At the 35th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, East German writer Marko Martin delivered a memorial speech in Bellevue castle in Berlin, the residence of Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier. The speech caused a scandal: It was an attack on East German nostalgia and populism, West German naivety about Russia and arrogance towards the “smaller nations”, and the role of Steinmeier himself, a close ally of then chancellor Gerhard Schröder. The speech sparked a broad debate. East German historian Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk supported Marko Martin, saying that Berlin’s Russia policy has “a significant share of responsibility” for Putin’s war against Ukraine. Gerhard Gnauck, historian at the Mykola Haievoi Centre for Modern History, gives a summary of the debate.
15.12.2024
UA Moderna
Gerhard Gnauck
Do you remember the tale “The Emperor’s New Clothes” by Hans Christian Andersen? In this story written in 1837, a ruler proudly displays his new clothes, beautiful but invisible, to the crowd. The propaganda coup is successful – until a child points at him and shouts: “He doesn’t have any clothes!” („А король — голий!”) I was reminded of this tale when I watched the video recording of recent festivities in November in Germany, marking the 35 th anniversary of the crumbling of the Berlin Wall. What happened there was NOT fiction, it was reality.
An East German writer, invited as a speaker to present his memories and views on “1989” and on Germany’s (and, maybe, Europe’s) recent history, entered the stage – and attacked the most prominent person in the first row: Germany’s Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier. The event took place in the President’s office, in Bellevue Castle, not far from the Reichstag/Bundestag and Federal Chancellery’s buildings. As I was told later, Mr. Martin didn’t show his text to anybody – so there couldn’t be any “censorship”.
The name of the writer is Marko Martin, born 1970. Here is a short summary of his speech: Martin reminds his audience that the East German contribution to breaking the Iron Curtain was rather small, compared with the Polish one. He points at the spectacular success of two “illiberal parties”, which both “spread Putin’s propaganda”, in this year’s elections in East Germany and asks why military assistance to Ukraine is much less popular in East than in West Germany. Do these people still believe in a concept of “peace” in line with Moscow’s interests? So, Martin’s speech is, in act 1, an attack against the widespread East German post-communist nostalgia.
Then comes act 2, the attack against the West Germans, or, to be more precise, against both parts of the then divided nation. The writer reminds us of the “refusal of (German) solidarity” with Poland in the 1980-s, with the Solidarność movement. He hears an echo of this refusal when he is listening to German voices today, demanding that Ukraine “give up her resistance and surrender to the Russian occupiers without struggle”. As to the West Germans, Martin quotes the West German politician Egon Bahr (1922-2015), the “architect of Ostpolitik”, the concept of détente with the Eastern bloc.
Bahr, as the writer quotes him, in 1982 called Solidarność a “threat to global peace”. While West German poet Peter Rühmkorf criticized the Polish workers for going on strike instead of showing “work and discipline”. Martin’s comment to Bahr’s position: “contempt, disguised as geopolitics or Realpolitik”.
Altogether, Martin sees, to put it mildly, a very selective remembrance (“Geschichtsvergessenheit“) in East and West Germany alike, combined with nostalgia for the “good tsar Gorbi”. The very Mikhail Gorbachev, who in 1991, after Germany’s reunification, sent Soviet tanks to Vilnius, as the writer adds.
Finally, act 3: The precise attack against the host of the event himself, the Federal president. Marko Martin reminds us of the year 2016: Steinmeier, then minister of foreign affairs, criticized Nato manoeuvres at the Eastern flank countries as “sabre-rattling and war cries (Kriegsgeheul)”. And he points – “with all due respect, Mr. President” – to the Nord Stream pipelines, supported by both (formerly dominating) parties, the social democrats (SPD, Gerhard Schröder and his close ally Steinmeier) and Christian democrats (CDU, Angela Merkel). By the way, Martin calls Schröder a “friend of the mass murderer in the Kremlin”. The support for the pipeline project, says Martin, must have convinced Putin “that the Germans, otherwise world champions in moralizing, wouldn’t let the (gas) deal fail, no matter what happens to Ukraine”. Even though Germany’s Eastern neighbors had warned against Nord Stream, in the spirit of 19th -century Poland’s freedom fighters: “for our freedom and yours”.
Mr. Martin reminds us of what is being decided upon in Ukraine today: “Whether “89” was the beginning of (…) a sustainable history of freedom, or just some sort of a breather (or “передишка”) in global history”. He mentions the Ukrainians, the suffering population as well as the armed forces, “who are defending, in this very minute and with incredible sacrifices, our freedom, since 1989 existing as the freedom of the entire Germany”. He deplores that some German experts as well as pro- Ukrainian politicians are being ridiculed, even by the President, which shows “fatal patterns of thinking” present in Berlin. His conclusion: Germans, East and West, still are “living a lie” (the adequate translation for the German word “Lebenslüge”), the lie of a wrong policy towards an aggressor. They should abandon this policy, not just as a “rhetoric” step, but seriously. This is the point where Andersen’s child in the palace points at the ruler and says: “He is naked!” The new clothes – the Berlin version is “Zeitenwende” – are not credible. Martin ends by quoting an unnamed Russian dissident saying: Before you can have justice and forgiving, you need to tell the truth.
Marko Martin until now has not been among the ten best-known writers in Germany. Now, his speech has been translated into Polish and French, and an English version is expected soon. Hardly any speech of a German intellectual in 2024 has had an echo comparable to this one.
