I

In his seminal 1976 essay on the character of historical time, Reinhart Koselleck narrates the following ‘political joke’ from the Soviet Union:

As this joke suggests, the language of ‘lived socialism’ was temporally charged. And its temporal content was filled by a clear understanding of how past, present and future were meant to interact. In other words, communist language was explicitly geared towards calibrating the relationship between what Koselleck terms the ‘space of experience’ and the ‘horizon of expectation’, holding them in a meaningful relationship to one another by reference to a specific, communist future. The absurdity of the joke derives from the evident disjuncture between official language and lived reality in post-war Eastern Europe.

The communist project begun in 1917 was the most ambitious, forceful and explicit attempt in human history to master time through the medium of politics – and politics through the medium of time. As an emphatically modern project, communism represented a re-enchantment of the world in a secular age, promising a vision of terrestrial paradise as the inevitable denouement of history.Footnote ² The telos of communist time structured the metanarrative of History and imbued daily toil and struggle with a transcendent purpose. As Koselleck puts it, so radically future-oriented was this vision that ‘expectation’ came to ‘swallow up experience’ completely.Footnote ³ But by the era of ‘late socialism’ in the 1970s and 1980s, these polarities had been reversed: the accumulated experience of political stagnation, resource shortages and unfulfilled promises had consumed most of what remained of communism's futurist optimism. The socialist states of Eastern Europe found themselves trapped in a crisis of time. This article explores the unfolding of this crisis in the German Democratic Republic (the GDR) – a state in which time assumed a particular significance as a marker of identity against its capitalist West German adversary.

Of particular value in evaluating ‘crises of time’ is the notion of ‘historicity’, defined by the historian François Hartog as the way ‘individuals or groups situate themselves and develop in time’; that is to say, their collective ‘assumptions about the relationship between past, present and future’.Footnote ⁴ Hartog's work belongs to a growing body of recent literature that has demonstrated how belief in a progressive, linear, modern conception of time began to fragment across Europe from the early 1970s.Footnote ⁵ These studies have documented the way that the future ceased to be ‘an open horizon’ of political and social possibilities and instead assumed something of an ominous quality.Footnote ⁶ This declining faith in future hopes manifested itself in an aversion to the radically new, and a yearning for the comforts of the past. Modernist visions – already tainted by authoritarian associations – rapidly fell from favour. Intellectually, too, the rise of postmodernism captured the dead-ends into which the modernist paradigm had led, while post-colonialism began to decentre modern European temporal assumptions, in turn revealing their deeply constructed character. In the public and cultural spheres, these fears and desires were amply nourished by a burgeoning ‘heritage industry’ equipped to commodify and propagate nostalgia in all its many guises.Footnote ⁷

Hartog diagnoses this era as subsisting in a ‘regime of presentism’, in which societies lack both meaningful pasts and meaningful futures. In our contemporary order of time, Hartog argues, the accelerating pace of social change ensures that the past bears ever less relevance for the present, while the future is too unimaginable – or too threatening – to provide a coherent vision worth striving for. As a result, the past becomes a nostalgic source of comfort rather than a meaningful guide for present-day action. The ‘regime of presentism’ thus stands in contrast to the ‘modern’ regime of historicity that structured the temporal assumptions of states like the GDR. This was a linear and progressive regime of time that resolutely sought to draw meaning for the present by situating it on a historical trajectory between a specific past and a specific future: the claim that the past and the future could be known was never rejected. Seen from the East German perspective, then, a Hartogian ‘regime of presentism’, in which past and future were collapsed into a static and all-encompassing present, could be seen as nothing other than a threat.

This article is an effort to show how extending the exemplary scope of Hartog's analytical paradigm ‘beyond’ the Iron Curtain can help to reintegrate the history of communist Eastern Europe into a more transnational European story. It seeks to demonstrate how the crisis of time that the GDR began to experience in the 1970s in many ways resembled the concurrent rise of ‘presentism’ in Western Europe. In this way, the article argues that a number of shifts in the historical culture of the GDR during this era actually drifted on the currents of a pan-European cultural change, in which an increasing depletion of the future as a depository for collective hopes led to an irruption of the past into the present. In East Germany, this decade witnessed a dramatic shift in attitudes to history at both the popular and elite-political levels. The regime began incorporating traditional regional and local histories into its new concept of a ‘socialist homeland (Heimat)’.Footnote ⁸ Conservation activities proliferated in all East German towns and cities. ‘Neo-historicism’ became fashionable in architectural circles. Countless radio and television programmes dedicated themselves to the lives and deeds of historical figures. ‘Popular history’ books and historical novels became best-sellers. And most strikingly of all, non-proletarian historical icons like Martin Luther and Frederick the Great were fully ‘rehabilitated’ into East German culture. This transformation in the historical consciousness of the East German state was exemplified by the triumphant return of Christian Daniel Rauch's equestrian statue of Frederick the Great to the historic centre of East Berlin in 1980 and the extravagant festivities granted in tribute to Martin Luther on his 500th birthday in 1983. The effect of the shift was dramatic: even if Frederick the Great had always maintained a latent presence in East German historical memory, official narratives had rarely portrayed the eighteenth-century Prussian king as anything other than a militarist and a servile instrument of his reactionary nobility. Luther, meanwhile, had traditionally been vilified in GDR histories as the reactionary nemesis of Thomas Müntzer, whose 1525 Peasants’ Uprising occupied a seminal position in official narratives as the radical and popular fulfilment of the revolution triggered by the Reformation in 1517.Footnote ⁹ The transfigured historical culture of the GDR was underwritten by the development of a new concept of Erbe (‘inheritance’ or ‘heritage’) that sought to capture and incorporate the totality of German history, not simply those aspects that anticipated the emergence of a ‘workers’ and peasants’ state’.Footnote ¹⁰

Because its historical culture was so deeply implicated in and receptive to historical and cultural discourses from both sides of the Iron Curtain, the GDR is an instructive starting point in expanding study of this subject eastward. We do not necessarily have to accept Hartog's theory that a ‘regime of presentism’ emerged in this era in order to situate GDR cultural history within this wider European story. What matters more is that his theory of ‘presentism’ enables us to perceive at once the fundamental similarities of cross-border cultural trends while at the same time realising how differently they could manifest themselves under distinct political regimes. This article accordingly poses the question of how damaging ‘presentism’ proved for a regime predicated on a hermetic vision of linear, progressive history. Did the palpable changes in historical understanding evident in the GDR from the 1970s amount to a renunciation of the stable futurities on which regime legitimacy rested? The question here is not whether the changes in historical self-understanding that took place in the GDR throughout the 1970s and 1980s actually led inevitably to the state's collapse in 1989. This would be a crude and reductive conclusion, and one that risks mistaking the symptom for the cause. What the article argues instead is that the loss of historical direction experienced by the GDR in this era was demonstrative (not causative) of a deepening disorientation in the political culture of the East German leadership during its twilight years of power. It both reflected and reaffirmed the disjuncture that was opening up between a regime that could countenance no alternative to the progressive, supersessionist narrative that it itself adumbrated and disseminated, and a culture that was media-saturated, attentive to the complexities of the past and – most consequentially – increasingly apprehensive of what the future might hold.

