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PASTOR GENERAL'S REPORT, APRIL 27, 1984
PAGE 11
At the same time, the East German authorities have been restoring, quietly
but steadily, Prussian history in an attempt to give their regime a more
solid historical underpinning. Here are excerpts from a report in the
INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE of March 23, 1984:
East Germany's Communist leaders are reviving Prussian history in
an effort to give their 35-year-old state a solid historical
underpinning and to cultivate an East German national feeling.
Frederick the Great, the Prussian generals who fought Napoleon,
the political reformers and neoclassical architects of the early
19th century and, more recently, even Otto von Bismarck are back
on their pedestals, or at least in the newspapers and school
books. Martin Luther was honored last year on the 500th anniver
sary of his birth.
It was not always so. After World War II and the partition of
Germany, the official impulse of the new state was to make a
complete break with the past. "Today, we know that our state was
not created by a single generation but has much deeper roots in
the past," an East Berlin intellectual said. Young people cannot
grow up without history but need a feeling of history to develop
a national consciousness, he added.
The revival of history is evident throughout the center of East
Berlin. A famous 19th-qentury monument of Frederick the Great,
riding high on his horse and surrounded by his officers, is back
in its honored place on the esplanade of Unter den Linden, the
city's most famous avenue.
It was brought back in 1980 after
being kept out of sight for four decades outside Berlin. It was
Erich Honecker, the present Communist Party leader and chief of
state, who first referred to Frederick as "the great" again.
Many others still prefer the more modest "Frederick II."
A few steps away, each on his pedestal, are Gerhard von Scharn
horst and August Neidhardt von Gneisenau, two Prussian Army com
manders who fought against Napoleon. In the same row is General
Ludwig Yorck von Wartenburg, who formed a common front with the
Russians and turned on Napoleon in 1813 without waiting for
orders from his hesitant king, Frederick Wilhelm III.
Next to
him is Gebhard Leberecht von Bluecher, the Prussian field marshal
who played a decisive role in Napoleon's final defeat at Water-
loo....
The latest adventure in rev1v1ng history is a biography of Bis
marck by Gerd Engelberg, a historian, which is to be published
soon. Until now, Bismarck, the chancellor of Imperial Germany
from 1871 to 1890, was seen in official East Germany as an over
bearing reactionary Prussian Junker, remembered mostly for having
banned the Socialist Party. Now he is described as a nation
builder and political thinker, even though perhaps on the wrong
side of the barricades, and it is said that he showed consider
able intelligence in the handling of his relations with Russia.
West German historians believe that the revival of history
fulfills an urgent political and psychological need of the East