The atmosphere was grim when we arrived in East Berlin the second week of June in 1989, a few days after the massacre on Tienanmen Square. The GDR government now saw its only two allies in China and North Korea. TV praised the action of the Chinese government, as if to warn East Germans how they might be treated. Küttler, who met us with a colleague at the Friedrichstraße train station, the crossing point from West Berlin, apologized for how the East German government reacted to the events in Beijing. On our way to the history institute we passed a church with a big sign announcing a service of mourning for the murdered Chinese students. Everyone we talked to openly expressed their concern, telling us that things could not go on as they had been, but that unfortunately they would. Hartmut Zwahr, whom I saw in Leipzig on my way back to West Germany, expressed the same sentiment. He told me that the present leadership that had served time in Nazi jails or fought in Spain would very soon be replaced by a younger generation who after 1945 had shifted from the Hitler Youth to the Communist Free German Youth. Unlike West Germany, East Germany had never honestly confronted the German past. This new generation, Zwahr feared, would govern the GDR for the next twenty years. He did not foresee that the GDR would be at an end.
On the way back from Leipzig to Göttingen I stopped once more with the Gutsches in Erfurt and asked them to drive me to Buchenwald. Wilma and I had visited Buchenwald a second time in 1985, at which time the exhibit had changed markedly since we had seen it in 1967. But in the spring of 1989 the New York Times had published an article by its correspondent Henry Kamm with the heading, “The Buchenwald Museum. No Mention of the Jews.” I wrote a letter to the editor saying that while this was the case in 1967, it was no longer so in 1985 when we last visited the camp. As one entered the grounds, one was immediately confronted by a memorial for the Jews who had been sent to Buchenwald after the November pogrom. The new exhibit no longer focused exclusively on the Communists, although they had comprised a large portion of the prisoners. It now dealt with the many nonCommunist political and nonpolitical prisoners from many nations, and contrary to Kamm, also the Roma. Kamm wrote me an irate letter claiming that I was wrong. Ingster had shown me a Temple bulletin from a suburban Boston congregation that also maintained that there was no mention of the Jews. I wanted to check once more in 1989, to see whether the exhibit had basically changed since 1985. It had not.
Source: Wilma and Georg Iggers, Two Lives in Uncertain Times, New York: Berghahn Books, 2006, p. 164f