The PDS a symbol of eastern German identity?

The PDS a symbol of eastern German identity?

The PDS a symbol of eastern German identity? By Adrian Webb Cambridge Scholars Publishing

The PDS a symbol of eastern German identity?, by Adrian Webb This book first published 2007 by Cambridge Scholars Publishing 15 Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, NE5 2JA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright 2007 by Adrian Webb All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-84718-369-7, ISBN (13): 9781847183699

To Toy, Rastus and Boo

CONTENTS Acknowledgements... x Note on Translations... xi Rationale... xiii Notes... xv Foreword: Why is the PDS significant?... xvii Notes... xx Section 1: Introductory... 1 1.1 Addressing the problem... 3 1.1.1 Challenges of interpretation: the legacy of the Cold War... 3 1.1.2 Unification and the thesis of inevitability... 8 1.1.3 German communism: a complex and contradictory construct... 11 1.1.4 Revised appraisals of the GDR... 15 1.2 Historical and international comparisons... 21 1.2.1 A retreat from socialism?... 21 1.2.2 A non-conforming socialist party?... 27 1.2.3 Or a non-conforming society?... 30 1.2.4 Defining the problem... 32 Notes... 35 Section 2: Alternative theses: a new form of nationalism?... 45 2.1 The nature of German nationalism... 47 2.2 Different understandings of an eastern German nationalism... 50 2.2.1 An enduring sense of regional identity... 50 2.2.2 The cultural particularism of eastern Germany... 54 2.2.3 The successful creation of a new East German national identity?... 57 2.2.4 A different approach to life, a different state of mind, a different scale of moral and social values?... 63

viii Contents 2.2.5 The sense of shared experience... 65 2.2.6 The reaction against colonialism... 68 2.2.7 A summary... 70 Notes... 71 Section 3: Alternative theses: a Marxist rebirth?... 77 3.1 The nature of German capitalism... 79 3.2 The contradictions of German communism... 83 3.2.1 The experience of 1919 33... 83 3.2.2 The new world of 1945 46... 84 3.2.3 Non-conformity in conformity... 88 3.2.4 The thread of dissent... 94 3.3 Eine bunte Truppe... 99 3.4 Herausforderung 80: Acht-Punkte-Programm für eine Wende Ost... 107 Appendix... 118 Notes... 119 Section 4: The evidence: policies and elections... 127 4.1 Introduction... 129 4.2 Policies... 130 4.2.1 Peace policy... 130 4.2.2 The new Party programme... 140 4.3 The PDS as coalition partner... 148 4.3.1 Berlin... 148 4.3.2 Mecklenburg-Vorpommern... 152 4.4 Elections... 154 4.4.1 Introduction... 154 4.4.2 Berlin: October 2001... 155 4.4.2.1 An analysis of the results... 155 4.4.2.2 The PDS hundred-day programme: its content summarised... 157 4.4.2.3 The PDS and its competitors... 159 4.4.2.4 The specific circumstances of Berlin... 162 4.4.2.5 An interim summary... 166 4.4.2.6 The spirit of the electorate... 168 4.4.3 Sachsen-Anhalt: April 2002... 180 4.4.4 Mecklenburg-Vorpommern: 22 September 2002... 185 4.4.5 The evidence of the Bundestag elections 2002... 188 Notes... 196

The PDS a symbol of eastern German identity? ix Section 5: The leader, the image and the activist... 209 5.1 Leadership... 211 5.1.1 Introductory... 211 5.1.2 Lothar Bisky: Freiheit oder Sozialismus?... 211 5.1.3 Gabi Zimmer: Geschichte lässt sich nicht aufrechnen... 214 5.1.4 Gregor Gysi: ambition and ambiguity... 216 5.1.5 Radical oppositionists versus pragmatists... 220 5.1.6 Gabi Zimmer: Wer kämpft kann verlieren. Wer nicht kämpft, hat schon verloren.... 221 5.1.7 The return of Lothar Bisky... 227 5.2 Imagery, publicity and symbolism... 233 5.2.1 Introductory... 233 5.2.2 The influence of the Soviet Union... 234 5.2.3 The experience of the SED... 236 5.2.4 The challenge facing the PDS... 238 5.2.5 Das Karl-Liebknecht-Haus... 239 5.2.6 Gregor Gysi: strategies of calculated risk... 241 5.2.7 After Gysi: inconsistency and uncertainty... 243 5.2.8 The use of language in posters and publicity... 246 5.3 The Party activists... 249 5.3.1 The questionnaire, its distribution and its purpose... 249 5.3.2 An analysis... 251 5.3.2.1 Brandenburg... 251 5.3.2.2 Thüringen... 255 5.3.2.3 Sachsen... 257 5.3.2.4 Mecklenburg-Vorpommern... 261 5.3.3 Conclusions... 264 The questionnaire... 271 Notes... 273 Section 6: In conclusion... 279 Notes... 286 Bibliography... 287 Index... 299 Illustrations A G are inserted in the colour centrefold.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First, I must thank the Sussex European Institute, within which I was housed at the University of Sussex from 2000, for its support and rigorous initial training, to which I hope I have done justice. This book takes as its point of departure the relevant academic literature and I must record my appreciation of the resources and helpfulness of the libraries of both the German Historical Institute, London, and the University of Sussex in making that available. As contemporary history it also draws particularly heavily on the publications of the PDS itself, supplemented by written questionnaires to activist Party members and interviews with leading Party figures, headed by the chair, Professor Lothar Bisky. I am deeply indebted to them all. I am also particularly grateful to the Rev. Anthony Smyth, formerly rector of Fittleworth and secretary to the Chichester Diocesan European Ecumenical Committee, for making some specialist books available to me. Needless to say, my interpretations are strictly my own. Most obviously, though, I must express my warmest and most sincere thanks to my supervisor, Dr Paul Betts, for his constantly expert and friendly advice and support throughout the preparation of this book. Illustrations A, B, C, F and G are reproduced with the kind permission of Die Linke, Berlin; illustration D with that of Marco Urban, Berlin; and illustration E that of Christian Bach, Berlin. Finally, I must thank my wife, Valerie, for her active participation: without her practical assistance and support it would never have been so satisfactorily completed.