II

Each of the socialist states of Eastern Europe was governed under the auspices of an idealised ‘temporal order’ that aimed to assimilate all competing temporalities to the time-rhythms of the regime. Since the fall of communism in Europe, a handful of historians have tackled the question of how the ruling parties sought to fashion their states in their own temporal image, configuring work patterns, economic and technological development and, above all, historical consciousness into their all-embracing orders of time. Katherine Verdery and Roman Krakovsky have documented the ‘etatization’ of time in Romania and Czechoslovakia respectively, charting the attempts and failures of party officials to coordinate new social relationships to space and time.Footnote ¹¹ As they show, it certainly inhered in the logic of socialist rule that the state itself would be the sole container of temporal energies: nothing outside it could be permitted to mobilise revolutionary momentum. But by promoting a textured understanding of how the state's centralising, ‘rational’ ambitions to transform social relationships to time were forced to encounter and navigate a multitude of temporalities engrained in local customs and traditional historicities, studies like those of Verdery and Krakovsky help illuminate the limits of the ‘totalitarian’ paradigm. The interstice between state time and private time, they demonstrate, could be a fertile zone of resistance.

In regard to the GDR, Rainer Gries and Martin Sabrow have analysed the manner in which the state's political language was marked by a series of ‘virtual time horizons’, in which the promise of socialism's consummation was continuously postponed by ever-lengthening stretches of time, until talk of the ‘victory of socialism’ ceased to possess any temporal content whatsoever.Footnote ¹² Nevertheless, right up until its demise in 1990, signs of a rigid order of time remained ubiquitous in the life of the East German state. All social, economic and cultural activity was subjected to the tyranny of the ‘Plan’. All commemorative and festive activity gravitated around officially designated anniversaries bearing ordinal numbers, imposing a stark linearity onto the cyclical character of the western calendar. Sabrow therefore speaks justifiably of the ‘radical linearity’ of the GDR's temporal order: from the perspective of the ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED), time was irreversible and quantifiable, while the present constituted but a ‘moment in the historical process’.Footnote ¹³

Regime language in the GDR also evoked an order of time that aimed at synchronising the plurality of temporalities that subsisted within East German society. The logic of this temporal vision meant that even the basic everyday needs of individuals were enchanted with a metahistorical significance. Witness for instance a 1963 report produced by the SED's ‘Institute for Social Sciences’ which argued that the most common medium-term desires of those it had surveyed – ‘peace, development opportunities at work and a happy family life’ – were not merely the banalities of twentieth-century industrial society, but in fact expressions of ‘a developed understanding of true conditions and knowledge about our path of the struggle for peace and social progress through the construction of socialism’.Footnote ¹⁴ Although East Germany – like any society – was inhabited by a multitude of temporalities, it was central to the very logic of the regime's temporal order that these would be drowned out or repatterned to its own melody.Footnote ¹⁵ Its intolerance to competing temporal rhythms derived from the secure belief of the communist leaders that only their specific form of political regime could ‘master’ historical time itself. In this way, the GDR's temporal order – and specifically the historicity it exemplified – was also essential to the state's political identity. Because of the exceptional conditions of German division, this may have been a quality unique to the GDR within the Soviet bloc. And as a result, the historicity of the East German state was explicitly invoked – time and again – within regime propaganda to demarcate the identity of the GDR from that of its capitalist West German adversary.

The recognition that there was an emphatically temporal aspect to the GDR's political identity in turn demands a reassessment of previous notions of East German identity construction. The convention in GDR scholarship has been to ascribe the new set of historical practices that emerged in the 1970s primarily to shifts in the wider political environment. By this view, popular engagement with, for instance, the dynastic histories of Prussia and Saxony derived from an expressly political need on the part of the SED to strengthen emotional bonds to the East German state at a time when Ostpolitik and the GDR's entry into the United Nations were demanding a cultural ‘demarcation’ (Abgrenzung) from the Federal Republic. Figures like Martin Luther, Frederick the Great, Otto von Bismarck and August the Strong of Saxony were called upon to populate the historical stocks of the new, separate ‘East German nation’ that the SED's new leader Erich Honecker pronounced as coming into being at the Eighth Party Conference in 1971. Now, Honecker affirmed, Germany was no longer one indivisible nation provisionally partitioned into two separate states, but had in fact evolved into ‘two nations’ distinct from one another.

It has now been twenty years since Mary Fulbrook outlined her pointed criticism of this ‘functionalist’ identity narrative, in which she questioned whether the mere ‘coincidence’ of the GDR's new attitudes to history with ‘wider political trends’ actually sufficed to explain them.Footnote ¹⁶ But few alternatives have since come to take this narrative's place. In what follows, I seek to tie together the cultural and political aspects of the GDR's ‘historical turn’ in the 1970s by identifying both as manifestations of a slower, less immediately perceptible shift in historicity. The new identity that East German cultural and political leaders sought to establish in this decade, I argue, also reflected the specific historicity of their state. And defending this mode of historicity against that of the Federal Republic became a central feature of GDR propaganda, revealing in turn the underlying importance for the regime's stability of its own unique sense of how the past related to the present and the future.

