The Great War in the GDR. Front experience and communist narratives

This article deals with the memories of the First World War in the GDR and more generally within the communist movement. The idea is to revisit a largely deserted field of research, treating of the relationships between the war experience (s) – and specifically trench warfare –, and the birth and history of communism as a mass movement and as a State. The article shows the ambivalence and ambiguities marking these connections. Though the founding fathers of the GDR (Ulbricht, Pieck, Grotewohl, Selbmann, etc.) fought as young men in the Great War, and like millions of others experienced its violence, as well as all the ruptures it provoked, the main communist writings and ideological frames embedded the intensity, depth and variety of these experiences into one master narrative which one might so characterize: a denunciation of an imperialist and therefore unjust war; a minimization of the effects and importance of individual experiences of trench warfare and fightings; a strong emphasis on the process of anti-imperialist and revolutionary conversion of the soldiers, especially following the successes of the Russian revolution; an offbeat narrative of the war, insisting first on the initial « treason » of the Social-Democracy (1914) and then on the years 1917-1920 and their revolutionary activism, especially by the Spartakists. This forms « the war of the communists ». This construction allows eventually to give a stabilizing meaning to one of the most distressing and painful experiences of the 20th century.