© REUTERS/Fabrizio Bensch

On March 21, 1933, the city of Potsdam was decked out in black-white-red, the colors of the German empire that had ended 15 years earlier. Hundreds of thousands of spectators were lining the street. The “Day of Potsdam” was an important moment for Adolf Hitler’s consolidation of power: a demonstration of bonding between the still powerful German aristocracy and the new Nazi regime.

Prince Wilhelm of Prussia, the eldest son of the exiled emperor Wilhelm II, who had abdicated in November 1918, was given the place of honor in Potsdam’s Garrison Church: with his family, the Hohenzollern, he sat behind an empty chair symbolizing the Kaiser’s absence. Hitler, when entering the church, saluted him.

Both men knew and intended to make use of each other: Wilhelm to try and restore the monarchy, Hitler, to pacify the old elites and consolidate his grip on power. Hitler won: Wilhelm’s family, the Hohenzollern, never returned to power.

But how much did the prince actually help the Nazis? That’s no longer just a question for historians. The answer is worth millions of euros in restitution claims—claims that today’s Hohenzollern are making against the federal government as well as the states of Berlin and Brandenburg. Years of secret negotiations have not yielded a settlement. In March, the state government of Brandenburg will decide whether to have the courts rule on the matter.

Compensation Demands

The Hohenzollern are demanding compensation for land expropriated by the Soviets in East Germany in 1946 as well as the return of thousands of artefacts—paintings, pieces of furniture or jewelry, books and other items such as valuable snuff boxes which their ancestors had acquired over the centuries.

At an earlier stage, the family even demanded the right to a free residence in Schloss Cecilienhof in Potsdam, a former Hohenzollern residence that in the summer of 1945 housed the Potsdam Conference. It was there that Truman, Stalin, and Attlee divided up the vanquished Germany.

East Germany, under Stalin’s control, became communist. In 1946, the Soviet occupational forces expropriated large landowners in the region, among them the Hohenzollern. But after German unification in 1990, the law was reversed: moveable property was given back; for land, there was to be compensation. However, the new pan-German government made one major exception: former owners who had “substantially abetted National Socialism” were excluded from making any claims.

There is little doubt that Crown Prince Wilhelm was a Nazi sympathizer who wrote Hitler fawning letters. Yet no court has ever explored the meaning of “substantially abetting.” How far is it a question of intention?  How much evidence is needed to show that the support actually helped Hitler?

Given the legal uncertainties, the Hohenzollern family from 2014 to 2019 secretly negotiated with Germany’s federal government as well as the states of Berlin and Brandenburg for restitution or compensation of their former East German property.

Yet little progress was made until 2019, when the talks were leaked to the public. Then, outrage over the Hohenzollern’s claim to so many artifacts of great historic and cultural importance—currently displayed in nearly 40 museums in and around Berlin—ran high.

“We’re not living in a monarchy anymore,” exclaimed Wolfgang Thierse, former president of the Bundestag. The Greens and the Left Party in the Bundestag called for a hearing on the issue to try and stop a secret deal with the emperor’s heirs.

An Empty Boast?

At the end of January, the committee for cultural affairs invited several lawyers and historians. Yet the hearing was inconclusive: the lawyers were unwilling to commit themselves; the historians invited to the event were divided; and as opposition parties, both the Greens and the Left were powerless to force the issue.

Most German historians actually believe that Wilhelm’s support contributed to Hitler’s rise. But the Hohenzollern family, keen to clear its reputation and regain its property, commissioned its own expert opinions. The well-known Australian historian Christopher Clark, for instance, largely exonerated Wilhelm in a study written in 2011.

Clark later somewhat revised that position. The prince, he now says, was a rightwing extremist and Nazi sympathizer. But Wilhelm was such a twit that nobody took him seriously. His boast of having procured two million votes for Hitler was just that—an empty boast. By that logic, Wilhelm failed to substantially advance the Nazi regime: not for lack of will, but for lack of weight.

Today, the Hohenzollern family is torn between wanting to regain their former property and avoiding further damage to their reputation. That includes not running the risk of having a judge confirm that Wilhelm helped Hitler to power. “I continue to be open to a comprehensive amicable settlement,” Georg Friedrich Prinz von Preussen, the current head of the family, declared in a press release in late January.