The SED's relentless compulsion to distinguish its state from the Federal Republic manifested itself in a wholesale repudiation of what history there meant. A fully developed socialist ‘historical consciousness’ could be juxtaposed with the ‘ahistorical’ and ‘nostalgic’ forms of historical understanding prominent in the ‘late capitalist’ West.Footnote ¹⁷ Furthermore, the bourgeois assumption that historical interpretation ideally derived from an objective, elevated standpoint was contrasted critically with the GDR's own notion of ‘partisan objectivity’, according to which the historian was obliged by the laws of historical progress to side unapologetically with the ‘progressive classes’. As the ‘History of the German Workers’ Movement’ put it in the early 1970s, any ‘historiography that is concerned with historical truth must take the part of the working class and its scientific politics’.Footnote ¹⁸ Viewed from within the logic of East German historiography, then, the consequence of abandoning ‘genuine’ (i.e. ‘partisan’) objectivity meant that the Federal Republic was marked by a total ‘absence of history’.Footnote ¹⁹ There, the utter deficiency of any lawlike explanatory structure had the effect of fissuring the past into so many dispersed components: ‘the searching eye does not meet history, but only scattered facts that do not coalesce into one image’.Footnote ²⁰ Bourgeois and ‘imperialist’ modes of conceiving history were fragmentary and non-dynamic, reflecting the crisis of a society in which ‘history can no longer play a role in explaining the present and the future’.Footnote ²¹ By contrast, historical consciousness in the GDR was predicated on a unified, encompassing, progressive and ultimately meaningful view.

From the late 1960s, an argumentative mode of distinguishing between these two historicities assumed increasing importance within the GDR's propaganda organs. In 1969, it was taken up by the television programme Der schwarze Kanal, in which excerpts from West German broadcasts were replayed and cynically dissected by the presenter, Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler. The episode of 18 July was entitled ‘The Good Old Days’, and lambasted an entertainment series that depicted Germany's imperial era in nostalgic tones, as well as West German television coverage of the weddings and goings-on of the descendants of Germany's abolished royal families.Footnote ²² As von Schnitzler put it: ‘Is this blather about the “good old days”, this praise of the most reactionary phenomena, this evocation of a society from yesterday and before yesterday – is that actually only “entertainment …”?’Footnote ²³

In a similar way, the arguments most prominently employed as a defence of the GDR's ‘rediscovery’ of Frederick the Great and Martin Luther against sceptical Western critics explicitly framed East German practices as antithetical to those of the West. In 1980, functionaries within the Central Committee's ‘Culture Department’ drafted a series of responses for Erich Honecker to questions put by the British publisher Robert Maxwell on the GDR's apparent transformation in historical attitudes.Footnote ²⁴ Developed expressly with an international audience in mind, these defended the activities of the SED by making explicit a distinction between East and West German modes of historical practice: ‘the forms of heritage preservation in our socialist society have nothing in common with the forms of heritage preservation officially practised in the FRG’.Footnote ²⁵ The lead-up to a controversial 1981 West Berlin exhibition on Prussian history likewise witnessed an eruption of polemics in the East German press contrasting the two distinctive historicities, with the progressive spirit of East German dialectical materialism confidently contrasted to the ‘nostalgic’ impetus of the Federal Republic's own ‘Prussia-Wave’.

The idea that West German historicity floundered helplessly in a sea of timelessness was contrasted explicitly to the ‘certainty of the future’ furnished by the uncompromising laws of dialectical materialism.Footnote ²⁶ This contrast was expounded at length in 1970 by Joachim Siebelt, an East German theorist of ‘socialist consciousness’. In the ‘movement’ from the social formation of capitalism to that of socialism, Siebelt wrote, the study of the past in the GDR provided

Siebelt boasted that the absence of such future certainties in the Federal Republic was indicative of that state's chronic existential weakness. He quoted the West German historian Felix Messerschmid's complaints that the FRG lacked a sense of nationhood precisely because it was unable to position itself in a lawlike relationship between past, present and future: ‘Though communism lives off it, we still haven't articulated such an awareness of the future,’ Messerschmid had written. ‘For many of us, the future essentially means a perennial present’.Footnote ²⁸ Siebelt concluded from this that the West German ‘imperialist’ mode of historical understanding was ‘incapable of becoming the foundation for genuine visions of the future’.Footnote ²⁹

From the middle of the 1970s, ‘nostalgia’ became the central polemical term in distinguishing the allegedly ‘dynamic’ mode of East German historicity from that of the West. As Tobias Becker has shown, a ‘semantic shift’ in the commonly understood meaning of ‘nostalgia’ from a spatial to a temporal yearning had been completed sometime in the 1960s and stimulated an explosion of usage of the word in the Western media.Footnote ³⁰ In the East, the term ‘nostalgia’ likewise began to appear in official publications with any regularity only from the mid-1970s. But here its use principally remained limited to the field of propaganda. In a context where history was inherently progressive, nostalgia represented, as Paul Betts puts it, ‘crass capitalist decadence and ideological cowardice in the face of the iron laws of Marxist historical progress’.Footnote ³¹ As a result, East German polemicists hurled the accusation over the Iron Curtain with increasing intensity. The contrast, naturally, was the Marxist-Leninist theory of history, which could not and would not permit itself to be sunk in an all-encompassing present.

However, in the historical discourses of the GDR, the apparent danger posed by ‘nostalgia’ was not limited to the ‘reactionary’ tendencies it purportedly awakened and legitimised in the West. Closer to home, GDR cultural authorities were attuned to the problems it posed to the Marxist-Leninist conception of history itself. The impetus behind the attacks on ‘nostalgia’ was that it was exclusively a capitalist malady. Writing in Neues Deutschland in 1975, for example, the cultural theorist and future Central Committee member Hans Koch confidently asserted that ‘socialism's certainty of the future excludes nostalgia’.Footnote ³² The previous year, in an article pointedly entitled ‘History or Nostalgia?’, Harald Wessel, the propaganda chief of that same newspaper, had made a programmatic case for the profoundly distinct characters of historical understanding between the two German states:

Not only was it the case that nostalgia did not exist in the East: by the reasoning of Koch and Wessel, it most assuredly could not. Even more explicitly, the GDR's chief ideologue Kurt Hager stated in a 1975 speech that:

Capitalism, then, had estranged West Germans from the present. But what is especially interesting about the critical nostalgia discourses in the East is the way in which they prompted a number of conscious reflections on socialist historicity and the fundamental challenges with which it was being confronted during the 1970s. In the same article, Hager turned to the real ideological challenge posed by the GDR's transformation in historical ethos:

Hager's underlying concern was that evidence of ‘nostalgic’ practices in the East would signify disenchantment with the socialist project itself. And the new popular forms of history being cultivated in the East certainly risked conveying that impression. As a result, it was imperative that new historical practices be embedded in a consistent socialist rationale. In other words, the amateur restoration of dilapidated buildings, the exploration of local histories, the accumulation of historical artefacts, the consumption of historical novels and dramas, the preference for the urban schemes and architectural styles of the ‘old city’, and the surge in regional museums, local heritage initiatives and interest in folkloric customs were not to be viewed as symptoms of fatigue with the modern world, but were in fact practices explicitly engaged in the forging of a socialist ‘historical consciousness’. They did not undermine, but reinforced, socialist historicity.

