Socialist Reformers and the Collapse of the German Democratic Republic

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DOI: 10.1057/9781137574169.0001 Other Palgrave Pivot titles

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DOI: 10.1057/9781137574169.0001 Socialist Reformers and the Collapse of the German Democratic Republic

Dietrich Orlow Boston University, USA

DOI: 10.1057/9781137574169.0001 © Dietrich Orlow 2015 -$2!-4#0 0#.0',2 -$ 2&# & 0"!-4#0 =12 #"'2'-, ><=A ECDV=V=?CVAC@=AV>

All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saff ron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. Th e author has asserted his right to be identifi ed as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2015 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fift h Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.

ISBN: 978-1-137-57416-9 PDF ISBN: 978-1-349-84737-2

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Orlow, Dietrich. Title: Socialist reformers and the collapse of the German Democratic Republic / Dietrich Orlow (Boston University, USA). Description: Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire : Palgrave Pivot, 2015. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifi ers: LCCN 2015037976 | ISBN 9781137574152 (hardback) | ISBN 9781137574176 (ePub) | ISBN 9781137574169 (PDF) Subjects: LCSH: Germany (East) – Politics and government – 1989–1990. | Germany (East) – Economic policy. | Germany (East) – Social policy. | Social reformers – Germany (East) – History. | Socialism – Germany (East) – History. | Socialism – Germany (East) – Philosophy. | Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands – History. | Human rights – Germany (East) – Societies, etc. – History. | BISAC: HISTORY / Europe / Germany. | HISTORY / Revolutionary. | HISTORY / Modern / 20th Century. Classifi cation: LCC DD289 .O75 2015 | DDC 943/.10877—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015037976 www.palgrave.com/pivot DOI: 10.1057/9781137574169 Contents

1 Introduction 1 2 The SED Reformers 8 3 The HRO Reformers 16 4 The Illusions of the Hardliners 25 5 The First Group of SED Reformers Takes Charge 32 6 A New Group of SED Reformers Tries Its Luck 51 7 The Round Table: The HRO Reformers’ Fifteen Minutes of Fame 64 8 Conclusion 74 Index 81

DOI: 10.1057/9781137574169.0001 v

1 Introduction

Abstract: This chapter places the analysis that is to follow into the political and historiographic context of the late 1980s. The – failed – efforts by the East German reformers are part of a larger picture that included the efforts by Mikhail Gorbachev to change the Communist regime in the Soviet Union and to put the relations between the USSR and the countries of Eastern Europe on a new footing, as well as the – successful – efforts by indigenous groups in Poland and Hungary to democratize and humanize their Communist- dominated societies.

Orlow, Dietrich. Socialist Reformers and the Collapse of the German Democratic Republic. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. doi: 10.1057/9781137574169.0002.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137574169.0002   Socialist Reformers and the Collapse of the German Democratic Republic

The course of European history was changed dramatically by a series of events that took place in just two years, 1989 and 1990. In the course of a few tumultuous months the Soviet empire collapsed, [1] Germany was reunified, and Western political and economic ideas and institutions triumphed in the countries east of what was now a torn Iron Curtain. Suddenly, the Cold War seemed over, and talk of a “common European house” was ubiquitous. Although with the benefit of hindsight the beginning of what was to come can be dated to the election of Mikhail Gorbachev as secretary general of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, virtually no contem- porary political or academic analyst predicted the rapidity or profundity of the changes that came in 1989/90. Not surprisingly, after the dust had cleared participants and analysts alike hastened to explain why the changes had happened, and, in the case of the political leaders, to highlight their own role in bringing about the momentous events. By now these analyses fill a medium-sized library with a plethora of more or less acute accounts, triumphant memoirs, and apologetic reminiscences. [2] Nowhere was the collapse of Communism and the triumph of the West more evident than in Germany. What had been for forty years a divided country with two antagonistic societies facing each other across a fortified if somewhat porous border, within a year between October 1989 and 1990 became a united, Westernized country as East Germany was essentially absorbed by West Germany. The West German constitution, the Basic Law, was now the law of the land for all of Germany, and the West German “social market economy” replaced the centrally planned and controlled economic system in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR). Somewhat overlooked in the euphoria over the introduction of West Germany’s political and economic system in the GDR (which most East Germans enthusiastically welcomed [3]) are the political activists who wanted neither German reunification nor the wholesale transfer of West German capitalism to East Germany. Instead, these self-proclaimed reformers, who were active both within the ruling Communist Party and outside it, wanted to retain an independent, sovereign East Germany with a “better, more beautiful” form of socialism. What follows is an analysis of these socialist reformers and the reasons for the ultimate failure of their vision. There were many causes for the fall of Communism in the Soviet Union and East European countries. Independent labor unions,

DOI: 10.1057/9781137574169.0002 Introduction  like Solidarity in Poland, and human rights organizations (HRO) (Bürgerrechtsbewegungen, in East Germany) certainly played a role. So did self-styled reformist leaders within the Communist parties, although the fall of socialism was certainly not their intent. This was true for the Soviet Union itself, where Mikhail Gorbachev, who was elected secretary general of the Communist Party in 1985, led the reformist elements in the party. Hungary and Poland also embarked on reforms with the cooperation of the leadership of the ruling Communist parties. In contrast, in East Germany (and in Czechoslovakia and Romania) the Communist Party leaders resisted all attempts at reform until it was too late to save the regime. True, in October 1989 Egon Krenz, one of the self-styled reformers in the East German Communist Party (called the Sozialistische Einheitspartei, Socialist Unity Party, SED) replaced the hardliner Erich Honecker as the secretary general, but Krenz’ proclamation that under his leadership the East German Communists would undertake a “turn- around” (Wende) was not taken seriously by anyone, and after fifty days Krenz disappeared from the political scene. As we shall see, in contrast to what was happening in Poland and Hungary, the East German HROs were also quickly pushed into political oblivion by events they could not control. And yet, paradoxically, the voluminous memoir literature suggests that by the second half of the 1980s opposition to the SED’s hardline policies was growing both in the party and among the HROs. Demands for change seemed to come from all quarters. [4] (To be sure, paralleling earlier discussions about the meaning of resistance to the Nazi regime, there is also a lively and ongoing historiographic debate about the meaning of “opposition” in the GDR. [5]) The questions posed in this analysis, then, are three: Who were the reformers inside and outside the SED, what did they want, and why were they so singularly unsuccessful in realizing their aims? At the beginning of the 1980s all seemed well with the GDR’s “real, existing socialism.” The Communists appeared to have an unchal- lenged hold on political power. Article 1 of a new constitution adopted in 1978 (“Honecker’s constitution”) defined the GDR as a socialist state of workers and peasants led by the SED. The party, armed with the scientific truths of Marxism–Leninism, wouldg uide East Germany to true socialism. The country’s mounting economic problems were still hidden. Instead, “the unity of social and economic policy,” as the SED’s leaders never tired of pointing out, provided the GDR with a standard of

