In East Germany, during the communist period, people would sometimes join a queue on the basis that if others were waiting, there must be something worth having at the end of it. Siegfried Wittenburg, whose images accompany this article, photographed this waiting-for-I-know-not-what in his home town of Rostock. It was safer to take photos than to criticise the regime in words, but only just.
The Ministry for State Security, or Stasi, kept Wittenburg under surveillance from 1972 almost until its own dissolution. The last entry in his file, which concerned some photos he had exhibited of Rostock’s dilapidated old town, was dated 27 November 1989 – almost three weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall. He knows this because he applied to see that file in 1999. Having discovered the identities of his informers, he made peace with one of them – whom the Stasi had blackmailed – and cut ties with the others. “Ever since I cleaned up my past, I feel free,” says the 69-year-old. “I became more open, happier, warmer – and successful.”
Many former East German citizens tell similar stories, which is why a new study in the journal Cognition has caused some consternation. Historian Dagmar Ellerbrock, of the Technical University Dresden, and psychologist Ralph Hertwig of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, report that the majority of people on whom the Stasi kept files have not opened them.
The finding has touched a particular nerve in Germany, which can sometimes seem like an open-air museum to the horrors of nazism, but all countries have zones of oblivion. Like Britain, Germany has yet to confront the violence it meted out in its former colonies, while France is struggling to process the Algerian war. Spain only recently dissolved the pact of forgetting it made after the Franco era. As the pandemic begins to fade from memory, and history is weaponised in Ukraine, the study has fuelled a wider conversation about how societies deal with past trauma and the role that individuals play in that reckoning. “I’m not justifying deliberate ignorance,” says Hertwig, “but I do want to understand it.”
He had heard many stories such as Wittenburg’s, but he also heard tales of a different kind. When the former West German chancellor Helmut Schmidt said of the Stasi archive, in 2002, “My instinct would have been to burn everything unread,” he was voicing the majority opinion of the West German political elite at the time of reunification. The writer Günter Grass publicly refused to see his file on the grounds that he would discover the identities of his informers, but not what motivated them (he eventually relented, but only once the names had been redacted).
Hertwig and Ellerbrock asked staff at the Stasi archive what proportion of people who had files consulted them. “Their response was: ‘What do you mean? Everyone looks at their file!’” says Hertwig. That seemed unlikely, but the researchers realised why it might feel that way. Nobody knows exactly how many files there are – only that before they were divided up between the Berlin central office and 12 regional branches of the national archives last year, they filled nearly 70 miles (111km) of shelf. One of the Stasi’s last acts was to destroy much of its indexing system, along with many files. But if you don’t know how many files there are, you don’t know how many haven’t been consulted, either – only how many have.
Hertwig and Ellerbrock estimated that if all East German citizens who believed the Stasi had files on them had applied to see them, there would have been around 5m applications since the archive opened in 1991. In fact, there have been closer to 2m, so roughly 3m people have opted for deliberate ignorance.
After advertising their project in the press, and persuading about 150 people who had not seen their files to come forward, they used a combination of in-depth interviews and questionnaires to examine the reasons. These varied, but the most common were that the information was no longer relevant; that people preferred not to know that colleagues, friends or relatives had informed on them; or that they feared being unable to trust again.
For Volker Höffer, who directs the Stasi archive in Rostock, those who consulted their files almost always found it a liberating experience – especially if they had been persecuted as a result of Stasi spying. “In numerous conversations, those affected told me that they could now dissolve dark holes within themselves,” he says. But he also saw it as a necessary step for Germany as a whole, an attempt to “extract the eternal essence of dictatorships and to develop from it a serum against future ones”.
These days, Wittenburg exhibits his photos and educates children about the communist period – often, he says, to the visible unease of their teachers. Individual deliberations are complex and private, Hertwig says, and they can change over time – especially with generational turnover. This is how collective memory evolves, and chapters that were once repressed swim back into public consciousness. Deliberate ignorance and forgetting are not the same thing – because to forget something you have to have known it in the first place – but forgetting can also be a collective strategy, he says. It has probably been societies’ preferred one for moving beyond trauma throughout history, albeit rarely durable.
In 1652, after the English civil war, parliament passed an “act of oblivion” that provided amnesty to those on the losing side (it’s no coincidence that amnesty and amnesia share a root). Within three years, the supposedly pardoned royalists had been placed under surveillance and slapped with a discriminatory tax. Then in 1660, after the restoration of the monarchy, another act of oblivion was passed. This time the amnesty excluded regicides, including some of the architects of the original act.