NOTE ON TRANSLATIONS The numerous translations in the text are the present author s own unless indicated otherwise. The German names of the eastern Länder have been employed throughout for consistency, to avoid such unhappy compounds as Saxony-Anhalt, and not least as a reminder that it is a specifically German political environment which is under discussion.

RATIONALE This book, which originated as a doctoral thesis at the University of Sussex, is a historical snapshot of the PDS, subsequently Linkspartei-PDS and since 17 June 2007 fused with the dissident left wing of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) as Die Linke (the Left), 1 in the tumultuous three years 2001 3, which saw in turn the accession of Gabi Zimmer to the leadership, the triumph of Gregor Gysi in East Berlin in 2001, the disaster of the Bundestag elections in 2002, and finally the resignation of Gabi Zimmer and her replacement as Party chair by Professor Lothar Bisky, her immediate predecessor and chair 1993 2001. The intensity of those highs and lows provided an opportunity, unmatched before or since, to analyse what truly motivated both the electorate and the Party itself at every level: in short, what made the PDS tick. The Foreword explains why the answer to that question is felt to matter. It soon became clear from that analysis that the distinctiveness of the PDS could best be explained in terms of either its reinterpretation of Marxism in a manner attuned to the interests of a contemporary society or as an expression of eastern German national sentiment, and the book explores those alternative understandings in turn. It must be admitted now that the description national is not ideal for the pervasive but erratic sense of separate identity under discussion, but the English language seems to have no better one. Regional nationalism will not suffice for the sentiments evoked by what Roger Boyes has described as the present Chancellor s eastern homeland. 2 In recognition of, if not as a solution to, the quandary, the term national is often used in inverted commas. The importance of that analysis could not be more topical. Die Linke, to which the PDS contributed 60,000 3 of the total of 72,000 members, 4 is now recognised as Germany s third largest political party. 5 Berlin s political party researcher, Oskar Niedermayer, has concluded that the formation of Die Linke has converted the German polity into a five-party system for the foreseeable future. 6 Although fusion dates only from June 2007, it was the logical and anticipated outcome of the alliance forged by the PDS with the dissident left wing of the SPD organised as Wahlalternative Arbeit und soziale Gerechtigkeit (WASG) prior to the

xiv Rationale Bundestag elections of 2005. 7 That alliance, with Oskar Lafontaine, onetime chairman of the SPD, and Gregor Gysi as its joint lead candidates, succeeded in becoming the fourth largest party in the Bundestag, pushing the Greens (Die Grünen) into fifth place. 8 That success has continued with the alliance winning representation in a western Land parliament, that of Bremen, for the first time in May 2007. 9 It is easy to forget just how remarkable this evolution has been. If a scholar had predicted in 1990 that the SPD Chancellor candidate of that year, Oskar Lafontaine, would less than 20 years later have his office in the building 10 from which Ernst Thälmann had directed the German Communist Party (KPD) until 1933, he or she would probably have been deemed too eccentric to hold an academic post. If he or she had predicted that Chancellor Schröder s first economics minister, the same Oskar Lafontaine, would be sharing a federal election platform successfully with the successors of East Germany s ruling Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED Socialist Unity Party of Germany) within ten years of leaving office, 11 he or she would probably have been dismissed as a practical joker. But these things have happened. The PDS has moved from being the threat to the system alleged by right-wing CDU politicians and observers such as Patrick Moreau to being an integral part of that system. Some might even feel that it has become a more stabilising part of that system than the traditional third party, the FDP, under the populist leadership of Guido Westerwelle. 12 At the same time, although fusion may have given the PDS the foothold in the west which was one of Gysi s key strategic aims, 13 it has not stopped the PDS from being an essentially eastern party. Quite apart from its disproportionate contribution to the membership of Die Linke, it has brought with it the spirit of an eastern German party, rooted in eastern rather than western European experience. It was at the final PDS Party conference, in June 2007, that the deputy Party leader, Katja Kipping, was citing the Prague Spring ideal, discussed in section 3 of this book, of Sozialismus mit menschlichem Antlitz (socialism with a human face). 14 Personalities are pushing the PDS in the same direction. For all too obvious human reasons, it is Oskar Lafontaine who is persona non grata with the SPD leadership and Gregor Gysi who is undertaking the linking role with Deputy Chancellor Franz Müntefering and foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier which he earlier played with Chancellor Schröder. 15 Finally, but by no means least, the underlying religious dimension discussed extensively in section 4 has not only not gone away but has