Prominent journalists praised the writer, among them Golineh Atai, a German public TV (ARD) correspondent in Moscow who was covering Ukraine in 2014. Mrs. Atai had then received the “journalist of the year 2014” award. In her remarkable speech at the prize ceremony, she called upon her colleagues “not to be afraid”: of Putin, his bots and collaborators. It was a year when
several German journalists reporting on Ukraine received something new: death threats by mail for “being anti-Russian”.
Let us return to the attacked Mr. Steinmeier. According to Martin himself, after the speech the president approached him and expressed his anger over being a victim of “defamation” by the writer. The president’s spokeswoman denied this, speaking of a “conversation” of the two. Several German politicians, as well as Poland’s Bartłomiej Sienkiewicz, a close ally of prime minister Donald Tusk, supported Martin’s position. The former Bundestag speaker Wolfgang Thierse (SPD) attacked Martin.
No wonder that East German historian Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk entered the debate. Kowalczuk, born 1967, a person opposing the communist regime, has become popular recently thanks to his efforts to demythologize core elements of East German history: the scope of dissent in the GDR and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Kowalczuk wrote an open letter to Steinmeier, defending Martin and suggesting that the president should step down. In the historian’s words, Steinmeier is until today “in line with the foreign policy of Egon Bahr, which was one-sided even in his times”. And more: “The Russia policy of the German federal governments since 2000 was a catastrophe – and everyone who wanted to see that, saw it.” This policy has left ruins and “thousands of killed”, for which the federal governments “bear a significant share of responsibility”.
Kowalczuk’s grandfather, by the way, was Ukrainian. He was born around 1900 in the region of Stryi, Western Ukraine, and “participated there in the 1919/21 events; he was sentenced to death, but was eventually liberated”, as Kowalczuk wrote me these days. The grandson has made a career as historian, researching East German history and the Stasi archives. His recent attacks against East German populism and nostalgia gave him many invitations to interviews and even talkshows in German public TV. He is perhaps the most prominent East German intellectual who is critical of his fellow countrymen. A reviewer of his recent book about East Germany, writing in Frankfurter Allgemeine daily, called the author „the punk among Germany’s historians”, referring not only to his hairstyle. The book’s title is “Freiheitsschock. Eine andere Geschichte Ostdeutschlands von 1989 bis heute” (The Freedom Shock. A different history of East Germany from 1989 until today, 2024).
Is this the end of the Marko Martin debate? Not yet. One of the listeners in Bellevue castle, the mentioned Thierse, a reasonable and respected SPD politician, called Kowalczuk’s demand for Steinmeier to step down “stalinist”. This part of the discussion took place on the pages of the Berlin daily “Tagesspiegel” (Daily Mirror). Kowalczuk fired back: “The stalinism accusation casts a shadow on his (Thierse’s) historical knowledge. The term ‘stalinism’ was invented by leftist communists in order to save – after the mass crimes with millions of dead people – the idea of a leninist communism. As a historian , I reject this term because it doesn’t help Aufklärung (clarification), trying instead to keep alive the idea of communism. However – Thierse has put me in the vicinity of mass murderers, an idea a reasonable man cannot have. Actually, Thierse wants to say: criticism and contradiction are not desired.”
One more demythologization: Crimea, Donbas and the full-scale war didn’t come out of the blue. In the words of Kowalczuk in “Tagesspiegel”: “There has always been harsh criticism of the
German Russia policy, starting with the year 2000.” (If I may: I joined this initially small choir of voices around 2004, being a correspondent with the Berlin daily “Die Welt”.)
The Marko Martin debate, kicked off by the writer’s speech November 7th, 2024, has since then developed in different directions and touched upon various aspects of history, politics and society. There was the axis “intellectuals versus the powerful”, another axis “politicians with insight against simple people who don’t understand international politics”. There was the relation between Ostpolitik then and the “Russlandversteher” camp, German Russia policy and “Eastern policy” now.
There was the German-German debate, as we call it (West versus East Germans), closely linked to the democracy/populism/autocracy cluster and to the question why and how to support Ukraine in its struggle against Russian putinist imperialism. I mentioned only a few of the points concerning Ukraine in this text. The last – and lasting – question in the Marko Martin debate could be, once again: Can intellectuals influence the powerful, “just by talking”? I have the impression that this has happened, to some extent. I believe that, after the writer’s Berlin Wall Memorial speech, the point that Germany has been “living a lie” in its Russia policy and was ignorant or arrogant towards the “small nations of Eastern Europe” has become stronger in the German public discourse.
If this is true – why should this be the case? Painful “personal” events do have some impact. Perhaps the first personal moment for president Steinmeier – when he wanted to join the Kyiv meeting in May 2022 with president Zelensky and the leaders from Poland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, but finally was asked “by Kyiv” not to come to Ukraine – was painful, and it had public impact. The writer’s Bellevue castle speech was, in this sense, a second personal moment for the president.
Marko Martin’s (and Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk’s) message was, in political terms: “We have to cope/to come to terms with our past (“Vergangenheitsbewältigung”, “Подолання минулого”), but you cannot help us because you are part of it. It’s our job now.”
Dr. Gerhard Gnauck is a historian at the Mykola Haievoi Centre for Modern History. He was a correspondent for Poland, Ukraine and the Baltic states with “Die Welt” and “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung” in the years 1999 – 2024.