In politics, ideas matter; but seemingly just as important is the political use of memory. In her book on political memory in divided Germany, Christina Morina convincingly shows the impact of eastern-front memories on the development of a distinctive political narrative in each Germany, as well as the way in which the gradual change in the narrative in West Germany helped to promote eventual reconciliation with its eastern neighbors. Morina is quick to emphasize that the focus of her study is on political memory, that is, the impact of the memory of the eastern front on political elites. This not only avoids the pitfalls of attempting to establish generalized “popular memory,” but also allows her to demonstrate the ways both postwar German states used eastern-front memories to promote their own legitimacy. Morina further notes the impact of personal experience in determining elite memories in each Germany.

Her starting point, of necessity, is the reality of a divided Germany. In the GDR the political elite, from personal experience, political conviction, and recognition that the new state needed a foundational myth, quickly seized on eastern-front memories to create a legitimizing narrative. The components of this master narrative fit together nicely into an exculpating whole: the Russians were both victims and liberators; German worker-soldiers were victimized by the Nazi regime; Stalingrad marked a collective awakening among these same worker-soldiers as to both the criminal nature of the war and the superiority of the Soviet system; many German soldiers gained redemption and reeducation in Soviet POW camps; in this process, they were aided by the independent work of the antifascist National Committee for a Free Germany. Thus, through a selective and instrumental use of history and memory, any war guilt of East Germans was erased and collectively transferred to West Germany, which was portrayed as the logical successor to the Nazi state. In addition, the GDR had learned the correct lessons of history, namely, the superiority of the Soviet system and the necessity of absolute support for the U.S.S.R.

The situation in West Germany proved more complex. Where Walter Ulbricht had spent the war in Moscow, Konrad Adenauer was a westerner in orientation. For him, and others in the political elite of the Federal Republic, the defining memory of the war was absolute defeat, and the sustaining myth of the new state was that of democratic antitotalitarianism. As such, the U.S.S.R. loomed not as a victim but as a threat, and in the emerging context of the Cold War, West Germany could claim to have learned the proper lesson of history: stand with democracy against authoritarianism. This posture both subtly negated and (partially) validated the Nazi war in the east. It was, after all, according to Nazi propaganda, a war to protect Germany and Europe from the threat of Soviet communism. This narrative also blended well with notions of German victimization (civilians killed in Allied bombing raids, refugees and expellees, POWs in Soviet captivity, fellow Germans ensnared in another dictatorship) and the emerging myth of the clean Wehrmacht, whose members had not fought a criminal war, but a defensive (or, perhaps, a preventive) war. In contrast to the GDR, where eastern-front memories were embraced and ritualized as a means of state building, in Adenauer's Germany they were, if not quite forgotten, then used to reinforce an alternative lesson of history.

It was in the Federal Republic, though, that the master narrative underwent the most transformation over the course of the next three decades. Confronted first in the 1960s by events such as the Auschwitz trial, which led to emphasis on the Holocaust as the key war memory, and the challenge of the '68ers, it was Ostpolitik that fundamentally altered West German political memory. In its pursuit of reconciliation, Ostpolitik necessitated greater understanding of Soviet security concerns, based on its historic memories, and so required changes in the West German master narrative. Both Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt worked to reconcile with the U.S.S.R. (and Poland) by altering this political culture and admitting German crimes. Still, their own personal historical experiences of the Soviet Union (Brandt as mayor of West Berlin and Schmidt from his own eastern-front experiences) constrained both men, so that while each expressed genuine empathy with the suffering of Poles, neither could quite do the same for the Russians (even as Schmidt and Leonid Brezhnev had a good personal relationship based on their shared war experiences). Nor could either quite abandon the equation of German and Soviet suffering.

By the late 1980s, as one German state was crumbling, Morina notes a few final ironies. As events such as the Historikerstreit prompted an exploration of the past in West Germany, East German leader Erich Honecker eroded the long-standing antifascist master narrative, leaving the memory of the eastern front little more than a static, ritualized, unusable fossil. At the same time, as both eastern and western leaders had come to invoke eastern-front memories for instrumental purposes, they ignored precise details and activities, preferring a generalized to a specific memory. After all, everyone knew crimes had been committed; in the east, they preferred to overlook Stalin's, in the west, Hitler's. Ironically, the conservative Helmut Kohl, with a doctorate in history, became the first leader to speak in detail about particular crimes and to expand the list of victims, even if he, too, neglected to mention the perpetrators. Finally, Morina emphasizes that even in reunified Germany the past refuses to pass away, for the lessons of the eastern war remain elusive. For some, memories of the eastern front lead to the refrain “no more war,” while others invoke the lesson “no more Auschwitz.” After twenty years of unification, Germans remain divided by eastern-front memories and the ways in which their respective political elites manipulated these memories during the Cold-War era.