The PDS a symbol of eastern German identity? xv been subtly reinforced by Lafontaine s recognition of his own Catholic roots. A man who can say: Die katholische Soziallehre könnte die Grundlage unseres Programms sein 16 (Catholic social teaching could be the basis of our programme) is rather literally not speaking the language of the east. The divide between the aspiration to be an all-german party and the reality of being an eastern German party is as deep and as unacknowledged as ever. This book remains, however, a snapshot of the PDS in the period 2001 3, and the successes achieved since have not been allowed to colour the analysis or the context of that chosen historical period. To do otherwise could have compromised the validity of such important elements as the survey of activist opinion. The party title PDS is similarly retained throughout in the interests of contextual consistency. Finally the author can only highlight the extent to which so much across eastern Germany has remained unchanged since the time of the original analysis and how little he is minded to vary his conclusions. By 2005 Berlin s debt had risen to euro 60 98 billion from euro 26 9 billion in 1996, and more than 50% of families with three or more children lived below the official poverty level. 17 Young women are now leaving the countryside, in particular, in such large numbers in search of opportunity that the ratio of women to men among 18 30 year olds in eastern Germany is the lowest in Europe. 18 Unemployment across eastern Germany stands officially at some 25%, and in reality is probably higher, and wages remain some 30% below western levels. 19 The prevailing mood has been captured by the Germans themselves as Ostdeutsche Tristesse 20 (eastern German sadness), a description which leads us on to consider the significance of the PDS as a voice, the voice, of that sadness. Notes 1. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 18 June 2007, p1 2. Boyes, Roger, The Times, 17 August 2005, p27 3. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 16 June 2007, p1 4. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 18 June 2007, p1 5. ibid. 6. Die Welt, 16 June 2007, p3 7. Der Spiegel, 22/2005, p56 8. Die Welt, 20 September 2005, p1 9. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 14 May 2007, p1 10. Lachmann, Günther, Die Welt, 16 June 2007, p3 11. Oskar Lafontaine resigned from the Schröder government in March 1998.

xvi Rationale 12. Westerwelle was describing himself, seemingly seriously, as die Freiheitsstatue der Berliner Republik (the statue of liberty of the Berlin Republic) at the 2007 party conference. Carstens, Peter, Die Welt, 16 June 2007, p4 13. Lachmann, Günther, Die Welt, 16 June 2007, p3 14. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 16 June 2007, p4 15. Lachmann, Günther, Die Welt, 16 June 2007, p3 16. ibid. 17. Boyes, Roger, The Times, 7 October 2005, p51 18. Marsh, Stefanie, The Times, 17 January 2007, T2, p4 19. ibid. 20. ibid.

FOREWORD WHY IS THE PDS SIGNIFICANT? The focus of this work is Germany s Partei des Demokratischen Sozialismus (Party of Democratic Socialism), hereafter referred to as the PDS and subsumed since June 2007 in Die Linke (the Left). It was the successor to East Germany s Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED) (Socialist Unity Party of Germany), and emerged from the disintegrating SED first as the SED-PDS in December 1989 and then as the PDS in February 1990. Although the hard-line leaders of the SED including Erich Honecker, its General Secretary and East Germany s leader from 1971 to 1989, were summarily expelled in December 1989, there was a considerable continuity of membership even if the PDS remained very much smaller than its predecessor. Hans Modrow, SED party secretary in Dresden until 1989 and East German prime minister 1989 90, was the Party s Honorary Chairman throughout its separate existence. The Party proved an effective electoral force in the former East Germany, although its attempts to establish itself in the former West Germany were a success only in alliance with others. In the east, it obtained an increasing share of the vote in the Bundestag elections of 1990, 1994 and 1998 and in successive Land and local authority elections, although it suffered a severe setback in the Bundestag elections of 2002. It attracted particular attention when it gained more votes than the mainstream social democratic SPD in Sachsen and Thüringen in the 1999 Land elections and in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern in the 1999 European elections, and although the SPD at the Federal level has remained reluctant to negotiate with the PDS, it is part of the ruling coalitions in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Berlin and the PDS formally tolerated the minority SPD administration in Sachsen-Anhalt until April 2002. This is a very different pattern of development from that of the other communist or united socialist successor parties in the former Soviet bloc. It is admittedly not unique for former communists to continue to hold high