DOI: 10.1057/9781137574169.0002  Socialist Reformers and the Collapse of the German Democratic Republic living that was one-third higher than that of any other socialist country, including the Soviet Union. On the international scene the GDR was recognized as a sovereign nation by almost all countries in the world, including the United States. Finally, there were no significant problems in the SED’s relations with its creator and guarantor, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. But problems loomed on the horizon. The SED could not ignore the challenges to Communism’s ideological bedrock coming from Eastern Europe, specifically from Poland and the Soviet Union. In the early 1980s the founding of the independent Solidarity labor union called into question the Polish Communists’ monopoly on power. The SED quickly recognized the danger on its eastern border and attempted to contain the threat. Fearing the spread of Polish ideas in the GDR, the East German Communists closed the GDR’s border with Poland, and mounted a propaganda offensive denouncing Solidarity as a group of counter-revolutionaries who were trying to create chaos in Poland. The GDR also urged Soviet military intervention in Poland along the lines of the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. [6] The most serious challenge to the status quo in Eastern Europe came, of course, from the Soviet Union itself. Relations between the GDR and the “friends” had been excellent as long as Leonid Brezhnev headed the Communist Party in the Soviet Union, but they became increasingly strained after Mikhail Gorbachev took over as secretary general of the Soviet Communist Party in 1985. Publicly the SED continued to celebrate the bonds of friendship between the GDR and the USSR, and the East German Communists welcomed Gorbachev’s program of glasnost and perestroika, [7] but behind the scenes Erich Honecker and his close allies grew increasingly critical of Gorbachev and his reforms. As always, accusations of creeping social democratism were readily at hand; [8] Gorbachev for his part made no secret of his lack of enthusiasm for Honecker’s hard line. [9] Finally, as if to illustrate the SED’s fears that reforms would indeed lead to the end of Communist rule, there was the case of Hungary. In the late 1980s Hungary embarked on a series of policy changes that modified the state-run economy and permitted political pluralism. The head of the East German secret police (Staatssicherheit, Stasi), Erich Mielke, denounced Hungary as a traitor to the Communist cause: The country’s political reforms led to social democratism and the economic changes to capitalism. [10] Worse was to come. As part

DOI: 10.1057/9781137574169.0002 Introduction  of the reform process, Hungary in May 1989 opened its borders with Austria, enabling thousands of vacationing East Germans to cross the border into Austria and from there to resettle in West Germany. (Hungary’s decision to open its borders was undoubtedly facilitated by a 500 million DM credit from West Germany, although the GDR, which desperately needed and readily accepted credits from the Federal Republic, was hardly in a position to criticize the Hungarians’ willingness to accept Western money.) [11] But this is getting ahead of the story. Until the last years of the decade the GDR’s Communist leaders seemed to be in firm control of the country and the party, but underneath the surface there was increasing ferment. The self-styled SED reformers recalled later that by the second half of the 1980s, a foreboding of change (Umbruchstimmungg) prevailed in the GDR. They listed the ingredients of this sense of unease as the loss of belief in the future Communist utopia, the questioning of the certainties of the past (this referred to the discussion of Stalin’s crimes and the Nazi–Soviet Pact in the Soviet media), and general dissatisfaction with conditions in the GDR. [12] The leader of theS ED’s successor party, Gregor Gysi, remembered that in the beginning of 1985 there was a widespread conviction that the SED’s leadership simply could not indefinitely ignore the demands for reform. [13] Even within the SED’s functionary corps, which was used to absolute obedience to dictates from the top, there were stirrings of criticism about the lack of initiatives coming from the Politburo. [14] Perhaps most tellingly, the Stasi reported that its ubiquitous informants found little difference in the critical attitudes of the SED’s rank-and-file members and the population at large. [15]

Notes

[1] Among the many treatments of the collapse of the Soviet empire see Charles S. Maier, Dissolution: The Crisis of Communism and the End of East Germany (Princeton, NJ, 1997); Gerhard and Nadja Simon, Verfall und Untergang des sowjetischen Imperiums (Munich, 1993); and Ivo Banac, ed., Eastern Europe in Revolution (New York, 1992). [2] Two examples of West German triumphalism are, Wolfgang Schäuble, Der Vertrag: Wie ich über die deutsche Einheit verhandelte (Stuttgart, 1991); and Helmut Kohl, Vom Mauerfall zur Wiedervereinigung: Meine Erinnerungen (Munich, 2009).

DOI: 10.1057/9781137574169.0002  Socialist Reformers and the Collapse of the German Democratic Republic

[3] Hubertus Knabe, ed., Aufbruch in eine andere DDR: Reformer und Oppositionelle zur Zukunft ihres Landes (Hamburg, 1989); and Birgit Lahann, Geliebte Zone: Geschichte aus dem neuen Deutschlandd (Stuttgart, 1997). [4] A small sample: Günter Schabowski, Der Absturz (Berlin, 1991); Egon Krenz, Wenn Mauern fallen (Vienna, 1990); Manfred Uschner, Die Zweite Etage: Funktionsweise eines Machtapparates (Berlin, 1993); Fritz Klein, Drinnen und Draussen: Erinnerungen eines Historikers in der DDR (Frankfurt a.M., 2000); Gerhard Schürer, Gewagt und Verloren: Eine deutsche Biographie, 3rd ed. (Frankfurt a.O., 1996); Hans Modrow, Ich wollte ein neues Deutschlandd (Berlin, 1998); Eberhard Jesse, ed., Eine Revolution und ihre Folgen: 14 Bürgerrechtler ziehen Bilanz (Berlin, 2000); and Knabe, ed., Aufbruch. [5] For a brief introduction to the historiographic debate see Hubertus Knabe, “Was war die ‘DDR-Opposition’? Zur Typologisierung des politischen Widerspruchsin Ost-Deutschland,” Deutschland-Archiv, 29 (no. 2, 1996), 184–98. [6] “[Telefon] Gespräch...Schmidt ...Honecker,” 12 Janaury 1982, Bundesarchiv Berlin-Stiftung Archiv der Parteien und Massenorganisationen der DDR (hereafter: BAB-SAPMO), Bestand Büro Erich Honecker (hereafter: Best. Büro Honecker), DY 30/2409, Fiche 1; Ludwig Mehlhorn, “Berlin- Warschau,” in: Knabe, ed., Aufbruch, p. 175; Monika Tantzscher, “‘Was in Polen geschieht, ist für die DDR eine Lebensfrage!’ Das MfS und die polnische Krise 1980/81,” in: Enquête-Kommission des Deutschen Bundestags, ed., Materialien der Enquête-Kommission: Überwindung der Folgen der SED-Diktatur im Prozess der deutschen Einheitt (Baden-Baden, 1999), V/3:2649; Michael Kubina and Manfred Wilke, eds, “Hart und kompromisslos durchgreifen”: Geheimakten der SED-Führung über die Unterdrückung der polnischen Demokratiebewegungg (Berlin, 1995). [7] Herbert Krolikowski, “Ein Vertrag von geschichtlicher Tragweite,” Einheit, 40 (no. 10, 1985), 867–71; and Erich Honecker, “Die entscheidende Lehre aus der ‘Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung,’” Einheit, 41 (nos. 4/5, 1986), 291–96. [ 8] Kurt Hager to Honecker, 12 June 1986, BAB-SAPMO, DY 30/26483, Bestand Büro Kurt Hager (hereafter: Best. Büro Hager); Manfred Uschner, “Interview,” 10 March 1993, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University (hereafter: HIA), German Democratic Republic Oral History Project (hereafter: GDR-OHP), box 7; Armin Mitter and Stefan Wolle, eds, Ich liebe Euch doch alle?: Befehle und Lageberichte des MfS Januar–November 1989 (Berlin, 1990), pp. 40–41. [9] Kohl, Erinnerungen , p. 26. [10] Mielke’s speech to the SED party organization at the Ministry for State Security (Stasi), 29 June 1989, in: Walter Süss, Staatssicherheit am Ende:

DOI: 10.1057/9781137574169.0002 Introduction 

Warum es den Mächtigen nicht gelang 1989 eine Revolution zu verhindern (Berlin, 1999), p. 177. [11] For a Hungarian perspective on these events see Gyula Horn, Freiheit, die ich meine: Erinnerungen des ungarischen Aussenministers, der den Eisernen Vorhang öffnete (Hamburg, 1991), pp. 309ff. [12] Uschner, “Interview,” 10 April 1991, pp. 60–61; Rolf Reissig, Dialog durch die Mauer: Die umstrittene Annäherung von SPD und SED (Frankfurt a.M., 2002), p. 58; and Christa Luft, Zwischen Ende und Wende: Eindrücke, Erlebnisse, Erfahrungen eines Mitglieds der Modrow-Regierung (Berlin, 1991), p. 77. [13] Gregor Gysi and Thomas Falkner,Sturm aufs Grosse Haus: Der Untergang der SED (Berlin, 1990), p. 13. [14] See, for example, the remarks of Johannes Chemnitzer and Hans Modrow in the meeting of the SED Central Committee, 1–2 Dec. 1988, BAB-SAPMO, Bestand SED/ZK (hereafter: SED/ZK), DY 30 IV/ 2/688. [15] Zentrale Auswertungs-und Informationsgruppe (hereafter: ZAIG) of the Stasi, “Hinweise zu...Aspekten der Reaktion der Bevölkerung ...” 30 November 1988; Gerd-Rüdiger Stephan, ed., “Vorwärts immer, rückwärts nimmer!”: Interne Dokumente zum Zerfall von SED und DDR 1988/89 (Berlin, 1994), pp. 53–57, doc. 7; and the reports collected by Krenz’ office, BAB-SAPMO, Bestand Büro Egon Krenz (hereafter: Best. Krenz)/317. See also Alexandra Nepit, Die SED unter dem Druck der Reformen Gorbatschows: Der Versuch der Parteiführung das SED-Regime durch konservatives Systemmanagement zu stabilisieren (Baden-Baden, 2004), pp. 312–19; and Uta Stolle, Der Aufstand der Bürger: Wie 1998 die Nachkriegszeit in Deutschland zu Ende ging (Baden-Baden, 2001), p. 70.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137574169.0002 2 TheS ED Reformers

Abstract: This chapter introduces the reformist elements in the East German Communist Party, the SED. The SED reformers were a small, isolated group of party functionaries, who were reluctant to challenge the authority of the anti- reformist hardliners. Moreover, while the reformers wanted to change the Communist regime, they insisted that this could only be done from above, by a new group of party leaders. Their model was Gorbachev. As for the reformers’ ideas and plans, they were vague and contradictory. The reformers wanted a “better, more beautiful” socialism, but what this meant in practice was not clear. On the economic side the reformers had a vision of a market- oriented, centrally planned economy, but this was something of an oxymoron.

Orlow, Dietrich. Socialist Reformers and the Collapse of the German Democratic Republic. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. doi: 10.1057/9781137574169.0003.

 DOI: 10.1057/9781137574169.0003 The SED Reformers 

At this point it may be useful to ask, who were the SED reformers and what did they want? To begin with, it is important to recognize that the reformers constituted a very small minority of the SED functionaries. Friedrich Schorlemmer, one of the founders of the HRO Demokratischer Aufbruch (Democratic Start, DA) described the SED reformers as a few “thinking, sensitive, courageous human beings.” [1] Moreover, until the fall of 1989 even this small group was very reluctant to articulate its critical views. At the center of the SED’s power structure three members of the Politburo and the Central Committee, Egon Krenz, Wolfgang Herger, and Günter Schabowski, would eventually lead a conspiracy to purge Honecker as secretary general of the SED. Krenz, who was born in 1937, had spent his entire working life as a party functionary. In the course of his career he headed the SED’s youth organization Freie Deutsche Jugend (Free German Youth, FDJ) for many years, and in 1989 he was the member of the Politburo responsible for internal security affairs. Krenz was seen as Honecker’s their apparent, although the secretary general was careful to not actually name a potential successor. In 1989 Wolfgang Herger was fifty-four years old. A close friend of Krenz, Herger had also spent a number of years as an FDJ functionary. He was elected to the Central Committee in 1976 with responsibility for youth affairs. Günter Schabowski, who was born in 1929, had been editor of the SED’s official newspaper Neues Deutschlandd since 1978. In 1981 he was coopted to the Central Committee, and in 1984 he became a member of the Politburo. In 1989 he headed the SED’s district organization in East Berlin. Among the other fourteen district chiefs only three, Johann Chemnitzer in Neubrandenburg, Kurt Meyer in Leipzig, and Hans Modrow in Dresden, were reputed to feel the need for reforms. [2] Within the Central Committee’s administrative staff the reformers included some second-echelon functionaries, such as Rolf Reissig and Manfred Uschner, the personal assistant of Hermann Axen, the member of the Politburo responsible for contacts with the West. (Axen himself was a hardliner and close ally of Honecker.) Reissig, in particular, came to recognize the need for reforms as a member of the SED delegation which negotiated the 1987 Streitpapierr with the West German Social Democrats (SPD). The SED’s delegation was headed by Otto Reinhold, the rector of the Central Committee’s Institute for Social Sciences, and Reissig served as his deputy. The Streitpapier obligated the two parties to work for disarmament and a zone in Central Europe free of atomic and chemical weapons (this

