Germany and the Geography of Memory
The Germany I Encountered
The recent elections in Saxony are the occasion for this essay, but they are not its subject. Electoral results belong to the immediate political moment. The deeper question is what happens to historical memory when borders, institutions, and political identities change while older geographies go on living inside families and societies. And in Germany’s case, that older geography did not begin in 1933, or in 1945, or in 1989. It begins centuries earlier, in a Europe whose Christian unity had already split before Germany, in any modern sense, existed at all.
An Older Fracture
In the year 1054, the Latin West and the Byzantine East formalized a rupture that had been building for centuries: different languages of worship, different claims to authority, different relationships between church and ruler. Historians rightly say the schism was gradual and its date symbolic rather than absolute. But symbolic dates matter, because societies organize memory around them. That fracture in Europe’s Christian unity has never fully healed, and I do not think it is only a matter for medievalists.
I first felt the weight of this claim personally in 1992, in a conversation with Cardinal Chrysostom of Nitra, sometimes called der Zauberberg. He described the division between East and West in Moravia – the ancient contest over whether Central Europe would face Rome or Constantinople – as a wound in Europe’s Christian body that never closed. The Bollandist scholar Michel van Esbroeck later confirmed to me how seriously this perspective deserved to be taken.
It is not a purely theological memory. Trace the line the schism drew, and it still runs, roughly, beneath the political map of Europe today: through the states that joined the EU and NATO with comparative ease and those that did not; through differing traditions of church-state relation, from a more centralized Catholic and Protestant model of national institutions to Orthodoxy’s historically closer identification with the state itself.
Most starkly, it runs through Ukraine, where the war now underway falls close to a line that separates a “Uniate” (in communion with the See of Rome) and Latin-facing West from an Orthodox, Moscow-oriented East – an alignment that predates communism, predates the Russian Empire, and reaches back to which rite first arrived with the missionaries.
A baptized Europe, even after secularization, never developed a common historical consciousness to match its common faith. It built the European Union’s institutional and economic framework without resolving that older inheritance, and the difference still shapes who feels naturally “European” and who does not.
Germany sits inside this larger unfinished geography, at its western edge and yet, through Prussia and Silesia, deep into its eastern one. That is where its memory truly starts.
The East That Remains
Eastern Germany cannot be understood only through the forty years of the German Democratic Republic. It belongs to a far older world in which Germanic and Slavic populations, languages, and political structures interacted for a thousand years before Bismarck, let alone Honecker. In Bautzen/Budyšin, the continuing Sorbian (Wend) presence and its bilingual street names are not decorative survivals. They are evidence of a history that never belonged to one people alone.
The same is true across Schlesien (Silesia), Pommern (Pomerania), and the old Prussian lands, where German, Polish, Kashubian, Czech, Jewish, and Lithuanian lives were woven together. The expulsions and population transfers after 1945 tore this fabric with particular violence: millions lost their homes, and new populations built lives in territories that became Polish or Soviet. Names like Breslau, Stettin, Danzig, and Königsberg can still carry meaning for descendants who have no wish to return and no claim to press – but that private meaning does not compete with, or diminish, the plain fact that people today belong to Wrocław, Szczecin, Gdańsk, and Kaliningrad. Historical memory and present sovereignty are different kinds of truth, and Europe’s peace depends on keeping them different.
Something else survives in families and estates across Germany and Austria, harder to name precisely: an inherited sense of rank, of territorial responsibility, of historical legitimacy tied to a particular place – what German calls an older sense of Adel. It need not be a political program. It is often simply a memory of who a family was, and where.
Prussia itself is the clearest case. It vanished as a state in 1947, dissolved by Allied decree, and yet it remains inseparable from how Germans understand their own past. Königsberg became Kaliningrad. Its German, Prussian, Baltic, and European layers did not stop existing because the name changed.
What I Saw
I encountered this layered memory directly, and unevenly, long before I had language for it.
In 1992, reporting through Eastern Europe, my route passed through Bautzen/Budyšin, Görlitz, Poland, and what was still, barely, Czechoslovakia. In the former GDR, rural communities were often poor and visibly shaped by four decades of communist structure. The Nazi past was not exactly denied, but it sat outside the identity through which people understood their own society — the GDR had called itself antifascist from its founding, and many inhabitants had simply inherited that self-description as fact, without examining it.