xviii Foreword political office. The former presidents of Poland and Romania, Aleksander Kwasniewski and Ion Iliescu, were both ex-communists as were the Hungarian and Polish prime ministers, Gyula Horn and Leszek Miller. The present (June 2007) Hungarian prime minister, Ferenc Gyurcsány, is another ex-communist. Indeed they hold significantly higher offices than do any members of the PDS, who are restricted to posts at Land level. Horn, Iliescu, Kwasniewski, Miller and Gyurcsány, however, may be described as non-ideological pragmatists whose policies owe nothing to Lenin and no more to Marx than do those of Europe s mainstream social democratic parties. Some critics might also define Iliescu as a protector of inherited vested interests, at worst as a protector of the interests of his perceived cronies. Under none of these interpretations, however, is there a continuing role for a voice of the radical left, critical of many of the pillars of the ordering of capitalist society in a way reminiscent of the German SPD prior to the adoption of the Bad Godesberg programme in 1959. Similar considerations apply to the other successor parties. They have either remained pure in their Marxism-Leninism and, except perhaps in the Czech Republic, 1 been relegated to the margins of political discourse for the (presumably) foreseeable future, or they have become bulwarks of vested interests rooted in the communist past, or they have become mainstream social democratic parties. The Hungarian party has been the most obviously successful of the latter, partly no doubt because the transition had started before 1990. The former General Secretary, Janos Kádár, had only been able to express his impotent anguish at the Hungarian Socialist Workers Party Conference of May 1988 as the shibboleths of communist rule were jettisoned one by one. 2 Moreover, that was only the culmination of a long process of evolution going back to the introduction of the New Economic Mechanism in 1968 3 which had produced such heresies as a Budapest Hilton and the proposed free convertibility of the forint. For good measure, the Hungarians had been the first to open the Iron Curtain in September 1989. 4 By 2002 the party was being led by an investment banker, Peter Medgyessy. 5 The PDS, however, has not taken the mainstream social democratic route. No doubt many members of the SED abandoned it in 1990 in favour of the SPD, but enough remained loyal to the vision, if not the reality, of the 1946 KPD-SPD merger in the east for the PDS to inherit the organisational structure and the core membership and support of a radical party of the left. Moreover, the PDS could not become the preserve of the vested interests, both new and old, so familiar from the collapse of communism

The PDS a symbol of eastern German identity? xix in the former Soviet Union, because German unification on western terms largely destroyed those interests. There are no German equivalents of Berezovsky and similar new Russian magnates. 6 Such questionable deals as were made were more likely to be made by West Germans and foreigners acting through the Treuhand. That is not to say that the PDS does not represent any sectoral interests. Quite apart from its role as a regional party, of which more later, it is quite clearly, in part, a conduit for the discontents of those dispossessed by the change of regime, ranging from former officials to former teachers. If it were not much more than that, though, it would have withered away as a political party, as did the national Refugee Party, the BHE, after the Second World War. By 1961, it had failed to gain 5% of the federal vote, even when merged with the German Party (DP). 7 The trend for the PDS has normally been the reverse. Equally, the PDS is not a marginalised, fundamentalist Marxist- Leninist party, like the western German DKP or the notoriously traditional French PCF. Evidence of the influence of Lenin, of the concept of the proletarian party in the vanguard of the revolution, is scant. On the other hand, it is not an essentially conservative party like the Russian Communist Party: unification has closed off that possibility. This brief foreword is, the author hopes, sufficiently comprehensive to indicate why he feels the PDS is of particular interest and significance and why he considers that any discussion of the success of the Party to date has to have regard to three key historical stories: the fate of the former governing parties of what was the Soviet bloc; the resilience of an essentially Marxist view of politics and society; and the relationship between the German political parties and German life and society. Read together with a level of electoral success which many observers in 1990 would have deemed impossible, they define the problem which this work will take as its point of departure, namely: Why is the PDS (apparently) the most resilient of the reformed former communist parties of central and eastern Europe? The first of the preceding historical stories is of direct concern to those involved in, or influenced by, the affairs of central and eastern Europe, and the second to socialist parties world-wide, even those primarily influenced by the non-marxist British tradition. Both also raise, as to some extent does the third, the whole question of the proper orientation of the European left in the twenty-first century. There is serious talk in French Socialist circles, for example, of a realignment of their left wing with the Communists as the proper response to their defeat in the French presidential and parliamentary elections of 2007. 8 The third, German,