III

This German–German confrontation over historical meaning was not simply a propaganda operation carried out by the SED. In practice as well as in theory, there were a number of real differences between the historical cultures of the two German states that reflected both their political values and their competing senses of historical continuity. In an obvious sense, the comparative freedoms afforded in the Federal Republic for public debate on historical subjects necessarily gave conceptions of history there a more subjective and contested colour. In respect to historical practices, moreover, an even more striking point of contrast between East and West lay in the emergence of a new form of memory culture in the Federal Republic throughout the 1970s and especially the 1980s on subjects such as the Second World War, Nazism and the Holocaust. In the GDR, there could be no talk of anything like the public reckoning that the subsequent ‘memory boom’ helped stimulate in the pluralistic cultures of Western Europe. Because the East German regime saw itself as the guarantor of socialist historicity, its privileged hold over historical interpretation – however ambiguous in practice – secured its position as the GDR's sole arbiter of memory as well. The force of the arguments advanced by its historical practitioners in defence of socialist historicity therefore depended entirely on the unchallengeable powers of the state over history to successfully guard against any incursions of alternative memory that might challenge official narratives or the stable, linear vision of history by which these narratives were structured.

In the GDR, history as conceived through the lens of ‘memory’ was a political threat as much as it was an intellectual and cultural challenge, and this was amply reflected in the language that East German theorists and historians used in their polemical attacks against West German historicity. Their chief problem was not so much the risk that recovered memory of the twentieth-century past posed to the GDR's foundational myth of ‘anti-fascism’ – though this was certainly far from unimportant. Rather, their anxiety stemmed from the more general threat that ‘memory’ and its attendant popular practices posed to the rigidities and forward-moving thrust of modern, socialist historicity. With its need to disturb the abstract, homogeneous chronologies on which ‘traditional’ history is constructed, memory collapses linearity and with it the idea that differences exist ‘between periods and qualities of time’: it is for this reason that Oriane Calligaro argues that memory is indeed the ‘privileged modality’ of history within a Hartogian ‘regime of presentism’.Footnote ³⁵ As a result, the distinction between ‘memory’ and ‘history’ so important to Western historical debates in the 1980s was entirely unarticulated within the GDR itself,Footnote ³⁶ where even as monumental a work as Pierre Nora's Les lieux de mémoire attracted next to no attention in official academic and public organs.Footnote ³⁷ The history that had stood at the core of East German political identity since the state's foundation in 1949 had always been contorted and instrumentalised for ‘presentist’ political and ideological purposes, but it had nevertheless served to situate the communist state on a precise historical trajectory between past and future. Whatever its failings, this was history as progressive narrative, not history as memory. And as Andreas Huyssen argues, whereas ‘[h]istory as a narrative of emancipation and liberation always points to some future … history as memory and remembrance is always a narrative concerned with a past’.Footnote ³⁸

Huyssen's observation reinforces the central argument of this article that a sense of forward-moving, modern historicity was not only a distinguishing feature of East European historical culture during the Cold War era, but was in fact of existential significance to the very legitimacy of communist rule itself. So it was of no minor consequence that the cultural and political authorities of the GDR had begun, through theoretical vehicles like Erbe, to authorise forms of history that bore at least some superficial similarities to the personalised and localised historical practices associated with the West European ‘memory boom’, at least insofar as they were emptied of their ‘emancipatory’ content. At the same time that ‘memory’ became the totemic term of historical and historiographical discourses in much of Western Europe, the GDR was also dealing with a transformation in public historical consciousness that summoned the attractions of heritage and locality as vectors to a vanished past.

The GDR's new concept of Erbe therefore demands closer analysis. By the start of the 1980s, East German historians and theorists had come to distinguish Erbe from ‘tradition’. According to this conceptual distinction, ‘tradition’ referred to the progressive qualities of history that inhered in the socialist identity of the German Democratic Republic, while Erbe encompassed the entirety of German history ‘in all its contradictions’.Footnote ³⁹ ‘Tradition’ and Erbe, in other words, partitioned the German past into its dynamic and non-dynamic components. When contrasted to the progressive spirit of ‘tradition’, Erbe was a concept synonymous with the ever-present. It drew the past into the present without any sense of a developmental logic. It represented a sense of history that was not dynamic, but static and suspended in time. The GDR radio journalist Heinz Winter expressed it thus in November 1980: ‘“historical Erbe” is for us a fact, it is simply there. We cannot seek it out or undo it when it doesn't suit us.’Footnote ⁴⁰ Similarly, the architect Isolde Andrä affirmed that ‘Erbe is not restricted to certain time-horizons – it encompasses all historical epochs.’Footnote ⁴¹ In its new manifestation, Erbe therefore placed at the heart of the GDR's identity a flattened, timeless approach to understanding the past.

This leads us in turn to question what relationship initiatives like the Erbe–Tradition distinction and the ‘socialist Heimat’ bore to the new historical conditions of Western Europe. Should their striking contemporaneousness be seen only as a correspondence or coincidence? Or should the SED's new enterprises in historical management during the 1970s rather be interpreted as a distinctive political response to a cultural shift that was in fact much more widespread and fundamental? The GDR's concepts of Erbe and the ‘socialist Heimat’, of course, were not explicitly designed to reflect, imitate or respond to the memorial discourses gaining currency in Western European history: to the contrary, they were cast as means of authorising an engagement with non-proletarian and non-progressive history in a way that remained conducive to the forward thrust of socialist historicity. But the effect was in any event the opposite of the party's intention: in reality, Erbe and the ‘socialist Heimat’ legitimised historical practices that in many people's view were socialist in name only, or that indeed were reinscribed by GDR citizens with something of an anti-socialist impulse.Footnote ⁴² In 1991, the former GDR historian Helga Schultz reflected that the Erbe–Tradition distinction signalled nothing less than a ‘conservative turn in the GDR's concept of history’.Footnote ⁴³ In her view, the SED's new theory of Erbe had emptied the socialist mission of its progressive content while seeking to root socialist identity in the soil of eternity. No dialectic could overcome this sense of history as permanence.

