Violence and Interpretation

The events that took place in Central and Eastern Europe in 1989 seemed to confirm Hannah Arendt’s prophetic words that the twentieth century would come to be known as “a century of revolutions.” ¹ The nonviolent mass demonstrations in the East German cities of Leipzig and Dresden for a while at least appeared to reestablish confidence in the power of the people, as well as prove the possibility of peaceful revolutions and new beginnings. Commenting on these events in June 1990, Jürgen Habermas, however, was quick to draw attention to the “mutually exclusive interpretations” to which these revolutionary upheavals had been subjected, ranging from Stalinist, Leninist, and reform-communist revisions to postmodern, anticommunist and liberal models of explanation. ² One of the better known interpretive models was Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History?,” which gained international notoriety not only for the confidence with which it established the demise of communism as the “unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism,” ³ but also for the curious anachronism with which the events of 1989 were said to present the triumph of the “modern liberal state,” whose principles of liberty and equality Hegel would have hailed in the 1806 Battle of Jena. ⁴ Similarly, conservative historians and politicians in Germany—foremost among them Ernst Nolte—celebrated the revolutions of ’89 as the definitive overcoming of “the global civil war started by the Bolsheviks in 1917.” ⁵ Among Germany’s left-liberal intelligentsia, by contrast, the collapse of the GDR, together with the utopian potential of an alternative “middle way” democratic socialism, was to lead to a profound cultural crisis or to what Helmut Dubiel, in a much noted article in Merkur, would call “left-wing melancholia.” ⁶ Habermas’s position, finally, proved to be more cautionary. Already in 1990 he referred to the changes in Eastern Europe as “revolutions of recuperation,” which, in spiraling back to the bourgeois revolutions of the West not only abandoned totalitarianism for constitutional democracy but, on a negative note, uncritically espoused a market economy and consumerism. Rejecting both the jubilant triumph of liberalism and the left-wing melancholia of Wolf Biermann and others, he instead ascribed a critical role to socialism, which was to function as the necessary corrective to liberalism.