DOI: 10.1057/9781137574169.0003  Socialist Reformers and the Collapse of the German Democratic Republic was Honecker’s sole interest in the whole project), but the two sides also agreed to permit internal criticism of their policies. Moreover, the SPD and SED agreed that the Streitpapier would be published in full in their respective official organs. The text of the Streitpapier was indeed published in Neues Deutschland, the SED’s official newspaper, so that all SED members could read that officially their party’s leaders would welcome internal criticism of its past policies. Actually, Honecker and his allies quickly suppressed any nascent internal criticism, but as the reformers later remembered, the damage had been done: At least for a brief moment the SED’s leadership had raised hopes for reforms. And the SED’s activists were not slow in responding. A flood of suggestions reached the central party offices. The recommendations ranged from electing new members to the Central Committee to demands that more comfortable furniture should be made available to the people of the GDR. [3] Contrary to Honecker’s often expressed conviction that the young people of the GDR were steadfast in their support of the SED’s regime (“youth belongs to us” [4]), in fact the under-twenty-five generation was increasingly unhappy with the SED’s rule and that included high- ranking officials of the Communist youth movement. The FDJ’s leadership had commissioned a number of polls which indicated widespread dissatisfaction among the organization’s membership. The polls showed that between 1975 and May 1989 the number of apprentices who identified “strongly” with Marxism–Leninism declined from 46 to 9, and among university students support for Marxism–Leninism dropped from 61 to 35. (The polling results were sent to the Politburo, but Honecker decided to keep the material under lock and key.) [5] Intellectuals who worked either in the GDR’s universities or at one of the quasi-scientific, SED-affiliated research institutes constituted another group of reformers. Not surprisingly, intellectuals found Gorbachev’s call for glasnost and perestroika particularly attractive. [6] After Honecker’s fall Otto Reinhold, the rector of the Central Committee’s Institute for Social Sciences, complained bitterly that his institute had sent a flood of papers recommending policy changes to the Central Committee and the Politburo. The documents were all classified as “confidential (Verschlussache)” and sent (mostly unread) to the party archives. [7] Another focus of reformist activity was the research group “Modern Socialism” at the Humboldt University in East Berlin. Here, under the leadership of two brothers, Michael and André Brie (who would later

DOI: 10.1057/9781137574169.0003 The SED Reformers  become leaders in the present-day Left Party), a team of professors and graduate students worked on the theoretical foundations of “better socialism.” The group, practicing Gorbachev’s glasnost, offered detailed and relentless criticism of Honecker’s “real socialism.” The researchers demanded transparency in decision-making and increased involvement of ordinary citizens to reach “consensus” between party and people, although the group was short on the details of what constituted “better socialism.” The researchers recognized that the economy was the GDR’s Achilles heel, but their proposals to introduce elements of a free market economy while maintaining a centralized planning system were, not surprisingly, vague and contradictory. [8] The aims of the SED reformers? Before turning to this topic, it should be noted that being an SED reformer was not easy. Most of the group worked in a variety of SED offices or party-affiliated institutes, but the party had always discouraged contacts and cooperation among its functionaries, so most of the reformers had no idea who their like-minded colleagues were, and they had no way of coordinating their goals or organizing to realize their aims. Still, most of the reformers shared a common vision of the SED’s and the GDR’s future. Until it became obvious that Gorbachev was failing in his efforts to reform the governing system in the Soviet Union, for virtually all of the reformers Gorbachev’s efforts in the Soviet Union provided the model for the SED’s and the GDR’s path to the future. [9] The SED reformers’ ultimate goal was the establishment of a “better” or “more beautiful” socialism in the GDR. [10] As was true for Gorbachev, it was also an axiom among the SED reformers that only the Communist Party could lead the way in implementing this “better” socialism. Consequently, their list of desired reforms concentrated on intra-party changes. At the top of the list was an end to what the reformers called the stifling “Politbürokratie,” which is to say the monopoly on decision- making by the SED’s Politburo. The reformers demanded more transparency in decision-making and more intra-party democracy. In sharp contrast to Honecker’s mantra of “keine Fehlerdiskussion” (“no discussion of [past] mistakes”), the SED reformers insisted on an honest accounting of the German Communists’ past mistakes, particularly their involvement in Stalin’s crimes, the endorsement of the Nazi–Soviet Pact, and the Communist Party’s relations with the Social Democrats during the Weimar Republic and after World War II. Building upon the Streitpapier dialog, most of the SED reformers sought a less antagonistic relationship

DOI: 10.1057/9781137574169.0003  Socialist Reformers and the Collapse of the German Democratic Republic between the GDR and the Federal Republic, and especially between the SED and the West German SPD. [11] Some of the SED reformers did not entirely neglect the future relations of party and society. Especially the group at the Humboldt University discussed the problem of the party’s role in the GDR’s judicial system. Traditionally, of course, the party stood above the law. The Humboldt group tried, without much success, to find ways of preserving a class- conscious and class-dominated system of justice while eliminating party interference in legal proceedings. [12] Finally, there are three issues on which the reformers were largely silent. One was the economy. For the most part they offered no concrete ideas for improving the chronically poor performance of the East German economy. They were certainly aware of the problems at the local and district levels, and they even articulated mild-mannered criticism of the constant shortcomings in the quality and quantity of goods delivered, [13] but they proposed no fundamental policy changes. This was in part because even they did not know how bad the situation really was. Honecker and his close associate, Günter Mittag, the member of the Politburo charged with overseeing the economy, deliberately kept even the members of the Politburo and the Central Committee from knowing how desperate the economic situation was. Among the reformers Gerhard Schürer, the head of the Central Planning Commission, did know the truth about the GDR’s economic problems, and in April 1988 he sent Honecker a memorandum suggesting a number of needed reforms. On Honecker’s recommendation the Politburo rejected all of them. [14] Another notable omission in the reformers’ discussion of necessary changes in the system of government in the GDR was any concern about Article 1 of the GDR’s constitution, which gave the SED a monopoly on political power. This is not surprising. After all, like Gorbachev in the Soviet Union, the SED reformers were convinced only a changed and strengthened party could implement the necessary reforms. [15] Finally, national reunification was not any part of the SED reformers’ agenda. This was not only because before the fall of 1989 neither they nor anyone else considered reunification a realistic prospect, but also because the SED reformers, and here they agreed with the party’s hardliners, were resolutely opposed to any political union of East and West Germany. The GDR was established, they insisted, to create an independent, socialist

DOI: 10.1057/9781137574169.0003 The SED Reformers  state. Union with capitalist West Germany would negate the very reason for the GDR’s existence. [16]