In light of these concerns, some professional historians articulated a fear that the GDR's new attitudes and practices risked liberating historical consciousness from the state's official historical master-narrative. Upon discovering in 1982 that a Potsdam brewery had produced a series of beers packaged in labels depicting symbols and icons from the militarist Prussian past, for instance, the historian Gustav Seeber wrote with some alarm to the brewery in the hope of warning them, from a position of professional authority, that the dissemination of thousands of such bottles daily among the population could give the impression of ‘drawing or at least supporting an idea of Prussian history that is historically false and politically damaging’.Footnote ⁴⁴ As he reflected a few years later with reference to the episode, this was an example of the problems that could arise when the ‘cultivation of heritage’ (Erbepflege) became unconstrained by the professional oversight of historians.Footnote ⁴⁵ While academic historical research in the GDR was much more sophisticated than would be suggested by the caricature of historians as mere party instruments, professional historians nevertheless remained indispensable agents through whom the SED could retain its unchallengeable prerogative over the East German interpretation of history.Footnote ⁴⁶ One of their fundamental roles within the greater political-cultural apparatus of East German society was to uphold a distinctive vision of socialist history by synchronising and synthesising historical understandings into the regime's formal, linear and progressive metanarrative.

IV

The flow of non-proletarian and non-progressive history into the bloodstream of the GDR's politics and culture from the 1970s reflected more than a shift in historicity: it also signalled the reanimation of spatial categories of identity at the expense of the temporal.Footnote ⁴⁷ This was apparent both at the local level, with the emergence of the new language and practices of Heimat and regional history, and on the national stage, through Honecker's doctrine of the ‘two nations’. At the level of official identity, the German Democratic Republic now existed in a separate time and space from its West German rival. This spatial distinction was also encompassed by the new concept of Erbe, as the histories of the core territories of Brandenburg-Prussia and Saxony assumed a heightened importance simply in virtue of their geographical correspondence with the GDR. The permanence of spatial categories of identity – much like the permanence of all that constituted Erbe – was purposely contrasted to the progressive vitality of ‘tradition’.

While geography was one dimension of identity that could offer stability in place of flux, the cultural and political authorities of the GDR held steadfast to the idea that it could be accommodated to and synthesised with the ever-moving, future-oriented spirit of socialist identity: indeed, this was the very essence of the ‘socialist Heimat’ idea. But a much more dangerous variant of the ‘stable’ identity narrative was nationalism. In contrast to the rigid progressivism of Marxist-Leninist histories, as Katherine Verdery points out, nationalist histories accentuate continuities at the expense of breaks, ruptures and changes. In their pursuit of enduring ethnic origins, they wrench events from their contexts, ‘flattening’ time and rendering history ‘motionless’.Footnote ⁴⁸ Hence, from the East German perspective, nationalist histories threatened to undermine – perhaps fatally – the very dynamism by which Marxist-Leninist historicity had sought to distinguish itself from the ‘nostalgic’ histories of the capitalist West.

This was not simply an abstract problem. In actuality, the threat posed by competing or antagonistic modes of history and historicity was acutely perceived by the East German cultural authorities, who were attuned to the risk that a more popular and ‘differentiated’ approach to history could ultimately legitimise a counter-productive form of nationalism.Footnote ⁴⁹ In 1980, officials in the Central Committee's Department of Culture reported with some alarm on the phenomenon of ‘protochronism’ unfolding in Nicolae Ceauşescu's Romania, in which nationalist intellectuals thrust themselves into the pursuit of ‘discovering’ specifically Romanian antecedents for intellectual currents and cultural movements that would later come to prominence in Europe more generally. Through protochronism, the East Germans noted, a raw form of nationalism was percolating into ever more published works and cultural artefacts.Footnote ⁵⁰ While ‘national pride’ and ‘historical consciousness’ could, they conceded, be cautiously employed in the service of a socialist identity (as had been the case in the GDR itself during the 1950s),Footnote ⁵¹ a nationalist historiography that neglected the ‘internationalist aspect’ and the ‘class character of culture and art’ constituted a potent threat to the entire temporal order of socialist society.Footnote ⁵²

The awareness of this risk prompted restraint on the part of those theorists and ideologues entrusted with rationalising and publicly defending the GDR's new historical practices. One such figure was Ernst Diehl, president of the Council of Historical Scholarship and thus the SED's chief guardian of Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy among the East German historical profession. Addressing his Council of Historical Sciences in January 1979, Diehl noted a ‘corresponding interest’ in past epochs within neighbouring socialist countries, drawing attention to the great popularity and international resonance met by a recent exhibition on the fourteenth-century Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV in Prague, the reconstruction of the Royal Palace in Warsaw and a Budapest exhibit of the crown of St Stephen, Hungary's first king (see below). Collectively, Diehl concluded, these instances ‘drew a picture’ and demonstrated the need for a ‘long-term perspective’ in historical propaganda.Footnote ⁵³ For the time being, though, he urged caution, ‘restrictions’ and ‘further deliberations’ before following these countries’ leads: ‘We also have to consider here how that will also be noticed by our enemies and there be expressed in a series of activities that we will have to take into account.’Footnote ⁵⁴ The caution that Diehl and his colleagues in the Department of Culture exercised in questions of nationalist representation reflected the unique political conditions faced by the GDR within Eastern Europe. In an environment where the invocation of national histories potentially bore geopolitical as well as ideological consequences, the pursuit of ‘flattened’ histories carried a great number of political dangers.

The international instances to which Diehl pointed could be interpreted as cultural manifestations of the ‘more independent, “nationalist” course’ pursued by the ruling parties of many bloc countries in the 1970s.Footnote ⁵⁵ But they also reflect the more recursive modes of historicity that began to permeate the political cultures of Eastern Europe's communist states throughout the ‘late socialist’ era. Diehl's comments therefore prompt a number of reflections on the transnational dimension of the GDR's historical turn. Not only do they demonstrate that East German cultural leaders were closely attuned to shifts in the historical practices of neighbouring states, and that they factored in these shifts when preparing their own exhibitions and propaganda offensives – Diehl's remarks also expose the unique set of problems posed by these shifting sentiments for the one bloc state that could not easily afford to indulge in nationalist sentiments. The following discussion will therefore concern itself with situating the GDR within a more general Eastern European context, comparing and contrasting the character of its historical turn to those of other bloc states.