Little Public Sympathy

Germany’s public authorities face just as much uncertainty over the legal outcome. In the worst case, Germany’s state museums could lose thousands of historically important Hohenzollern items. And not just from the family’s East German properties: the Hohenzollern have also loaned numerous pieces from their undisputed West German holdings to public collections. If the quarrel escalates, they could take them back.

“When it comes to the issue of the Hohenzollern, I’m interested in sustainable solutions in the interest of the state and not in big headlines,” Brandenburg’s Finance Minister Katrin Lange told reporters in late January.

Yet going back to the negotiating table will not be easy. After the Bundestag hearing and the newspaper headlines, any settlement seen as overly generous to the Hohenzollern will meet with massive public criticism. More than a century after the revolution which established the Weimar Republic, very little sympathy for the former imperial family remains.

The latest snippet of news concerning the Hohenzollern doesn’t help, either. It was just announced that the Hohenzollern crypt in the Berlin Cathedral would be closed off for renovations until 2023. It houses the remains of 84 members of the family, among them the Great Elector Frederick William of Brandenburg.

Yet today’s Hohenzollern will not be contributing a single cent to the 17.4 million euro that the renovations will cost. “That greedy, miserly dynasty,” commented Neues Deutschland, a leftist daily newspaper.

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© REUTERS/Stringer

These days, many are celebrating 1989. The problem is that we in the US and Western Europe remember it wrong. This is at least in part because we were wrong about 1989, or at least guilty of severe oversimplification. There was not one 1989 story; there were four. And the legacies of all four are visible in the world we find ourselves in 30 years later, a world where the fate of liberal democracy globally, and even within Western societies, seems a lot less certain than it once did.

1989 of the West

What happened in Eastern Europe in 1989-90 was not about a wall falling, it was about peaceful political revolution on a mass scale. A revolution that supplanted authoritarian, vassal-state Communist rule with national democracy. In our shorthand version, the authors of the story have been replaced by the events of the finale.

The other thing we get wrong about even this version of 1989 was that it was not, as the US National Security Strategy of 2002 put it, a “decisive victory.” The West did not defeat Communism—it withstood, outshone, and outlasted it. Communism was not vanquished by a president in Washington DC; it crumbled because it failed. It failed to deliver peace and well-being to its people. As our Western societies struggle with growing inequality and social discontent and are unable to address the most pressing issues of our time, including migration and climate change, we would do well to adjust our memory of how the Cold War was “won.”

Beijing’s 1989 

There were many pro-democracy protests in 1989, but not all of them ended peacefully. Just hours before the first round of Poland’s (and Soviet-Europe’s) first free election, tanks rolled into Beijing’s Tiananmen Square to brutally quash student-led demonstrations there, the last and largest of months of widespread protests challenging Chinese Communist Party legitimacy. The world watched as thousands were wounded and at least several hundred killed on June 4. At the time, the images of students facing off against tanks were as iconic as the images of revelers on the Berlin wall. It was in the years afterward that the more optimistic story of 1989 prevailed and colored the West’s expectations for China.

Western policy makers were so wrapped up in the certain march of democracy heralded by Poland’s 1989 that they failed to see that Beijing’s 1989 had left very different deep and lasting marks. As Gideon Rachman notes in the FT, “It was Tiananmen that secured the Chinese Communist party’s grip on power, thus ensuring that the rising power of the 21st century would be an autocracy not a democracy.” Furthermore, as China watcher Janka Oertel argues, the “Tiananmen shock” has shaped how the CCP’s holds its power ever since, preventing new challenges by delivering economic prosperity and strictly prohibiting public dissent.

The reason the Beijing 1989 is so important to our world today is that China succeeded where it should have failed, and because it succeeded so exceptionally.

Economic reform without political reform was supposed to be impossible. A succession of US Presidents and other Western leaders assumed that an open economy would necessarily lead to an open society. As George W. Bush argued in 2000 on the issue of WTO membership: “[T]rade with China will promote freedom. Freedom is not easily contained. Once a measure of economic freedom is permitted, a measure of political freedom will follow.” But it turns out that political freedom in China did not follow. And even the information age did not change this. Instead, Beijing now boasts an impressive AI-empowered surveillance state.

To make matters worse, economic reform did not materialize either. 19 years later, Chinese WTO membership has not made the Chinese economy or society significantly more open; instead China’s non-market, Party-driven economy has thrived in a way no one would have imagined. The Chinese economy is now so big and so successful that it is more likely to kill the system than be reformed by it.