Notes

[1] Friedrich Schorlemmer and Gregor Gysi, Was bleiben wird, ed. by Hans Peter Schütt (Berlin, 2015), p. 186. See also Frank Wilhelmy, Der Zerfall der SED-Herrschaft: Zur Erosion des marxistisch-lenistischen Legitimitätsanspruches (Münster, 1995). [2] Rainer Eckert, “Gewalt und Internationalität [review],” Deutschland-Archiv, 45 (no. 3, 2012), 537–46; Patrik von zur Mühlen, Aufbruch und Umbruch in der DDR: Bürgerbewegungen, Kritische Öffentlichkeit und Niedergang der SED-Herrschaft (Bonn, 2000), pp. 198ff; Werner Eberlein, Geboren am 9. November: Erinnerungen, 2nd ed. (Berlin, 2000), p. 458; Delef Pollack, Politischer Protest: Politisch-alternative Gruppen in der DDR (Opladen, 2000), pp. 217 and 238; and Lothar Mertens, Rote Denkfabrik? Die Akademie der Gesellschaftswissenschaften beim ZK der SED (Münster, 2004), pp. 38–39. Manfred Uschner, Die Ostpolitik der SPD: Sieg und Niederlage einer Strategie (Berlin, 1991), p. 145 claims, without citing evidence, that in the wake of the Streitpapier some 20,000 SED functionaries and rank-and-file members were reprimanded by the party’s control commissions. [3] Dieter Dowe, ed., Die Ost- und Deutschlandpolitik der SPD in der Opposition, 1982–1989 (Bonn, 1993), p. 160; Gerd Meyer, “Gesellschaftliche Widersprüche und demokratischer Aufbruch in der DDR,” in: Andrea Pabst et al., eds, Wir sind das Volk? Ostdeutsche Bürgerrechtsbewegungen und die Wende (Tübingen, 2001), p. 18; Heinrich Bortfeldt, Von der SED zur PDS: Wandlungen zur Demokratie?? (Bonn, 1992), pp. 16–17; and Stefan Bollinger, 1989 – Eine abgebrochene Revolution (Berlin, 1998), p. 105. [4] “Gespräch...Honecker mit...Eduard A. Schewardnadse,” 9 June 1999 in: Stephan, ed., SED-Dokumente 1988/89, p. 83, doc. 12. [5] “Expertise des Direktors des Zentralinstituts für Jugendforschung...für Egon Krenz,” 21 November 1988, ibid., p. 43, doc. 6; and Wilfried Possner’s testimony in: Uwe Thaysen, ed., Der Zentrale Runde Tisch der DDR: Wortprotokoll und Dokumente (Wiesbaden, 2000), IV:1014. (Until 1989 Possner was head of the FDJ’s children’s organization, the Thälmann Pioneers.) See also Mitter and Wolle, eds, MfS-Befehle, pp. 223–24; and Gerd-Rüdiger Stephan, “‘Wir brauchen Preistroika und Glasnost für die DDR’: Zur Reflexion des Zustands der Gesellschaft durch die Leipziger Jugendforschung, 1987–89,” Deutschland-Archiv, 28 (no. 7, 1995), 721–34. [6] Gorbachev, Memoirs (New York, 1996), pp. 483 and 523.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137574169.0003  Socialist Reformers and the Collapse of the German Democratic Republic

[7] Reinhold at the SED Central Committee meeting, 9 November 1989 in: Hans-Hermann Hertle and Gerd-Rüdiger Stephan, eds, Das Ende der SED: Die letzten Tagungen des Zentralkomittees (Berlin, 1997), p. 335. Jörn Schlütrumpf, who in 1988 headed the history section of the GDR’s Academy of Sciences, agreed that in 1988 Reinhold’s institute produced a “drunken fit of papers( Studienrausch).” See Jörn Schlütrumpf, “Steuerung und Kontrolle der Wissenschaft...,” in: Enquête-Kommission des Deutschen Bundestages, ed., Materialien der Enquête-Kommission: Aufarbeitung von Geschichte und Folgen der SED-Diktatur in Deutschland (Baden-Baden, 1995), III/1:359–74. [8] Nepit, SED, p. 354. See also Ehrhart Neubert, “Die Opposition im Jahr 1989 – Ein Überblick,” in: Eberhard Kuhrt et al., eds, Opposition in der DDR von den siebziger Jahren bis zum Zusammenbruch der SED-Herrschaft (Opladen, 1999), p. 432; Dirk Rochus, “Welche Umstände verhinderten die Verwirklichung des Dritten Weges?” in: Pabst et al., ed., Wende, pp. 101–102, Dirk Rochus, Zwischen Realität und Utopie: Das Konzept des “Dritten Weges” in der DDR 1989–90, tr. Martine Westermann (Leipzig, 1999), pp. 82–83; and Rainer Land, “Reformbewegungen in der SED in den 80er Jahren: Möglichkeiten und Grenzen,” in: Detlef Pollack and Dieter Rink, eds., Zwischen Verweigerung und Opposition: Politischer Protest in der DDR, 1970–89 (Frankfurt a.M., 1997), p. 137. [9] Hans Modrow, Die Perestroika wie ich sie sehe: Persönliche Erinnerungen und Analysen eines Jahrhunderts, das die Welt veränderte (Berlin, 1998), p. 159. [10] Jürgen John et al., “Für eine Erneuerung des Geschichtsverständnisses in der DDR,” Einheit, 44 (no. 12, 1989), 1176–77; and Rainer Land and Ralf Possekel, Fremde Welten: Die gegensätzliche Deutung der DDR durch SED-Reformer und Bürgerbewegung in den 80er Jahren (Berlin, 1998), pp. 65 and 76. [11] Rolf Reissig, “Der Niedergang des ‘realen Sozialismus’ und das Ende der DDR,” in: Rolf Reissig and Gert-Joachim Glaessner, eds, Das Ende eines Experiments: Umbruch in der DDR und die deutsche Einheitt (Berlin, 1991), pp. 19, 28–29, and 33; Reissig, Dialogg, pp. 50 and 172–73; Schürer, Gewagt, p. 257; Land, Welten, pp. 12 and 49; Rolf Richter, “In der Pflicht des Antifaschismus,” Einheit, 44 (no. 12, 1989), 1145; Joachim Petzold, “Gedanken eines Historikers zur Erneuerung der SED,” ibid., pp. 1152–53; Parteinahme wofür? DDR-Historiker im Spannungsfeld von Politik und Wissenschaftft (Potsdam, 2000), pp. 314–15; Karl-Heinz Wagner, “Zur den Verhandlungen zwischen SPD und SED aus der Sicht eines Teilnehmers...,” in: Detlef Nakath, ed., Deutschlandpolitiker der DDR erinnern sich (Berlin, 1995), p. 268; and “Interview Reissig,” 19 May 1992, GDR/OHP, box 6, pp. 40–41.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137574169.0003 The SED Reformers 