Because of its multi-ethnic make-up, the Soviet Union in particular found itself confronted with a number of theoretical difficulties on national questions, especially in relation to Russian nationalism, which would come to play such a central role in the Union's dissolution from the mid-1980s. ‘Progressive’ traditions, of course, had always been valorised in the state's political language and propaganda, forming the central pillars of Soviet socialism's historical culture. But early Soviet rulers cultivated an equivocal relationship to their historical inheritance, fetishising the new while at the same time adopting a sophisticated approach to its management of imperial and Russian national heritage. In the 1930s, meanwhile, Stalin's purges of revolutionary heroes impelled a revision of the USSR's historical master-narrative, drawing it away from the abstractions of the class struggle and towards the emotional sanctuaries of ‘monarchs, dates and battles’.Footnote ⁵⁶ The state's professional historians populated this new historical landscape with narratives, myths and symbols extracted from the previously suppressed domains of ‘religion, ethnicity, and the state’.Footnote ⁵⁷ Even the Romanov dynasty could find its unwilling place in this history in virtue of its creation and consolidation of the core territory on which the Soviet Union now stood.Footnote ⁵⁸ These tendencies were magnified during the darkest days of the Great Patriotic War, as Stalin – who had previously served as Lenin's ‘People's Commissar for Nationalities’ – came to invoke the language and symbolism of Mother Russia and the Orthodox Church in an urgent appeal to the traditional historical consciousness of many Soviet citizens.

In the long run, however, Stalin's efforts to mobilise Russians’ primal strength of feeling for the ‘Motherland’ was not without consequence for the stabilising futurities of communist time; rather, the penetration of Russian nationalism into Soviet political culture only aggravated ‘the problem of interruption versus continuity’ in the writing of ‘patriotic history’.Footnote ⁵⁹ It ruptured the clean, unidirectional historical trajectory on which socialist consciousness was predicated. And when the Russian victory itself was later cemented as the central legitimating myth of the Brezhnev era, this only served to deepen the period's sense of cultural and political stagnation.Footnote ⁶⁰ Nevertheless, the differences between the Soviets’ often ambivalent relationship to the pre-1917 Russian past and what transpired in the GDR during the 1970s are perhaps of greater importance than the similarities: the Soviet narrative was after all a triumphant one, focused on the forging of patriotic unity through military glory. Further, it had evolved from the complex matrix of ethnic groups unique to that state in a particularly tense geopolitical atmosphere. Indeed, it is notable that East German historians and cultural officials did not invoke any Soviet precedent – either privately or publicly – in their rationalisations for their new theory of Erbe.

Better international comparisons with the GDR's historical turn are perhaps to be found in other ‘satellite states’, and particularly those also forced to reckon both with difficult wartime legacies and the reality that their communist governments had been imposed by the Soviets. The problem was especially acute in Romania, the major bloc state possessing perhaps the weakest historical attachment to communism of all.Footnote ⁶¹ Here, national history had propped up the regime since the Soviet troop withdrawal of 1958, appealing, as Dragoş Petrescu puts it, to a historical sense of ‘independence and territorial integrity’ pervasive among Romanians.Footnote ⁶² The political employment of nationalist histories intensified following Nicolae Ceauşescu's ascent to power in 1965 and his affirmation of full Romanian independence at that year's Ninth Party Congress.Footnote ⁶³ The phenomenon of ‘protochronism’ encountered above was one manifestation of this shift, and was accordingly adopted with vigour by a regime increasingly looking to anchor the legitimacy of its rule in the unique qualities of Romanian history.Footnote ⁶⁴ Throughout his long reign, Ceauşescu continued to invoke the mythic imagery of Romania's medieval and ancient past to buttress his country's drift from Moscow's orbit.Footnote ⁶⁵ The result, from the mid-1970s onwards, was the phenomenon of ‘Dacomania’, in which the historical culture of Romania became saturated by the imagery and symbols of the ancient Dacians, to whom Ceauşescu and his cultural apparatchiks wished to ascribe the ethnogenesis of the Romanian people. Ceauşescu could be confident of his strategy's popularity: at the same time, the historical films of director Sergiu Florin Nicolaescu were attracting mass audiences. His 1967 Dacii (‘The Dacians’) and 1971 Mihai Viteazul (‘Michael the Brave’) – both among the most-watched Romanian films in history – rendered with great artistic sophistication and style the narrative that the history of the Romanian nation consisted of an ancient and continuous struggle for independence and unity.Footnote ⁶⁶

In Bulgaria, meanwhile, an intellectual circle tied to Lyudmilla Zhivkova – Politburo member and daughter of the long-standing Bulgarian communist leader Todor Zhivkov – actively sought in the 1970s to animate a historical sense of Bulgarian national identity so as to help overcome what Ivanka Nedeva Atanasova terms ‘the complex of shame of being Bulgarian’.Footnote ⁶⁷ Their principal historical motifs consisted of the ancient Thracians (a group that encompassed the Dacians), the ninth-century saints Cyril and Methodius, and Bulgaria's two medieval empires. The campaigns were accompanied by a series of popular exhibitions, publications and commemorations both within Bulgaria and abroad.Footnote ⁶⁸ The year 1981 witnessed a series of international festivities to celebrate the 1300th anniversary of the First Bulgarian Empire.

In Hungary, the cult of the King St Stephen was dramatically revitalised at precisely the same moment that Frederick the Great physically and spiritually re-emerged at the centre of East German cultural life.Footnote ⁶⁹ The historian György Györffy's immensely popular biography of Stephen was published in 1977,Footnote ⁷⁰ the same year in which the Hungarian government began negotiations with the Carter administration to retrieve the king's crown from the United States.Footnote ⁷¹ More spectacular still was the success of Levente Szörényi's and János Bródy's 1983 rock opera István, a király (‘Stephen, the King’), which portrayed Hungary's patron saint in his struggle to become the first king of Hungary at the turn of the eleventh century.Footnote ⁷² The culmination of socialist Hungary's reinvigoration of the cult of St Stephen was a nationwide ceremonial tour of the king's right hand – ‘the country's most holy relic’.Footnote ⁷³

Of course, even comparing Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary to the GDR risks oversimplification in view of the wider geopolitical context of the 1970s and 1980s. Since distancing itself from Moscow, Romania had become one of the poorest and most ruthless of Eastern Europe's dictatorships, while Hungary, at least in Western eyes, was widely recognised as the ‘least unattractive’, boasting comparatively lax restrictions on foreign media and communications and offering its citizens a relatively high standard of living.Footnote ⁷⁴ In addition, the reasons why these countries’ political elites – to say nothing of their populations – chose to invoke ancient icons in a new nationalist spirit could also be traced to domestic idiosyncrasies, touching on those states’ specific religious and ethnic compositions in addition to the failures of alternative, ideological sources of identity. Nevertheless, the basic point remains; namely, that political elites in all of these countries could rely on a high degree of popularity when drawing on historical events, figures and conventions that were not generally understood to belong to the armoury of progressive traditions. And in the end, in all of these cases the guarantee of popularity overrode whatever theoretical reservations they may have harboured.