xx Foreword story will, however, be the focus of attention. The PDS is interesting not only because it poses questions of global relevance, but also, and perhaps ultimately more so, because it is a specifically German party. We may even agree with Christian von Ditfurth that it is Germany s most interesting political party. 9 The justification for our focus is that even if we cannot prove why the PDS is as successful as it is, we can draw up a coherent body of evidence in support of a plausible and persuasive hypothesis. Some of our conclusions may be suggestive of wider application. If, however, we try to work from the general to the particular, we may well find that the body of evidence is unmanageably large, that it is inconsistently prepared, and that our conclusions are either too superficial or too conditional to be applied with confidence in any particular context. Notes 1. The Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia (KSCM) scored 18 5% of the vote in the legislative elections of 14 15 June 2002. (Source: Keesing s Record of World Events, Longman, Harlow, June 2002, p4487) 2. Keesing s Record of World Events, May 1988, pp35938 9 3. See Wilczynski, J., Socialist Economic Development and Reforms, Macmillan, London, 1972. 4. Fulbrook, Mary, The Two Germanies 1945 90. Problems of Interpretation, Macmillan, London and Basingstoke, 1992, p81 5. The Times, 9 April 2002, p18 6. Truscott, Peter, The Times, 25 February 2004, T2 pp6 7 7. Ritter, Gerhard A. and Niehuss, Merith, Wahlen in Deutschland 1946 1991. Ein Handbuch, C. H. Beck, Munich, 1991, p101 8. Wiegel, Michaela, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 16 June 2007, p6 9. Ditfurth, Christian von, Ostalgie oder linke Alternative: Meine Reise durch die PDS, Kiepenheuer und Witsch, Cologne, 1998, p12

Section I INTRODUCTORY

1.1 ADDRESSING THE PROBLEM 1.1.1 Challenges of interpretation: the legacy of the Cold War The very concentration on what is being presented as a specifically German contribution to the whole question of the future orientation of the European left does, however, pose certain challenges which have to be recognised from the very beginning. The first is the extent to which, more than 60 years after the end of the War, Germany still excites a degree of suspicion and tends to be measured by a moral yardstick which is not extended to the other Axis powers, not to mention the Allies. Anne Sa adah admits in the Preface to her book, Germany s Second Chance, that (for her) Germany is a stressful country to study and her title 1 perfectly captures that assumption of moral obligation. One consequence is that the PDS is expected to prove its democratic and moral credentials in a way that the Hungarian or Polish Socialists, for example, are not. The second challenge is to recognise the extent to which the SED, like the other ruling parties in the Soviet bloc, was the Cold War opponent, and the degree to which it was the objective of the western powers in general, strongly seconded by Adenauer and the CDU in West Germany, to present East Germany in as negative a light as possible, in the hope and expectation that it would collapse under the pressure. 2 Even the BBC Foreign Service, allegedly a source of objective reporting, deliberately distorted its news bulletins on East Germany. 3 This negativism went far beyond the narrowly political. Weber noted in 1969 that psychologists had had to diagnose that, in the mind of many West Germans, the brothers and sisters in the eastern part of Germany were already showing un- German traits. 4 A psychologist summarised the results of the investigation as follows: A picture thus emerges of people who are not popular and to whom one attributes little capacity. Besides the good, indeed the very good, Germans, there are the others. 5 Weber continued that they were not only other but the exact opposite of us in the minds of the majority of West Germans. He quotes Hofstätter: The stereotype of the East Germans which is openly taking shape in the Federal Republic is stumbling in psychological jargon into the anal region. 6 Weber argues that a scientist who wanted to analyse the above investigation, but without knowing the political situation, would have to come to the

4 Section I conclusion that those GDR people were the arch-enemies of citizens of the Federal Republic, against whom all psychic aggressions were concentrated. 7 Although Brandt s Ostpolitik ushered in a gradually more nuanced approach by the West German SPD, it only mitigated the essentially confrontational relationship between east and west. 8 Just as obviously, the SED in East Germany was no more concerned with strict accuracy than were the liberal democratic parties in the west. As probably the most orthodox communist party in the Soviet bloc, it accepted unquestioningly the Leninist line that all considerations, truth included, had to be subordinated to the interests of the revolution and of the revolutionary party. As Mikhail Nelken has written, this was die äußerste Konsequenz der Verwirklichung des stalinistisch-sozialistischen Rechtverständnisses, das das Recht als eine Frage der Macht und als ein Instrument der Politik betrachtete 9 (the most extreme result of the realisation of the Stalinist socialist understanding of law, which looked on the law as a matter of power and as an instrument of policy). Such observations do not pretend to be original, but it is important to remember in the more relaxed European conditions of the early twentyfirst century just how much effort was devoted by government propaganda machines on both sides of the Iron Curtain into presenting a highly selective picture rather than a strictly accurate one. Of nowhere was this truer than Germany as the cockpit of the Cold War. It is important to recall this historical background and even more the psychological mindset of the protagonists, not just for historical reasons but because they continue to distort, and some might say dominate, the mutual perceptions of eastern and western Germans. Although the military confrontation may be at an end, the ideological battles of the Cold War are far from over. As will be analysed later in this work, unification has brought with it a requirement for easterners to see their own past through western glasses, and many are neither willing nor perhaps able to do so. Michael Schumann is one such: Der Sozialismus-Versuch in der DDR war trotz der mit ihm verbundenen Fehler, Irrwege, Versäumnisse und selbst Verbrechen eine legitime historische Antwort auf die durch Kriege und andere unvergleichliche Verbrechen an der Menschheit gekennzeichnete Periode der deutschen Geschichte in der ersten Hälfte unseres Jahrhunderts. Er war eine legitime Alternative angesichts des katastrophalen Versagens der bürgerlichen deutschen Eliten und der Restauration der alten Machtverhältnisse in Westdeutschland. Das Engagement Hunderttausender für diese Alternative bedarf keine Entschuldigung. 10