[12] Ulrike Poppe, “‘Der Weg ist das Ziel’: Zum Selbstverständnis und der politischen Rolle oppositioneller Gruppen in den achtziger Jahren,” in: Ulrike Poppe, Rainer Eckert, and Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk, eds, Zwischen Selbstbehauptung und Anpassung: Formen des Widerstandes und der Opposition in der DDR (Berlin, 1995), p. 271; and Thomas Klein, “Frieden und Gerechtigkeit”: Die Politisierung der unabhängigen Friedensbewegung in Ost-Berlin während der achtziger Jahre (Cologne, 2006), p. 446. [13] See the remarks by Modrow, Johann Chemnitzer, Siegfried Lorenz, and Hans Albrecht (district leaders in Dresden, Neubrandenburg, Karl-Marx- Stadt [Chemnitz], and Suhl resp.) at the CC meeting, 1–2 Dec. 1988, Best. SED/ZK/688. [14] Schürer, Gewagt, pp. 154–56; and Andreas Rödder, Deutschland einig Vaterland: Die Geschichte der Wiedervereinigung (Munich, 2009), pp. 96–97. After his fall from power Günter Mittag, in an interview with the German news magazine, Der Spiegel, admitted, “at the end of 1987 I recognized: We didn’t have a chance.” See Spiegel, 9 September 1991. [15] Eckhard Jesse, “Oppositionelle Bestrebungen in den achtziger Jahren und ihre Repräsentanten” in: Jesse, ed., Revolution, p. 266. [16] See Otto Reinhold’s comment during the CC meeting 9 November 1989, no. 708. See also Otto Wenzel, “Dieser Sozialismus ist auf Dauer gescheitert: Die Erkenntnis des SED-Chefideologen Otto Reinhold,” Politische Studien, 42 (May/June, 1991), 320–25.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137574169.0003 3 The HRO Reformers

Abstract: This chapter introduces the other group of East German reformers, those affiliated with the human rights organizations (HROs). Like the SED reformers, they were a numerically small and socially homogeneous group. For the most part, they were young, and almost all had at one point in their short lives had a run-in with the GDR’s ubiquitous secret police, the Stasi. Most found employment in church-related jobs or in subordinate positions in the GDR’s health services. As for the HROs’ ideas, they too were vague and contradictory. Their vision fo the “third way” between capitalism and neo-Stalinism envisioned a society in which the GDR’s citizens “could find themselves” free of Stasi and SED interference in their lives.

Orlow, Dietrich. Socialist Reformers and the Collapse of the German Democratic Republic. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. doi: 10.1057/9781137574169.0004.

 DOI: 10.1057/9781137574169.0004 The HRO Reformers 

The literature on the reformers outside of the SED, the members of the human rights movements, fills small libraries. The major groups will be introduced in more detail a little later, but to begin with it might be useful to discuss their common goals and to compare these with those of the SED reformers. In looking at the HROs it must be kept in mind that they, too, never constituted more than a tiny minority of the GDR’s politically conscious population. It is estimated that the HROs (some 350 in all) had a total active membership of some 5,000 before the fall of 1989. Almost all of the groups initially operated under the protective umbrella of the Protestant churches. The HROs’ membership was not only numerically insignificant, but it was drawn from a very narrow stratum of the GDR’s society. The HRO reformers were predominately young; some 40 were between twenty-five and thirty-four years of age. Most of the HRO activists came from what in the GDR was called the intelligentsia. Since many of the activists had been barred from pursuing their preferred career paths because of their opposition to the regime, most of the HRO leaders were either employed by the churches in some capacity, or worked in the health professions (usually in subordinate roles like hospital orderlies or nurse’s aides), or they made a living as freelance artists. Only 7.7 of the HRO activists were industrial laborers. [1] In the 1980s a number of decisions by the SED’s leadership led to increased dissatisfaction with the regime and consequently the founding of the HROs. Among these developments were the GDR’s worsen- ing and neglected ecological problems, the introduction of mandatory pre-military training for all 9th and 10th graders, the prohibition of the (reformist) Soviet magazine Sputnik, the fraudulent local elections in May 1989, and the SED’s praise of the Chinese government’s violent repression of the protesters in Tiananmen Square in June of that year. As a group the HROs constituted a small subculture within the GDR that wanted to start a country-wide dialog about the problems and future of East Germany, but until the fall of the SED regime the dialog was essentially limited to their own groups. As one of their members recalled later, “I have never experienced such beautiful discussions as the ones [we had] in the fall of 1989.” [2] The HROs certainly did not see themselves as a force that would exercise political power. Rather, their self-image was that of a moral authority that would articulate ethical reasons for political change and action. [3] The HROs’ relationship to the SED was ambiguous, but it became increasingly antagonistic. Initially most of the HROs wanted to include

DOI: 10.1057/9781137574169.0004  Socialist Reformers and the Collapse of the German Democratic Republic the SED in the dialog they sought, [4] but until the dramatic events of October 1989 neither the SED leaders nor the reformers had any interest in a dialog with the HROs. Even the SED reformers wanted to retain the party’s monopoly on political truth and power, because, like the hardliners, they had “internalized” the maxim that only the party could lead the GDR to a better socialist future. From the perspective of the SED reformers, the HROs were “political amateurs” who stood in the way of the party’s efforts to implement needed reforms from above. [5] As for the HROs, they did not accept that a humane form of socialism could coexist with the Politbürokratie and the ubiquitous Stasi. Not surprisingly, as the SED’s hardliners persisted in putting the HROs at the center of the party’s “enemy picture (Feindbild),” the desire for cooperation among the HROs turned to distrust and eventually to demands for an end to the SED’s monopoly on political decision- making in the GDR. [6] The HROs envisioned a form of socialism for the GDR that would be democratic, guarantee equal rights for all, and permit “self-realization (Selbstverwirklichungg)” by the country’s citizens. [7] While the positive aspects of the new socialism were rather vague, the HROs were quite specific about one thing: They did not want the wholesale transfer of Western societal values to the GDR. They rejected what they called the West German “push and shove society (Ellbogengesellschaft)” with its fetish of “consumerism.” Instead, the new GDR would follow a third way, combining the Western values of individual freedom and pluralism with what they saw as the Marxist ideals of solidarity and cooperation. Since the HROs wanted to establish the GDR as a “laboratory (Experimentierfeld)” for the future “third way” society, [8] they, like the SED reformers, had no interest in German national reunification. Until the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November, the question was not on the agenda for any of the HROs. [9] They wanted better relations with the Federal Republic, but they rejected any political union with capitalist West Germany. Instead, as a statement by one of the HROs, Demokratie Jetzt (Democracy Now, DJ), put it in September 1989, East Germany and West Germany should “reform toward each other (aufeinander zu reformieren).” [10] Even after the GDR opened its borders and reunification became a distinct possibility, the HROs urged restraint. Many HRO activists were among the signatories of the proclamation “For Our Country” at the end of November (more about this later), which urged support for a reformed, but independent GDR. As one analyst put it,