In light of these international examples, one can see why cultural and political officials in the GDR kept a close but critical eye on the history-politics of their ‘brotherlands’ – they were acutely aware of the fact that their own efforts to recalibrate East German historical practices to the demands of socialist historicity reflected an international trend towards embracing a deeper and non-proletarian past as a legitimate component of socialist national identity. But at the same time, they were also aware that the nationalist thrust of these trends carried particular dangers in the unique political circumstances of the GDR – not only because of the ever-present problem posed by a national history shared with a competitor capitalist state, but also because the resuscitation of national traditions could so easily be read as a statement of independence from Moscow.Footnote ⁷⁵ Caught on the horns of this dilemma, the GDR's cultural leaders were especially careful to develop strategies and theories – like Erbe and the ‘socialist Heimat’ – that appropriated the new cultural energies for the purpose of deepening their specific, forward-moving sense of historicity.

Around Eastern Europe at the same time, however, one can detect a number of subtler examples of shifts in historical attitudes that collectively pointed to something much more fundamentally troubling to socialist structures of time. In this respect, a better clue to the pan-European character of these cultural shifts is perhaps provided by a controversial aesthetic counterpart to Hungary's historical turn of the 1970s. In the so-called ‘Tulip Debate’ of that decade, a series of predominantly younger architects derived artistic inspiration for a series of prefab housing developments from the traditions of regional and national folk-art.Footnote ⁷⁶ The striking results of these proposals appeared in the workers’ village at the Pécs nuclear power plant in the country's south. Yet the designers were forced to confront accusations of ‘antimodernism’ by some of the Hungarian architectural establishment's more dogmatic members, who even compared the young architects’ practices to those of the interwar fascists.Footnote ⁷⁷

The use of language here is crucial. The new designs offered by the young Hungarian architects, as Virág Molnár points out, abounded with ‘ornamentation, vernacular traditions, historicism, and cultural identity’, rendering them convergent with the principal tenets of the ‘postmodern turn’ in architecture concurrently taking place in the West.Footnote ⁷⁸ What's more, the purposes of the designs ‘grappled with similar challenges to modernism’ to those that had begun to stimulate postmodern ideas in the architectural circles of Western Europe.Footnote ⁷⁹ To all intents and purposes, then, this was evidence that postmodernist ideas were taking root in Eastern as well as Western Europe in the early 1970s, and were being inspired in both halves of the continent by a sense of discontent not only with the aesthetic soullessness of modernism in practice, but also with its increasingly evident incapacity to reshape society along the lines its practitioners had promised. The problem, however, was that the language of postmodernism – and especially the term itself – was utterly taboo within the cultural discourses of Eastern Europe's communist states, whose inherent devotion to a modern vision of progress was incapable of accommodating anything that smacked of ‘a critical appraisal of modernity’, let alone post-modernity.Footnote ⁸⁰ In the GDR, planners spoke of ‘neo-historicism’ instead of ‘postmodernism’, despite the obvious aesthetic similarity between the two.Footnote ⁸¹ As with the ‘memorial turn’ in history and literature, then, the ‘postmodern turn’ in architecture was not something that could be subscribed to in the same language as that used in the West.Footnote ⁸²

In this sense, the ‘Tulip Debate’ provides an intriguing parallel to the GDR's own turn to the ‘old city’ and urban environments that displayed ‘visible traces of history’ during the 1970s and 1980s, including projects such as the reconstruction of the Gendarmenmarkt in East Berlin, the Semperoper in Dresden and the ‘Dutch Quarter’ in Potsdam.Footnote ⁸³ What is interesting about these design projects are their clear parallels to contemporaneous developments in Western Europe. Florian Urban has argued that this turn in East German architectural practice ‘grew from an intellectual field that reached beyond the borders of the German Democratic Republic and included both capitalist and socialist countries’.Footnote ⁸⁴ While it is true that East German planners and architects accessed and discussed Western journals,Footnote ⁸⁵ this was arguably less important than the simple fact that societies in both halves of Europe faced similar sets of problems. The reality was that architects east of the Iron Curtain were often searching for ‘responses to the social and economical change of the 1960s and 1970s’ in much the same way as their Western counterparts.Footnote ⁸⁶ The ‘old city’ in East Germany, much like the vernacular designs developed by the Hungarian architects at Pécs, was a product of the failings of ‘urban modernism’. Where events differed in the East was in the ‘shortsightedness of [their] government officials’.Footnote ⁸⁷

As GDR historians had done in questions of historiography and memory, East German architectural theorists also insisted on a fundamental difference between trends in their field and ostensibly similar phenomena in the capitalist world. And – also like their historian compatriots – they sought to distinguish their own language and practices by accusing their Western counterparts of capitulating to the temptations of ‘nostalgia’. In 1982, for instance, the GDR architectural theorist Christian Schädlich attacked postmodernism's ‘nostalgic reproduction of the pre-industrial architectural environment’.Footnote ⁸⁸ It was imperative, wrote his colleague Hermann Wirth, that each historical citation employed in an architectural work ‘be accompanied by an examination of that being cited which is concerned not merely with its form, but with its content’. In other words, architects were to ‘make intelligible’ what they were seeking to achieve: ‘Otherwise the impression of formal trickery emerges, of “nostalgia” or frivolous haphazardness, of a need for history without a historical consciousness’.Footnote ⁸⁹ A historical turn in architecture, then, could only be justified through reference to the master-narrative of progressive, materialist history. Anything else was mere indulgence.