The vogue now is for confronting the past, for truth and reconciliation on the model of the commission that South Africa set up in 1996 to investigate the apartheid era. But this approach has its own problems, says historian Martin Jay of the University of California, Berkeley. Take reparations, which some might see as drawing a line under the past, and others as letting the perpetrators off the hook. “If the reparations are paid, does that clear the ledger?” Jay asks. “Can the perpetrators then say: ‘We’ve paid for the grievance, so shut up, stop bothering us’?”
Canada adopted the truth and reconciliation model to address historical abuses of its Indigenous people, but its approach has proved controversial. In 2020, during a confrontation between police and activists who claimed that the government was trying to force a gas pipeline through stolen indigenous lands, a slogan was born: “Reconciliation is dead.” That slogan has come to symbolise a sense among Indigenous people in Canada and elsewhere, that if you forgive and forget, you’ll always be a victim.
Likewise, in Ireland, some feel that keeping traumatic memories alive is the only way to drive political change. In 2018, geographer Joseph Robinson of Maynooth University accompanied veterans of the Ulster Defence Regiment to places along the Irish border, where they had survived violence in the 1980s. He noticed that they talked about present-day residents as if they had been bystanders to the violence – seemingly ignoring the decades that had elapsed in between.
Robinson calls this “prolonging the past” – keeping the past viscerally alive in the present – in an effort to retain a voice in the collective conversation. Integral to the writing of history is a negotiation over where the past ends and the present begins, as an ambitious programme of research in France is finding.
The 13-Novembre project tracks the evolution of individual and collective memories of the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris over a vast swathe of the French population. By the time the trial of the accused perpetrators got under way in September 2021, the six attacks – which took place at different locations across the city – had been condensed into two in the collective memory: one vague, Paris, and the other precise, the Bataclan concert venue. But the extensive press coverage of the trial, which drew on eyewitness accounts, reminded people of forgotten details – including the other locations.
Historian Denis Peschanski, one of the co-directors of 13-Novembre project, says they are watching a historical narrative being constructed in real time: a negotiation between individual and collective accounts that, he predicts, will eventually stabilise at some consensus.
In the meantime, Peschanski says, those who survived the attacks, or who lost a loved one, suffer a “double penalty”. They are forced to live with the harrowing memories while watching the public narrative migrate away from them. Sometimes, this dissonance negatively affects their mental health. Those who remain healthy, or recover, are the ones who manage to construct their own historical narrative – a story they can live with, that doesn’t diverge too far from the collective account. “The only possibility is to send the event back where it belongs, into the past,” he says.
What is interesting about this is that it chimes with evolving thinking about how best to treat post-traumatic stress disorder – which is characterised by intrusive, traumatic memories. The current standard of care for PTSD involves trying to update the traumatic memory by introducing new information that dilutes the associated emotion and sense of injury, says Jennifer Wild, an experimental psychologist at Oxford University who specialises in PTSD. But her recent work with healthcare workers traumatised by the Covid-19 pandemic has made her wonder if there isn’t a better way to speed up a patient’s recovery.
Updating the memory can help, Wild says, but “what people have found really useful is to break the link with the past”. Applying her ideas to the Stasi victims, and with the caveat that she hasn’t worked with them personally, she says it makes sense that a person with no traumatic memories would feel no desire to consult their file. If they found themselves dwelling obsessively on the past, however, a trip to the archives might help – “with the frame of mind of thinking about objective reasons why somebody might have betrayed them and why the situation today is different”.
In a recent book, Forgetting: the Benefits of Not Remembering, neurologist and Alzheimer’s expert Scott Small of Columbia University in New York City writes that we will soon forget much of the pandemic – which is good for our mental health. He explains how the science of forgetting has undergone a revolution in the past decade. Forgetting is no longer seen simply as faulty remembering, but as a process underpinned by distinct molecular mechanisms. One important ingredient of those mechanisms is the hormone oxytocin, which is secreted naturally when people interact face to face, inducing forgetting and regulating stress. Thus, through social interaction, we mould each other’s memories to reach a mutually compatible, emotionally defanged account.
The philosopher Walter Benjamin would have been horrified. He wanted us to explode the agreed historical narrative and peer into the chaos of competing interpretations beneath. Only by doing that, he felt, could we keep the emotion raw and stop repeating the mistakes of the past. The public health experts who despair over our inability to remember pandemics, and prepare for future ones, might agree. But, the likelihood is that many of us will forget, or choose ignorance if we can, and unknowingly rewrite history in the process. The ones anchoring us to the past, the enduring receptacles of memory, remain the bereaved. “As for the losses,” says a man who lost both his parents during the pandemic, “only those that have known them intimately will carry them every day for the rest of their lives.”