DOI: 10.1057/9781137574169.0004 The HRO Reformers 

“The HROs held fast to an independent, socialist GDR until five minutes before twelve, or, strictly speaking, until five minutes after twelve.” [11] Like the SED reformers, the HROs recognized that the GDR economy faced massive problems, but their proposed solutions, too, were awash in generalities. They wanted a more “dynamic” GDR economy which they expected would result from democratic and decentralized decision- making. They demanded an end to the corruption and privileges of the SED leaders and they wanted a more market-oriented price structure. The latter would include significant changes to the artificial system of subsidies that severely distorted the workings of the GDR economy. Still, there were very few concrete proposals on how to accomplish these goals. [12] Turning to the major individual HROs, [13] pride of place belongs to the Initiative für Frieden und Menschenrechte (Initiative for Peace and Human Rights, IFM). Founded in 1985, the IFM was the first HRO to leave the protective umbrella of the Protestant churches and strike out on its own. The original twenty members were a group of typical HRO activists: intellectuals alienated from the GDR society with Stasi records that prohibited them from working in their chosen professions. The IFM had no program as such: It simply urged dialog and discussion. This programmatic open-endedness did not prevent the IFM, however, from expressing its support for democratic socialism as a societal ideal. The group criticized Western parliamentary democracy and the free market system. Neither was worth aiming for (erstrebenswert). Theg roup played a major role in the deliberations of the Central Round Table (about which more later), but as a Western-style parliamentary system was established in the GDR, the IFM became marginalized. Some members left because they were tired of the endless, open-ended discussions, while others joined another HRO, Demokratie Jetztt (Democracy Now, DJ). [14] The Sozialdemokratische Partei (Social Democratic Party, SdP) was the first HRO to organize itself as an independent political party, thereby directly challenging the SED’s monopoly on political power. Founded in early October 1989, the SdP was also the most Western-oriented of the HROs. Like the other HROs the SdP initially endorsed the “third way,” but it soon abandoned this program in favor of parliamentary democracy, a free market economy, and better relations with the FRG. [15] (In September 1987, two of the SdP’s founders, Rainer Eppelmann and Stephan Burckhardt, proposed organizing a GDR–FRG Friendship Society, analogous to the already existing, SED-sponsored

DOI: 10.1057/9781137574169.0004  Socialist Reformers and the Collapse of the German Democratic Republic

German–Soviet Friendship Society. The initiative came to nothing, of course, but Egon Krenz, then the Politburo member responsible for internal security, thought the Stasi’s report was important enough to send on to Honecker. [16]) Interestingly, the SdP initially welcomed SED members as partners in creating democratic socialism in East Germany. Not surprisingly, once political parties were free to organize in the GDR and reunification became a reality, the SdP quickly changed its name to SPD and merged with the West German Social Democrats. The party also reversed its earlier position on cooperating with the SED reformers. It voted to reject applications for membership in the SdP/SPD by any former member of the SED. The largest and most ambitious of the HROs was the Neues Forum (New Forum, NF); in November 1989 (when the NF had become a legal organization) some 200,000 East Germans counted themselves as members of the NF. [17] Unlike the other HROs, the leaders of the NF saw their group as an umbrella organization that would coordinate the activities of all HROs. This ambition was never realized; the other HROs clung to their organizational and political autonomy. In GDR terms, the NF was also the most conservative of the HROs. The organization asked for dialog with the SED, and initially did not contest the Communists’ political power monopoly. It was not until it became clear that the SED’s leaders would not permit the NF or any other HRO a public role in the GDR that the NF became increasingly critical of the East German Communist Party. [18] At the end of October 1989 the group issued a programmatic proposal entitled, “What is the New Forum and What Does it Want?” It was a typical “third way” document. It described the NF as an “independent citizens’ movement without ideological or party-affiliated boundaries” which would work for a democratic society and a “humane (menschlichen)” democratic socialism. The NF also adamantly opposed any “fascist tendency,” and resolutely objected to any union of East and West Germany. The group regarded the division of the country as a justified consequence of Germany’s “guilty past.” As one of the NF’s leaders (Reinhard Schult) put it, “The [West German] Christian Democrats’ claptrap (Gedudel) about the sisters and brothers in the East is annoying and disgusting.” [19] Like the other HROs opposing national unity, the NF was quickly marginalized as German reunification became a reality. The organization split; some of the NF’s activists joined established parties, while others attempted (unsuccessfully) to keep the NF alive as a discussion catalyst.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137574169.0004 The HRO Reformers 

Both contemporaries and later analysts found it difficult to distinguish two of the smaller HROs, DA and DJ. Both wanted to work for democratic socialism, which included preserving the GDR’s “social attain- ments.” At the center of the new, democratic GDR was to be the “mature citizen (mündiger Bürger).” Both were sharply critical of the free market economy and wanted to preserve the public ownership of the means of production in the GDR, although they also demanded free unions and worker participation in economic decision-making. [20] In view of their lack of programmatic originality and scarcity of supporters, it is not surprising that DA and DJ were not very successful in the rumble and tumble of GDR politics in 1990. Their representatives played a significant part in the deliberations of the Central Round Table, but as the GDR became a parliamentary democracy, the independent political parties absorbed most of the DA and DJ activists. DA split on the issue of the free market economy with the supporters of capitalism going first to DJ, and then, along with most of the DJ members, to the Greens. [21] The Vereinigte Linke (United Left, VL) was the HRO with the small- est number of supporters and the one that appealed most directly for support among the SED reformers. [22] What distinguished the VL was its radical socialist program. Instead of attempting to augment socialism with Western ideas of personal freedom, the VL advocated political and economic rule by workers’ councils, a concept the VL associated with the ideas of Leon Trotsky. Instead of parliamentary democracy, political decisions would be made by grass-roots councils dominated by industrial workers. VL advocated retaining public ownership of the means of production, but instead of a centralized planning system, the VL wanted factory councils to be in charge of economic decision-making. [23] The VL’s ultra-left position destined it to be a marginal player on the GDR’s political scene, but the other HROs did not fare much better. There were a number of reasons for this. The East German HROs lacked charismatic leaders; there was no Lech Walesa or Vaclav Havel among them. Their programs for democratic socialism also lacked specifics. As one analyst put it, the HROs had concrete immediate goals and an ideal vision of the future, but they never managed to combine the two. [24] The HROs tended to talk past the people of the GDR. For most East Germans the freedom to leave the GDR or at least to travel freely outside East Germany was a primary concern. The HROs criticized such people as deserters of the GDR’s reform movement who had succumbed to Western “consumerism.”

DOI: 10.1057/9781137574169.0004  Socialist Reformers and the Collapse of the German Democratic Republic

[25] The HROs also labored under significant organizational handicaps. They were never able to create a cooperative, GDR-wide structure. Instead, the groups remained divided by personal conflicts, rivalry between Berlin and the provinces, and programmatic differences that were more apparent than real. [26] Finally, they rendered themselves obsolete. Their primary aim was the democratization of the GDR and that goal was essentially accomplished by November 1989. But the driving force in this development was not the HROs, but the people in the streets. [27]