Thus, the Tiananmen 1989 has proven lasting and successful, and as China’s influence in the world grows, so does the meaning of this alternative story of protests.

Internet 1989

And in the early years of what would soon to be known as the World Wide Web, “techno-utopianism,” to quote Karen Kornbluh, around a new technology was equal to bright-eyed optimism about democracy’s “new era.”

Originally started in the 1960s as a military project to enable communication during a nuclear blackout, around 1989 a different future for the decentralized digital communication network was beginning. In this year the first commercial dial-up access connected users to the Internet, ending the early phases of the Internet as first a military and then an academic network. (ARPANET, the military precursor network, was officially decommissioned in 1990.) The architects of early Internet policy were a small niche group in 1990, but thirty years later the web and social media have become central to our lives and even, as we’ve more recently learned, our elections and democracies.

Because of its decentralized structure, the Internet was envisioned as an open, democratic, and power-equalizing force. And in its first decades, it arguably was. People connected directly with each other through email and chat and created their own sites and blogs.

But the Internet grew more centralized and more central to our lives. More and more of life is lived online, and this online life is dominated by a few very large companies who control a user’s experience. Algorithms meant to keep us online longer determine what we see in our search feeds and our timelines. Even news is increasingly fed to us (and filtered for us) by these platforms, while at the same time the Internet has savaged the revenue model of democracy’s fourth pillar. Thus instead of the bottom-up, citizen-driven supplement to established media that the early Internet promised, we now contend with struggling serious media and mass-scale, bot-supported propaganda. As Karen Kornbluh writes, “Propagandists and extremists wishing to conceal their identities fund targeted ads and create armies of social media bots to push misleading or outright false content, robbing citizens of a basic understanding of reality.”

Not only for citizens of democracies has the Internet proven not to be an unambiguous force for freedom. In 2011, we were still celebrating the Arab Spring as a social media revolution and heralding technology’s power to undermine dictators. A few short years later, as GMF’s Laura Rosenberger observes, authoritarian powers have learned to harness technology “for control and manipulation, developing tools to constrain, surveil, and insidiously shape the views of their populations using information and technology, bolstering their power.“ China, in particular, has managed to create a national censored Internet and platforms and apps that allow the Party to track users online activities—with AI-enabled surveillance tracking them offline. And Beijing is increasingly exporting the “techno-authoritarian systems of surveillance and control” that it has developed and employed domestically to other countries.

Thus thirty years after the modern Internet began to take shape, there is an unforeseen contest over its future. What we can foresee is that a rosy future is not automatic: the Internet and other new technologies will only be as friendly to democracy as we can make them be.

Yugoslavia’s 1989

Unlike in Central Europe, there was no Soviet yoke on Yugoslavia, and Titoist Communism provided greater freedoms. What’s more, by 1989 political reforms had been underway for a decade. But other forces were also rising within the multinational state. Slobodan Milošević was elected president of Serbia in May 1989 and shortly afterward delivered his (in)famous Serbian ethno-nationalist speech by the Gazimestan monument in Kosovo. Milošević was not alone, indeed, as Paul Hockenos writes, “[m]ost Yugoslavs welcomed the new spaces and ideas that sprouted from the cracking façade of socialism, including the liberty to identify more openly with one’s ethnicity, be it as a Serb, Croat, Muslim, Slovenian, Montenegrin, Macedonian, or Kosovo Albanian.” We all know what happened next: Slovenia and Croatia opposed Milosevic’s centralist policies, and in 1991 declared independence, starting the first in a series of territorial wars and ethnic conflicts that would last a decade, destroy Yugoslavia, and cost around 130,000 lives.

The ethno-nationalism that turned violent in Yugoslavia was a bigger feature of 1989 than our simpler story acknowledges. Branko Milanovic, a Serbian-American economist, has argued that the revolutions of 1989 should be “seen as revolutions of national emancipation, simply as a latest unfolding of centuries-long struggle for freedom, and not as democratic revolutions per se.” In Poland, Germany, and Czechoslovakia the revolutions of 1989 “it was easy to fuse” nationalism and democracy: “Even hard-core nationalists liked to talk the language of democracy because it gave them greater credibility internationally as they appeared to be fighting for an ideal rather than for narrow ethnic interests.”

