Przeciwko zapomnieniu. Jürgen Fuchs i pamięć o drugiej niemieckiej dyktaturze
Against Forgetfulness. Jürgen Fuchs and Memory of the Second German Dictatorship

Summary/Abstract: Twenty-five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, GDR did not become a relic of the past nor was it dumped on the garbage heap of history. Contrary to widespread expectations, the ‘‘state of workers and peasants’’ is still by all means a current topic, as attested by numerous scholarly and journalistic publications, as well as by memory, whose scope oversteps the borders of former Eastern Germany and enters into the difficult and complex context of German-German history. According Jürgen Fuchs (1950-1999), who until the breakthrough of 1989/90 was considered to be one of the most important writers living in forced emigration in the FRG, memory played a key role in the struggle against the communist regime, and it was memory that became instrumental for him in the process of creating engaged literature. The article highlights the person and achievements of this engaged and critical writer, who used to ‘‘tell what it was really like’’, and therefore struggled against forgetfulness. His work dealt largely with the second German dictatorship, which he exposed among others by the description of facts, documentation of the surrounding reality, presentation of the mechanisms of totalitarian violence, rejection of the postulate of a ‘‘thick line’’ that closes the past without settling accounts, and above all by disclosing the truth hidden in the Stasi files.

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