Taking My Cue From A Few telling remarks in Franz Fühmann’s 1973 Hungarian travel diary Zweiundzwanzig Tage, I want to examine the figure of the “iota of difference” in reference to really existing socialism. I come to a discussion of Fühmann’s curious passage in the second half of this essay. To begin with, however, I explain why I find the iota so apt for characterizing the memory of GDR socialism now that so little socialism of any kind remains. In other than a mocking sense the iota might turn out to be indicative to me alone, so I cannot pretend to be ascertaining anything about the manifest state of memory in united Germany. What I can do, with the suggestion of Fühmann’s work, is speculate on why I think today’s memory of socialism is more or less compelled to be esoteric and what this enforced darkness means.

I concede that it is contrarian to focus on a consummate figure of obscurity — reaching back to the declining days of the Roman Empire and the conflicts over the canonical form of Christian orthodoxy — in a volume dedicated to the twenty fresh and productive years since Eastern Europe was liberated from a heavy burden of dogmatism. The formerly socialist part of Germany has developed a public culture notably free of the elaborate consolations and justifications that once accompanied its works like the grinding of epicycles on an outmoded planetary mechanism. While Germany’s cultural problems remain substantial, over the last twenty years they seem to have become contemporary problems. That is, the culture’s freshness issues from the relevance of the new challenges facing it, so whatever severity and loss is involved with its struggles, the lightness of its up-to-dateness graces it in contrast to the heavy sense of futility that clung to the challenges that faced yesterday’s troubadors of socialism.