Introductory 5 (The attempt at socialism in the GDR was despite the mistakes, errors, defaults and even crimes a legitimate historical response to the most familiar period of German history in the first half of our century, as a result of its wars and other incomparable crimes. It was a legitimate alternative in view of the disastrous denials of the bourgeois German élites and the restoration of the old power relationships in West Germany. The commitment of hundreds of thousands to this alternative needed no apology.) This defence of the guiding principles of the GDR comes, not surprisingly, from a PDS source, but a wide range of sources, of which the Emnid survey printed in Der Spiegel in 1995 and discussed in section 1.1.4 below is perhaps the best known, testify to a much more differentiated appreciation of the former East Germany than mainstream western opinion has normally been ready to allow. It is unimaginable, for example, that a Times correspondent of the era would have written, as Roger Boyes did in July 2003: Communism produced an imperfect world, full of defeat, yet it was not evil or run by monsters. It was intimately bound up with the biographies of people who believed in something better 11 and: East Germans developed a fetishistic interest in western goods but most understood that consumer choice was nowhere near as important as ethical choice, the daily tests of loyalty and selfrespect in a crumbling police state. These were values learnt under communism and in spite of it; it has made thoughtful individuals out of east Germans, sceptical of ideologies, of populism and posturing. Perhaps we should stop mocking them and listen more carefully to the people that history left behind. 12 It is this sense of a society which had its personal priorities right, and which was not characterised by the social coldness (soziale Kälte) of which easterners so often accuse the new Germany, which frequently escapes analysis, not least because it conflicts with both western German capitalist values and western German everyday experience. Michael Benjamin records of eastern German citizens: Zu den weiterhin mehrheitlich als sehr wichtig bewerteten Dingen gehören Gesundheit, Partnerschaft und Kinder. Die Sozialmediziner und Sozialpsychologen Elmar Brähler (Gießen/Leipzig) und Horst-Eberhard Richter (Frankfurt am Main) resumieren ihre diesbezüglichen Untersuchungsergebnisse wie folgt: Was immer man in der Erziehung von den Eltern erfahren und bekommen hat, klingt im Osten freundlicher als auf der westlichen Seite. Demnach werden die Eltern (von den Kindern) als warmherziger und toleranter beschrieben. Sie haben die Kinder näher an sich herangelassen, sie weniger bestraft, weniger geschlagen, weniger beschämt, mehr unterstützt und haben diese weniger mit ehrgeizigen

6 Section I Forderungen gequält. 13 Das Sozialverhalten der Ostdeutschen ist egalitärer, auf soziale Gleichheit orientiert und solidarischer. Man muß nicht notwendig die Beobachtung Geyers für allgemeingültig halten, daß in Warteschlangen der Abstand zwischen Ostdeutschen Maximal 15 Zentimeter betrage, der zwischen Westdeutschen jedoch mindestens 45 Zentimeter, ( Vor den Kopf geschlagen, Der Spiegel 29/1995, S-52) um Brähler und Richter zuzustimmen, daß die Ostdeutschen mehr soziale Nähe suchen und sich im Ganzen als mehr sozial verbunden erleben als die in der sozialen Einstellung distanzierteren Westdeutschen. 14 (To those things valued by most as very important belong health, partnership and children. The social physicians and psychologists Elmar Brähler (Gießen/Leipzig) and Horst-Eberhard Richter (Frankfurt am Main) summarise their relevant research results as follows: Whatever one has experienced and absorbed in being brought up by one s parents sounds more friendly on the eastern than on the western side. The parents are accordingly described (by the children) as more warm-hearted and tolerant. They have kept the children closer to them, punished them less, beaten them less, shamed them less, supported them more and plagued them less with high-flying demands. The social behaviour of the eastern Germans is more egalitarian and directed at social equality, and it shows more solidarity. One does not necessarily have to take Geyer s observation as generally valid that the distance between eastern Germans in queues is a maximum of 15 centimetres but between western Germans a minimum of 45 centimetres (Der Spiegel 29/1995, p52) to agree with Brähler and Richter, that the eastern Germans seek more social proximity and on the whole see themselves as more socially united than the more socially distant western Germans.) Such differences will be further addressed in later sections of this work, but the present author s immediate purpose is to re-emphasise the extent to which evaluations of the SED and of East Germany have always been coloured, and sometimes distorted, even in the academic sphere, by considerations of a decidedly political nature. This is highly germane to our present purpose because it is unquestioned that the PDS is the linear descendant of the SED, and many observers appear to have transferred their perceptions of the SED to the PDS. Anne Sa adah, for example, unblushingly describes Gregor Gysi, the best-known PDS politician, as a semi-respectable leader of a semi-transformed successor party. 15 Analysis of what can only be characterised as political bias does, however, lead on to the third challenge of interpretation, namely recognition that one s position on the underlying conflicts of moral, social, and even religious values has a far greater subjective element than is often recognised. If the East German state in the past, 16 and many

