is closer to our own times, or
because very few historians could be plausibly accused of Nazi
sympathies; but I continually find it odd that academic attempts to
explore degrees of support in the GDR are more likely to be accused of
seeking to "exonerate" a dictatorship than are scholarly attempts to
explore support for Hitler and the Nazi ideological and racist project.
In short: why is it apparently alright for a Kershaw to write about the
"Hitler myth", or a Gellately to talk about willing informers for the
Gestapo, and for others to critique these views on purely scholarly
grounds - but not for historians of the GDR to explore degrees of
accommodation and grumbling assent among the East German population
without being accused of coming close to exculpation of an unjust
regime? Why is it okay for a Götz Aly to look at the extent and
implications of material rewards for members of the racial
Volksgemeinschaft in Hitler's Germany, but not for historians of the
GDR to explore the (far more modest) attempts of the SED to deal with
everyday issues such as housing and health for those who were among the
politically conformist majority? Neither such approach intrinsically
denies the preconditions of Aryanisation, aggressive war of expansion,
and genocide (in the case of the Third Reich), or the Wall, the Stasi,
the presence of Soviet and Warsaw Pact troops (in the case of the GDR).
But the focus with respect to bases of popular support in Nazi Germany
is deemed to be acceptable territory for historians, while for the GDR
it is often held to be politically suspect, even dangerous.

To appeal to the political and moral abuses of historical
representations by biased contemporaries in the post-regime years is
not a valid argument. It may of course have been convenient for former
Nazi fellow travelers after 1945 to have focussed on a conception of
"Hitler and his henchmen" blinding a supposedly innocent population
with propaganda and terror, and to claim they acted out of fear rather
than commitment; just as it may now, in rather different ways, be
convenient for former Stasi officers and informers to downplay their
own repressive roles in the GDR and play up the supposed attractions of
the regime, in the context of a wave of Ostalgie supported by the mass
media. But retrospective attempts on the part of former collaborators
or perpetrators to justify or exonerate themselves should surely not be
used to fetter serious historical research into the actual balances of
coercion, compromise, conformity, consent - for whatever range of
reasons - in any dictatorship. To follow to a logical conclusion the
implications of Bruce's line of argument here would indeed be to put
history in the service of a political cause, even if it is a morally
compelling one of serving to give voice only to the victims of
repression, however large or small a proportion of the population that
may turn out to be (and without investigating the accommodating,
grumbling or genuinely committed rest, one could not really come to any
well-founded conclusion on this).

If, as Bruce desires, the "pendulum, which has swung far away from the
very real, very harmful, very controlling aspects of the regime, must
start its swing back", then this can only be on the basis of reasoned
and well-researched arguments rooted in sources which demonstrate that
such further shifts in conceptual framework and theoretical
interpretation are well founded. Only in this way can contemporary
history be truly disentangled from the sorts of contemporary abuse of
historical interpretation and distorted memorialisation that Bruce
rightly deplores.

Mary Fulbrook.
University College London

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