In Yugoslavia, ethno-nationalism quelled any hints of democracy as events unfolded very differently than they did for Central Europeans. As a result, in our narrative of 1989 Yugoslavia was an anomaly, a regional side-note. But by 2019 the ringing of the nationalist side note has become impossible to miss, from Viktor Orban’s Hungary to the Brexiteers called for British self-determination, and Donald Trump proposing to “take the country back.”

The Intricate Story of 1989

The truly remarkable and inspiring story of the Polish revolution, the fall of the wall, the peaceful collapse of Soviet rule in Europe should be celebrated on its 30^th anniversary, certainly. But this story has never been the truth. It was as Damir Murasic, executive editor at The American Interest, notes, a “successful narrative” that “captured important truths about the time it sought to describe. And like all good stories well told, it chose to focus on some things in lieu of others.”

However, those events left out of our original 1989 narrative also hold important truths that can help us better understand the challenges we face today—for a start by making us both humbler and less hopeless. For the victory of democracy and freedom in 1989 was not as unequivocal or robust as our original narrative had us believe, nor the future so certain. But now that we find ourselves in a more difficult future we should not succumb to the temptations of cultural pessimism, as also the GMF’s Thomas Kleine-Brockhoff argues in his book, Die Welt Braucht den Westen. Like the Internet, the world is not, as it turns out, an automatically democratizing place. Tribalism continues to be a powerful force, even in wealthy democracies. Freer markets do not have to lead to freer people; capitalism and technology are as compatible with authoritarianism as with democracy.

And yet, democracy remains a powerful idea that even today, and even in China, drives people to the streets. Yes, democracies, too, can fail if they fail to deliver enough. But they need not. If we want freedom and democracy to have a future, we will have to work to ensure that new technologies reflect and support these values. And we will have to work to sustain freedom and democracy within our own societies. As we should have learned from Poland in 1989, a better future is possible—it’s just neither easy nor guaranteed.

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© REUTERS/Valentyn Ogirenko

History can be a unifying, but also a dividing factor. Where do you see the dividing lines in the historical narratives of Russian and in Ukrainian history today?

Alexey Miller: The lines in that new confrontation are quite obvious. First of all, a division runs along what in the Russian historical narrative is called the Kiev Rus, which in the Russian historical narrative is the shared heritage of the Russians and the Ukrainians. In the Ukrainian narrative – and now I am talking about the primitive and aggressive version of this narrative – we deal with the notion that this Kiev Rus is the exclusive property of Ukrainian history. And then of course you have the Ukrainian narrative of Russian czardom and later the Russian empire, which for many centuries has been seen as the oppressor of “Ukrainianess” and the aggressor in Ukraine. In contrast to that, the Russian narrative sees the Moscovite and then the Russian state as the protector of Ukraine and the state, which invested very much in the development of this land.  This narrative continues into the Soviet state. Now, the Ukrainian narrative stresses the military clashes between Russians and Ukrainians, which in Russia would be considered an attempt to create an enemy.

Is there in the Ukrainian interpretation of history – in historiography – a “post-colonial moment”, one that emphasizes the “liberation” of the centuries-old protector/oppressor relationship?

Georgyi Kasianov: I appreciate the mentioning of historiography and the professional writing of history, as I was wondering which narrative we were discussing. One can distinguish between a narrative in media, in school textbooks, and professional history writing. As to the latter: There we see a more differentiated landscape, but certainly also a reorientation to the idea of a confrontation with the other, and that other is Russia. To be sure, we saw several constitutive others besides Russia, like the Ottoman Empire. But now we have the trend about Russia as the oppressor, as an evil empire. While this is still not the dominant narrative in historiography, it might very well be the dominant one in media.

We also have to distinguish between different levels of functioning of these narratives in schools, in media, and in professional historiography. If we were to assess the Russian narrative in school textbooks, Ukraine as such would be almost absent. It is not considered to be a separate entity at all. In Russian academia, Ukraine is treated in a much more serious way: Here at least Ukraine is recognized as a separate entity.

Miller: In that case I might not belong to the Russian academia, since I am very skeptical about recognizing Ukraine as a separate entity. Not because I insist that Ukraine is part of Russia, but simply because I think what stands behind this notion of a separate identity is a national narrative, and I am very skeptical about national narratives as such. We are talking about a space where so may actors over the centuries clashed, including the Moscovite czardom, the Polish Commonwealth, the Russian empire, which for a while became the dominant actor. I am not quite sure if it is a professionally productive perspective to look at Ukraine as a separate entity. The same would be fair about Russia in the sense that we cannot take Russians out of the context of the Russian empire.