Earlier, in Bischofshofen, Austria, I – a Jewish child of Ukrainian origin whose mother tongue is Yiddish – was welcomed by a family of openly Nazi conviction. Their warmth, their Fröhlichkeit, seemed almost detached from the history sitting inside it. Nothing was hidden. There had been Nazis, and here I was, at their table.
At sixteen, near Düsseldorf, I stayed with a large Junker family, bound to strict tradition, who had sheltered resistance fighters and Jews on their estate during the war. Their bearing was one of implacable silence – never mentioned, and never questioned by the surrounding community. Memory here survived through discretion, not declaration.
I set these three encounters beside each other deliberately, because they resist any simple story of an East that forgot and a West that remembered. Silence can come from fear, loyalty, shame, conviction, or the plain desire to keep living. No defeat, no division, no reunification purifies memory by decree.
Two Germanies, One Unfinished Reckoning
German communists I met over the years sometimes saw the GDR as a genuine European model – egalitarian, culturally ambitious, open toward the Warsaw Pact states. Their belief was often sincere, even as the regime’s surveillance and coercion contradicted it daily. The GDR’s disappearance in 1990 did not erase the world in which they had believed. It is worth noting how many East German-formed figures went on to lead the reunified state – Angela Merkel among them – a fact that still generates unease today.
In the West, public acknowledgment of Nazi crimes grew steadily more substantial, but institutional recognition did not automatically dissolve the silences inside individual families. The Federal Republic was not purified by Nazism’s military defeat any more than the GDR was purified by proclaiming itself antifascist.
Germans also came to Israel, formed friendships, and married into Jewish families – Sephardic and Mizrahi first, Ashkenazi somewhat later. New generations built relationships their grandparents could barely have imagined. That does not mean memory disappeared. It means inherited history need not govern every human encounter, even as it slowly recedes into a blurred past.
Germany’s financial restitution to Jewish victims of Nazi persecution has continued for decades. Its more recent, and still contested, engagement with the genocide of the Herero and Nama peoples shows that state responsibility can outlast by generations the lifetimes of those who committed the crimes. But payment, however necessary, cannot by itself do the deeper work of memory.
The genocidal violence of modern Europe needs to be examined through racial ideology, colonial practice, administrative power, and the failure of both Christian and secular institutions – not explained away as some inherited national essence, nor dismissed as an aberration belonging to a vanished regime alone.
An Unfinished Geography
None of this explains Saxony by itself, and we must be careful not to claim that it does. The rise of the AfD reflects real and immediate grievances: dissatisfaction with established parties, economic disparity between East and West that thirty-five years have not closed, disputes over migration, differing visions of Germany’s direction. Those causes deserve to be examined on their own terms, and they do not, on their own, indicate any desire to recover former German territories.
But the Eastern German experience cannot be reduced to the difficulties of reunification either. The disappearance of the GDR was followed by rapid upheaval in institutions, industry, agriculture, and social hierarchy. For many, the political order they had lived under was replaced almost overnight by one whose legitimacy had been established elsewhere, by other people, in another Germany. That tension has continued across generations, and it sits on top of – not instead of – the far older layer of Germanic-Slavic geography.
Postwar Europe was built on the recognition that historical grievance cannot be allowed to keep reopening territorial settlement. German reunification, and Germany’s subsequent agreements with Poland, confirmed existing borders permanently. Preserving German memory of the lost eastern territories does not diminish Polish sovereignty over them, just as the lives built in those territories since 1945 do not require the erasure of what came before. A territory can recover an older identity without recovering an older border.
The European Union created law, institutions, and habits of cooperation that have genuinely transformed relations among its members. But that achievement – largely the work of Western politicians and intellectuals – did not produce a common historical consciousness to match it. National and regional inheritances, and older ones still, continue to shape how people understand their place on this continent.
Germany sits at the center of this unfinished process: its economic and political weight, its history of division and reunification, and its older eastern geography make it the clearest single case of the relationship between memory and sovereignty in Europe today. Saxony’s election is one small episode inside a much longer history – a history that runs back through 1989, through 1945, through the Prussian centuries, and through 1054, further than any of us are used to counting.
The question Europe still has not answered is whether it can hold its overlapping historical geographies without turning them into instruments of exclusion or territorial claim. Political borders can be settled permanently without requiring the disappearance of the older identities beneath them. Europe’s future may depend less on erasing these memories than on learning, finally, to live with all of them at once.