Introductory 7 eastern Germans now, attach more value to social cohesion and support than to competitive individualism, 17 who is to say they are wrong? The new united Germany judged that the mass expansion of the telephone system in the east was a necessity 18 but that the dismantling of the extensive child-care system there was acceptable. 19 Who is to say they were right? Women in the GDR 20 and eastern German women now are much more likely than western women to see paid employment as a source of personal fulfilment and as a symbol of their full participation in society. 21 Is one side right and the other wrong, or are both right, or are both wrong? Such questions are as unanswerable as Saladin s question to Nathan der Weise of what is the true religion. Or rather, they can only be answered on the basis of Nathan s parable of the three rings. The true religion is the religion in which one believes. 22 The ideological struggles of the Cold War, however, were conducted on both sides more in the spirit of exclusive revelation. Fulbrook maintains, with reference to the writing of history in West Germany, for example: Far from being some valuefree, objective scientific inquiry carried out in ivory towers, history in West Germany became a highly politicised affair, directly and centrally relevant to the key issues of the day many approaches seemed to be assessed on their political implications rather than their empirical adequacy (or other notion of historical truth ). 23 Since 1990, the revelation expounded by the west has become the dogmatic orthodoxy of the new Germany. Corey Ross details the attacks on the Zentrum für zeithistorische Forschung in Potsdam for offering positions to a number of eastern Germans who had supposedly collaborated with the regime, and the demands for the establishment of an alternative research institute more in tune with the concerns of the civic movements of 1989. 24 The question which rarely appears to be asked is whether the east might not sometimes, just sometimes, have been in the right. 25 Such a blanket rejection of the traditions of the GDR is obviously associated also with its submission of the law to the dictates of the SED, its suppression of non-conforming opinion and its chequered record on human rights. Once again though we must be cautious. Who is to say whether the right to housing or the right to work is more or less important than the right to vote? Who is to say whether political democracy is more or less important than industrial democracy? Who is to determine the weighting of civil rights within human rights? However rhetorical such questions may be, they serve as a reminder that the Cold War precluded neutrality and that the PDS as a successor party runs the risk of not being treated with neutrality either.

8 Section I One final point may perhaps be permitted. The present writer enjoys, and is as ready to defend his civil rights, as any other UK citizen, but it is all too easily forgotten, particularly perhaps by Anglo-Saxon writers, that until extremely recent years democratic rights have never been enjoyed by more than a minuscule fraction of humanity. His own grandfather did not have the vote until he was a man of nearly 50. 26 All British women were similarly disenfranchised until after the First World War, 27 and Swiss women had to wait until 1971. 28 The comparative importance of such rights to the human condition must not be so inflated that we deem virtually all our other human inheritance, whether from Egypt or China, from the classical world or medieval Europe or from the European imperial capitals of the nineteenth or twentieth centuries, somehow inferior or even invalid. It is a form of arrogance of which some of the former East German and other eastern European dissidents were guilty after 1990. Some of their claims, however understandable in human terms after decades of repression, were also demonstrably untrue. 29 A measure of humility is perhaps the most demanding but also the most significant of all the challenges of interpretation. 1.1.2 Unification and the thesis of inevitability The foregoing section sought to identify and thereby minimise the adverse impact on objective perceptions of nearly 50 years of Cold War. There are, however, two other forms of perception which must be addressed and which are at least as important to a clear appreciation of the context within which the PDS is operating as those already discussed. The first may be described as the thesis of inevitability. At its simplest it may be characterised as a posteriori reasoning. Because the fall of communism happened, it was bound to happen. Even more sympathetic commentators strongly imply that the collapse of 1989 90 was inevitable, and reproach themselves only for not reading the tell-tale signs in time. Such retrospective determinism tends to forget both the extent to which western governments believed (and feared) the opposite, and, surely, the role of individual agents. Gorbachev, as Soviet president, opted to reform the political system first, with a view to then reforming the economic system second. 30 China has opted to reform the economic system first and perhaps to reform the political system second. 31 Gorbachev s choice undermined the Soviet Communist Party and in 1991 undermined the Soviet state itself, whereas, despite some dire predictions to the reverse, the People s Republic of China has continued to prosper. 32 It is surely feasible that if Gorbachev had followed the Chinese route and

