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[...] the government's need to legitimize its own educational dictates coincided completely with the citizens' need for exoneration from historical responsibility. Add to this a kind of "Hiroshima effect." The genocidal bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had transformed the Japanese into victims, an…

One cannot quibble with the fact that the East German government managed to completely recast the old apparatus, often at great cost, since many of those dismissed were far more skilled than their replacements. What is problematic, however, is that from the outset, this housecleaning was performed …

As far as public trials are concerned, all parties are in complete agreement: don't hold them. No one is qualified, they say to pass judgment on the East Germans, for no one knows with absolute certainty how he himself might have behaved under similar circumstances.

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Apart from the publi…

[...] In 1980, East Germany had signed an accord with the People's Republic of Vietnam which allowed skilled Vietnamese laborers entry and limited residence for purposes of labor. Under the terms of this agreement, thousands of Vietnamese came every year; by 1989, about 60,000 were employed in East…

1. We probably cannot ascribe the failure of this massive seventy-year experiment in socialism exclusively to Stalinism and the lack of democracy. What has happened appears to refute the utopian notion that masses of people in the industrial age can work creatively over long periods of time for a l…