The “Buchenwald Child,” a Polish-Jewish boy named Stefan Jerzy Zweig who was imprisoned in the Buchenwald concentration camp until its liberation in April 1945, stood at the center of an East German narrative of Communist resistance to National Socialism. Historian Bill Niven uses the construction of this narrative to explore the use of memory in creating the ideological foundations of the GDR. Buchenwald was seen by the Socialist Unity Party (SED), the Communist Party of East Germany, as the most important center of Communist resistance from within the Nazi camp system. In the official version of the story, Stefan Zweig was saved by communists. This story became part of attempts to portray the GDR as the “better Germany.” It was argued that while fascists were on the loose in West Germany, East Germany was built on a brave tradition of antifascism. As many scholars have pointed out, the official SED version of antifascism created a black-and-white sense of “us and them,” “us” being East Germans, who were encouraged to see themselves as victims of the Nazis, “them” being Nazis who appeared all to have vanished or to have gone to the West after the war.

Niven's discussion of the historical events that provided the basis for East German myth making is subtle. As in most concentration camps, Buchenwald was divided into different prison populations that competed for the favor of the SS and domination over camp self-administration, while at the same time trying to organize resistance. Communist prisoners, who gained the upper hand in 1942, could be ruthless in trying to promote their own position, though some of them helped to save Jewish children. Stefan Zweig was saved also thanks to his parents, Zacharias and Sylwia Zweig. They underwent an almost unimaginable ordeal in connection with their attempts to hide, then shield, their son Stefan, born in 1941 in the Cracow ghetto. By the time he was three, Stefan had witnessed executions, lost his mother (who was killed in Auschwitz in 1944), and been transported (under frightful conditions) with his father to Buchenwald. German political prisoners “adopted” him and lavished attention on this beautiful boy, who was a welcome reminder of the world outside. In the process, though, they separated him from his father, who could only visit from time to time. Stefan was even occasionally pampered (though also threatened) by SS men. For them, he was a token Jew, doubtlessly singled out for good treatment to assuage feelings of guilt. In October 1944, he was saved at the last moment from deportation to Auschwitz by a communist Kapo (prisoner-administrator) and an SS doctor. Just before liberation, the communists nearly abandoned Stefan, but he again narrowly escaped death, this time thanks to his father.

After the war, communists who had been in Buchenwald defended themselves from criticism with tales of resistance and heroism. The 1958 novel Naked Among Wolves by Bruno Apitz played a key role in this process of myth building. As an inmate of Buchenwald from 1937 to 1945, Apitz resisted the Nazis through sculpture, entertainment of prisoners, and plays. He salvaged a mediocre postwar career as a writer with the stunning success of Naked Among Wolves, a novel about Buchenwald that became a modern classic and a required reading for high school students in the GDR. Niven demonstrates that Apitz gave in to pressures to make the novel more palatable to the powers that be. Any hint of collaboration with the SS was expunged. What remained were good communists doing the right thing. The salvation of the Buchenwald child, placed in the context of a morally unassailable antifascist struggle, culminated in the self-liberation of the camp (also a myth). The novel became one of the “foundational texts … for the socialist nation developing in our country,” according to a top official (p. 110). This “foundation myth” was, in Niven's words, rooted in “traditional cultural heritage” (p. 111) and conceptions of an all-male antifascist community. Pushing Jews off into a very minor role as victims, the novel is essentially about the triumph of socialist humanism over fascist barbarism. “It is almost totally monoperspectival, because of its obsessive focus on communist heroism” (p. 191), though communists only made up a small percentage of Buchenwald inmates.

It was discovered in 1964 that the real Stefan Zweig was alive and living in Israel. A heretofore unknown account, written by his father, Zacharias Zweig, and preserved by Yad Vashem, was serialized in an East German newspaper, but aspects of the story were suppressed or changed so as to preserve the “canonical status” (p. 175) of Apitz's version. Living in the GDR in 1964–1972, Zweig was exploited and manipulated to a certain extent by the SED, but he also worked to raise awareness of the Holocaust and refused to criticize Israel.

There have been tremendous debates about memory, antifascism, and the ideological foundations of the GDR in recent years, particularly in Germany. Some have argued that antifascism served to legitimize dictatorship, largely ignored the Holocaust, and promoted intolerance (including anti-Semitism) in East Germany. Recent studies tend to emphasize the more participatory aspects of antifascism. Niven's book straddles the two categories, portraying the complex interplay between manipulation from above and genuinely popular manifestations of antifascism, such as the popularity of Apitz's best-selling novel, widespread fascination with Zweig, and willingness to learn from Buchenwald. One wonders whether the “Buchenwald child” phenomenon truly promoted tolerance toward Jews in East Germany, though other East German works, such as Jurek Becker's Jakob the Liar, certainly did, revealing the “harsh historical reality of anti-Semitism” (p. 197).

Niven agrees with the post-reunification thesis that “antifascism as practiced by the SED often functioned as a smoke screen designed to conceal state crime” (p. 199); however, he argues that antifascism was much more than that. Before the 1970s, there was a more extensive public discussion of the crimes of the Nazis in East Germany than in West Germany. Niven is critical of attempts to make a 180-degree turn in ways of thinking about the past in reunified Germany. He, for example, rejects blanket condemnations of the communist resistance at Buchenwald. Though some communist inmates were anti-Semitic, others risked their lives to help Jewish prisoners such as Stefan Zweig. Niven rightly criticizes post-1990 reinterpretations of the story of the “Buchenwald Child” for their “self-serving one-sidedness” (p. 214) and dogmatic anticommunism. His embrace of Maurice Halbwachs's thesis that collective memory is always connected with myth making (not just in the sense of a trope, but also in the sense of falsification) detracts from the book; however, his careful reconstruction of ideology within the context of East German and post-1990 German society belies this very ahistorical way of thinking. Niven has delivered a very well-researched work of great insight and sophistication, a fine piece of scholarship that furthers our understanding of the way ideology was formed under Communism.