Introductory 9 concentrated on economic reform, both the Soviet Union and the GDR would still be with us. Fulbrook may well agree, because she draws attention to the contribution of human fallibility to the decline of the GDR in the late 1980s: The ageing leadership around Honecker proved unwilling even to acknowledge the scale of the GDR s mounting economic problems, let alone take action to deal effectively with them. Problems which might have been contained if action had been taken in the mid- or late 1970s, or even as late as the early 1980s, became ever more insurmountable by the closing years of the GDR s existence. 33 Corey Ross makes much the same point: In the end, no one within the SED leadership wanted to take the necessary steps, no one thought it was possible to make the about-face to consumer austerity that would be necessary to stop the rot. 34 The economic dimension to the inevitability argument is similarly tendentious. The superiority of the ideal market over any other known system in securing the efficient allocation of resources is uncontested, but an ideal market does not exist, never has, and never will. In practice, real markets are gravely distorted by externalities and other factors engendered by real life. 35 Moreover, the efficiency of the market is the efficiency of a machine: it has no sense of purpose and no values. It must also be remembered that such fathers of capitalism and the market economy as Adam Smith were amongst its harshest critics. His analysis that [speculative growth] is at once undirected and infinitely self-generating in the endless demand for all the useless things in the world 36 hardly expresses confidence that the world had discovered the optimum economic system. To adopt twenty-first-century perspectives, Smith s analysis also finds the market economy environmentally unsustainable, just as Fukuyama s thesis of the end of history and the final victory of liberal democratic and economic systems 37 is put in question by the highly destabilising impact of economic globalisation and the clear continuation in much of Africa, Asia, the former Soviet Union and, to a lesser degree, Latin America of markedly authoritarian and sometimes openly dictatorial regimes. As Mary Fulbrook has observed, It is more that communism lost, than that capitalism won. 38 In short, if we make a functionalist assumption that communism was bound to fail, then the SED was bound to fail, just as the Prague Spring and any conceivable reform movement would have been bound to fail. Such a fundamentalist conclusion may be fashionable but it was not the view of the early 1970s, which saw the two systems as evolving towards a common identity, 39 or of the 1980s, which saw both West Germany s commitment to building a whole new government quarter in Bonn and US

10 Section I President Reagan s star wars initiative, 40 neither suggestive of a belief that the other side was simply going to give up. If we adopt the fundamentalist conclusion, however, we are more than half way towards saying that the PDS, as a reformed communist party, is bound to fail. That is, at the very least, contrary to the available evidence. A further problem is posed by the historical record of 1989 90 in East Germany itself, because the question of whether or not the fall of European communism, and hence the overthrow of the SED, was inevitable begs the question of whether or not East Germany made its own revolution. Did the system, characterised by Konrad Jarausch as a welfare dictatorship, 41 by Thomas Lindenberger as a kind of educational dictatorship 42 and by Bradley Scharf as consultative paternalism, 43 collapse as a result of its own contradictions and its own inherent rigidity, or as a result of unforeseen external stimuli? Grix suggests that the previously passive normal citizen did not remain untouched by what he describes as the series of blunders and inaction on the part of the SED at the time, and quotes its unconditional solidarity with the Chinese communist regime after the repression of the demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in Beijing as a key example. 44 He also records though that the crowds in Berlin on 4 November were roughly equally divided between those that sought a reformed GDR and those that wanted more fundamental changes. 45 National pride is at stake, because Germany likes to describe 1989 as the first peaceful revolution on German soil. Manfred Stolpe, for example, claimed: The breathtaking changes in Germany, the bloodless revolution that led to freedom, is our achievement; we resisted usurpation and shook off the tutelage to which we had been subjected. We did it on our own, not without fear, but with courage and determination. 46 Historically, though, the evidence to that effect is ambiguous. It was Gorbachev who between July 1987 and October 1989 changed his view that no alternative to the existence of two German states could be countenanced, and it was the Hungarians who effectively tore down the Iron Curtain. 47 No doubt both internal and external factors coalesced, and revolutions are notoriously catching, with 1848 as the text-book example of (unsuccessful) Europe-wide revolution. Nevertheless, the more we stress the inevitability thesis, the more we rob the SED of individuality and discretion, and of the potential to adapt. That again must have major implications for our assessment of the PDS as a party which has sought, and been forced by circumstances, to make that adaptation.