Shouldn’t history be detached from territory, in the sense that a “national” history can be claimed without claiming territory? German history of course “stretches” into vast European territories, which are not seen as territory of the German state anymore – think of Immanuel Kant’s home of Königsberg/Kaliningrad. The problem with Ukrainian/Russian narratives seems to be that history could and does serve as a justification to also claim territory. Ukraine could and should be seen as a separate territorial entity even if its history is intertwined with Russia’s  – or the history of Poland and that of the Ottoman empire.

Kasianov: First of all, I appreciate that Alexey repeats an argument of Ukrainian nationalists concerning our history, which is: Russian history and Russia should be reduced to the size of the Muscovite czardom.

As to history and territory: The notion of territory is projected from our days to the past. When Ukrainians present their history as national history, we discuss at this moment national history, and national narratives. When they present their history in contemporary borders, they project contemporary borders to the past. It was thought that the process of a definition of contemporary Ukrainian territory was finished in 1954. And now we see that this is not the case due to the efforts of certain people outside. National history is being written in reverse: we have territory here, imagine Ukraine as a historical Ukraine and then we project it into the past. This is why Ukrainian national historians would think that the Kiev Rus is a part of Ukrainian history, because it is exactly on the territory of Ukraine.

Miller: I’m first of all skeptical about this interpretation of German history. The Federal Republic between 1949 and 1989 was an irredentist state which didn’t recognize the GDR as something that was a fixed reality. They wanted unification, insisted on it, and got unification at the end, which took the form of an incorporation of East Germany into West Germany.

When it comes to Russia and Ukraine, the most important fact that we have to recognize is: Neither Russia nor the Ukraine can be clearly defined and dealt with as a nation-state, because in both cases we are dealing with populations that are not recognized as single nations but as two or more politically organized and mobilized groups which claim to be nations.

Western political scientists, not Moscow spin doctors, argued that Ukraine belongs to those states that can only develop if they recognize that instead of nation-states they should be defined as “state-nations”, as some structure that recognizes and institutionalizes differences. That is exactly what has been addressed in the Minsk agreements with a special status for the eastern regions, and in the discussions about federalization. If that is not recognized one ends up with various unpleasant situations. Ukrainians does not fit the notion of the nation-state – just like Belgians who also do not fit the model of the nation-state.

Isn’t that a return to the concept of the nation-state as an ethnically monolithic entity? Or an entity bound together by a notion of common, authentic culture one is born into but can’t be acquired? Rather than accepting the nation-state as a political entity whose citizens agree on a set of rules and the rule of law? Is this, again, a question of “civilization versus culture”? Haven’t the Ukrainians been demonstrating on Maidan for the notion of a state based on the rule of law for citizens of different national/cultural backgrounds?

Kasianov: Let me first remark that I find it a little bit ironic that Alexey mentioned the Minsk agreement in the context of Ukrainian civic nation-building. I would think that Mr. Putin is pushing some different goals with the Minsk agreement, and certainly does not care for Ukrainian state-building, especially when one considers his statement that there is no Ukrainian state, not even in history.

Ukrainians certainly do not have much historical experience with building a civic state. But they are in the process of doing just that. We do see signs of a civic society, of pressure by this civic society toward the government. We do see a process that is of course complicated, but the goal has been described very correctly: A civic nation and a state that upholds and respects the principles of a civic nation.

Miller: When I insist that Ukraine cannot become a nation-state, I do not mean, however, that Ukraine cannot be a functioning state. It is not history which determines politics, it is politics which uses and abuses history, be it the history of Crimea, the Ukrainian east, or the question of who owns the past of the Kiev Rus. History can be helpful in understanding what is going on, but only when we have a better understanding of the historical roots of current events. Then we have to explore the consequences of a dissolution of imperial spaces, of Russia’s relationship towards Europe, of European Union’s expansion to the east, and whether the Ukrainian crisis marks the end of the eastward expansion of EU.

The interview was conducted by Sylke Tempel.

Georgyi Kasianov and Alexey Miller also took part in a live debate in Hamburg, Germany, on Monday, April 11, 2016. It was part of the “history@debate” series hosted by the Körber Foundation and the Gerda Henkel Foundation. The video of the discussion can be viewed here.

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