In highlighting the transnational dimension of the changing relationship to history that Europe experienced in the 1970s, it is necessary to emphasise how the fundamental similarities between corresponding phenomena like Eastern ‘neo-historicism’ and Western ‘postmodernism’ are much more significant than the differences in how they were expressed and explained. The correlation is not only significant because both ‘neo-historicism’ and ‘postmodernism’ gave new forms of aesthetic expression to the past, but also because the recursive temporality they betrayed was understood as a very conscious reaction to the sense of sterility that had come to be attached to the futurist orientation of modernist styles. In this respect, the parallel between ‘neo-historicism’ and ‘postmodernism’ is symptomatic of a much more general disillusionment with the future promises of a previous era that set in during the 1970s on both sides of the Iron Curtain, and that had great consequences in recasting relationships to heritage, commemoration and identity.Footnote ⁹⁰

So how to explain this apparent synchronicity between East and West in shifting cultural attitudes to the past? At an international level, this was an era of comparative cooperation between the two Cold War blocs, and particularly across the Cold War's German front line. The early 1970s saw the GDR more completely integrated into the international political order, at a time in which this order was turning its attention to conservation and heritage in the most visible ways possible. Under the refrain ‘a future for the past’, the inaugural European Heritage Year was held in 1975, three years after UNESCO adopted its convention for the preservation of ‘World Cultural and Natural Heritage’.Footnote ⁹¹ Furthermore, events like the 1973 oil crisis drew attention to the finitude of global resources, among which were soon counted ‘cultural and natural heritages’.Footnote ⁹² The GDR was far from hermetically sealed from this world. As Mary Fulbrook puts it, with the explosion of the ‘heritage industry’ in the West,

Perhaps more significant, however, was an increasing acknowledgement that the value of the future had been depleted as a political resource both in Western Europe's liberal democracies and in Eastern Europe's socialist states. In the West, new major challenges to social cohesion, job security and the welfare state were met with a wealth of diagnoses that ‘pinned their hopes on the present, and nothing but the present’, while the vast expansion of a middle-class consumer culture helped forge a new set of social values focused exclusively on the immediate obtainment of material reward.Footnote ⁹⁴ In the East, the very grandness of socialism's own ambitions left it especially vulnerable to disenchantment, as regime language drifted ever further from empirical reality. SED First Secretary Walter Ulbricht's 1958 promise that the GDR would ‘overtake’ West Germany in per capita consumption within three years constituted a microcosmic German counterpart to Khrushchev's reckless 1961 vow to deliver communism to the Soviet Union by the year 1980. In the short term, reality's frustrating tendency to invalidate these forecasts openly revealed the many structural shortcomings of socialist economic planning. But in the long term, the chief problem turned out to be less the hollow idealism of regime language than the utter exhaustion of the future as a viable instrument of political legitimacy.

The socialist regimes’ efforts to replenish the depleting power of their future visions with the possibilities of technology and cybernetics also proved illusory.Footnote ⁹⁵ As the 1970s unfolded, faith rapidly collapsed in the idea that technological advancement could be an ally of political progress. From the middle of the decade, a number of critics in the GDR began to recognise the dangerous directions in which the failures of the regime's ‘Scientific-Technical Revolution’ from the 1960s and early 1970s could lead, with a number even echoing the post-materialist and post-growth discourses of the West European Left.Footnote ⁹⁶ Meanwhile, in the early 1980s, functionaries in the Ministry of Culture were increasingly drawn to a disquieting new wave of literature that expressed – in their words – ‘uncertainty about the future’.Footnote ⁹⁷ It was with good reason, then, that the West German political scientist Gert-Joachim Glaeßner observed that it could prove ‘fatal’ when a socialist system, having already discarded its old shibboleths of a global socialist future and a belief in real socialism's superior economic capabilities, began to acknowledge the downsides of progress.Footnote ⁹⁸

But even amidst this collapse of faith in a bounteous socialist future, it remained essential to the very identity of the East German state – and by extension to its rulers’ claims to political legitimacy – that its mode of understanding history be insulated and distinguished from that of the capitalist West. In the GDR's dying days, this was a theme that continued to occupy the playwright and poet Heiner Müller – one of the state's most perceptive critics of the way it had dealt with its historical inheritance. Even in 1988, the Berlin Wall continued to represent for him a partition between two contrasting regimes of historicity. In the East, he wrote, there was ‘still a past, or memories, and there is still a future, expectations’. In the West, by contrast, there was ‘no past, no memory, no expectations: only the present’.Footnote ⁹⁹

V

The tumultuous events that would befall Europe over the following two years, of course, were as unthinkable for Müller as they were for anybody else. But his reflections nevertheless reveal the profundity of the ‘temporal anxiety’ that played as ominous background music to the GDR's sclerosis and decline in the 1970s and 1980s: for the socialist dream to remain alive, the historicity of the East had to be distinct from that of the West. It had to invest meaning into the past, orienting the present to the inevitable unfolding of a glorious, classless future. But, as the historical practices of the East German state seemed to converge with those of its Western antagonist – assuming new, popular forms and concerning themselves ever more with the legacies of long-vanished dynasties and their material traces – the dynamism furnished by the GDR's progressive and modern sense of historicity could no longer marshal the powers of national identity, let alone legitimate the state's very existence. Instead, there arose a sense that history – if not time itself – could no longer be mastered.

The point of this article has not been that the GDR – or indeed any of the socialist states of Eastern Europe more generally – ‘discovered’ or ‘rediscovered’ their histories during the 1970s and 1980s: the significance of the past, it should be clear, had always been fundamental to socialist life. What was distinctive about the late socialist period was the emergence of a new historical culture, in which the ideal of the seamless integration of past, present and future was ruptured by new, popular forms of historical recognition that in turn prompted a conscious and determined effort by the GDR's political elites to reinforce and defend their Marxist-Leninist historical citadel. The surge of the past into East German historical culture – and the exhaustion of the future it reflected – was a sobering reality for the GDR's leaders, whose ironclad commitment to a specific temporal order was predicated on a belief that their form of regime could make a unique claim to have mastered historical time by embodying the inner logic of its motion. Since 1949, they had drawn energy from the awesome mission they were fulfilling, and legitimacy from their privileged knowledge of its methods. The temporal essence of their ideology conferred both meaning and hope upon their project. But as new political and economic realities began to bite, their once-fervid conviction shrivelled into a hollow and derisible doctrine. Disoriented and devoid of ideas, history itself seemed to have abandoned them.