Notes

[1] Pollack, Protest, pp. 64 and 139–40; and Christof Geisel, Auf der Suche nach einem dritten Weg: Das politische Selbstverständnis der DDR-Opposition in den 80er Jahren (Berlin, 2005), pp. 14–15. [2] Hagen Findeis et al., eds, Die Entzauberung des Politischen: Was ist aus den politischen alternativen Gruppen der DDR geworden? (Leipzig, 1994), pp. 58–59. See also Geisel, 3. Wegg, pp. 194ff; and Enquête-Kommission des Deutschen Bundestages, ed., Aufarbeitung von Geschichte und Folgen der SED-Diktatur in Deutschlandd (Baden-Baden, 1995), VII: 246ff. [3] Rochus, “3. Weg,” p. 101. For a useful chronology of the HROs’ activities see Karl Bruckmeier, “Die Bürgerbewegungen der DDR im Herbst 1989,” in: Gerda Haufe and Karl Bruckmeier, eds., Die Bürgerbewegungen in der DDR und den ostdeutschen Bundesländern (Opladen, 1993), pp. 29–31. [4] Modrow, Deutschland, p. 203. See also Stolle, Aufstand, p. 303; Geisel, 3. Wegg, pp. 55ff; and Pollack, Protest, pp. 8–9 and 201. [5] Schorlemmer and Gysi, Bleiben, p. 85. [6] See the submissions to the SED’s Politburo and Central Committee, Best. Krenz/312. See also the comments by Stephan Hilsberg and Wilfried Busemann in Dowe, Politik, pp. 67–68 and 147; Bortfeldt, PDS, p. 98; and Geisel, 3. Wegg, p. 86. [7] Bärbel Bohley, Englishes Tagebuch 1988, in Irene Kukutz ed. (Berlin, 2011), pp. 29 and 62 (5 February and 3 March 1988); and Findeis et al., Interviews, pp. 81–82 (Hans-Jürgen Fischbeck [DJ]); Rainer Eckert, “Die revolutionäre Krise am Ender der achtziger Jahre und die Formierung der Opposition,” in: Enquête-Kommission, Aufarbeitungg, VII/1: 701–02 (quoting Rainer Eppelmann); Rochus, Utopie, pp. 117ff; and Geisel, 3. Wegg, pp. 62, 107, and 116. [8] Rochus, “3. Weg,” pp. 103–04. [9] Geisel, 3. Wegg, p. 128; Pollack, Protest, pp. 22 and 177; Ulrike Poppe, “Gesperrt für sämtlichen Reiseverkehr bis zum 31.12.1999,” and Eckhard Jesse, “Oppositionelle,” in: Jesse, Revolution, pp. 209–21 and 257–324 resp.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137574169.0004 The HRO Reformers 

[10] Rödder, Vaterland, pp. 26 and 35; and Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk, “Verschiedene Welten: Zum Verhältnis von Opposition und ‘SED-Reformern’ in den achtziger Jahren,” in: Ehrhart Neubert and Bernd Eisenfeld, eds, Macht-Ohnmacht-Gegenmacht: Grundfragen zur politischen Gegnerschaft in der DDR (Bremen, 2001), p. 70. [11] Bollinger, 1989, p. 92. See also Jens Reich, “Revolution in der DDR – und zehn Jahre danach,” in: Pabst,et al., Wende, pp. 42–43. [12] Findeis et al., Interviews, p. 154 (Ernst Neubert, DA); Geisel, 3. Wegg, p. 53; Poppe, “Gesperrt,” p. 219; and Michel Aymerich, “Anfang einer Kapitulation?” in: Siegfried Prokop, Die kurze Zeit der Utopie: Die “zweite DDR” im vergessenen Jahr 1998/90 (Berlin, 1994), pp. 22–42. [13] For an overview of the HROs’ programs, organization, and leaders see Martin Jander, “Die besondere Rolle des politischen Selbstverständnisses...einer politischen Opposition in der DDR,” in: Enquête-Kommission, Aufarbeitung, VII/1: 913ff; Eckert,“ Opposition,” pp. 705ff; Bruckmeier,“ Herbst 1989,” pp. 44ff; Gerhard Rein, ed., Die Opposition in der DDR: Entwürfe für einen anderen Sozialismus (Berlin, 1989); and Mühlen, Aufbruch, pp. 126ff and 268–72. [14] For the IFM’s view of itself see Wolfgang Templin and Reinhard Weisshuhn, “Die Initiative Frieden und Menschenrechte,” in: Kuhrt et al., Opposition, pp. 171–211. See also Findeis et al., Interviews, p. 51 (Bärbel Bohley). [15] The SdP/SPD’s view of its own founding is in Kuhrt et al., Opposition, pp. 607ff. See also Pollack, Protest, pp. 224–25; and Rochus, Utopie, pp. 129 and 131. [16] Krenz to Honecker, 27 September 1987, Best. Krenz/312. [17] Bruckmeier, “Herbst,” p. 45. For the NF’s self-image see Sebastian Pflugbeil, “Das Neue Forum,” in: Kuhrt et al., Opposition, pp. 507–36. [18] Stolle, Aufstand, p. 197; Pollack, Protest, pp. 223 and 227; and Gysi and Falkner, Sturm, pp. 53–54. [19] Knabe, Aufbruch, p. 168 (quotation); Stolle, Aufstand, p. 194 (quotation). See also Rochus, Utopie, p. 122; Lothar Probst, Ostdeutsche Bürgerbewegungen und Perspektiven der Demokratie: Entstehung, Bedeutung und Zukunftft (Cologne, 1993), pp. 78–80; and Poppe, “Gesperrt,” p. 218. [20] Ludwig Mehlhorn, “Demokratie Jetzt,” in: Kuhrt, Opposition, pp. 573–97. See also Ernst Elitz, Sie waren Dabei: Ostdeutsche Profile von Bärbel Bohley zu Lothar de Maizière (Stuttgart, 1991), pp. 150ff; Konrad Weiss, “Was macht ihr, wenn ihr die Macht habt?” in: Jesse, Revolution, pp. 48–49; Rochus, Utopie, pp. 124–26; Knabe, Aufbruch, pp. 201–03; and Carola Wuttke and Berndt Niedbalski, eds, Parteien und politische Bewegungen im letzten Jahr der DDR (Berlin, 1991), pp. 101ff. [21] Ulrike Franke, “Geschichte der politisch-alternativen Gruppen in der DDR,” in: Findeis et al., Interviews, pp. 14–34.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137574169.0004  Socialist Reformers and the Collapse of the German Democratic Republic

[22] Rochus, Utopie, pp. 126–27; and Stolle, Aufstand, pp. 119–21. [23] See the documentation in Best. Krenz/326; and Rainer Eckert, “Die Aktivitäten kleinerer oppositioneller Gruppen,” in: Kuhrt, Opposition, p. 700. [24] Mühlen, Aufbruch, p. 254; and Rochus, Utopie, p. 103. [25] Stolle, Aufstand, p. 44; and Mühlen, Aufbruch, p. 185. [26] Findeis et al., Interviews, p. 185 (Gerd Poppe [IFM]); Geisel, 3. Wegg, pp. 76–77; and Neubert, “Überblick,” p. 450. [27] Geisel, 3. Wegg, p. 215.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137574169.0004 4 The Illusions of the Hardliners

Abstract: This chapter describes the illusions that the SED hardliners had about the true state of affairs in East Germany and their futile efforts to prevent any reforms. Erich Honecker and his allies persuaded themselves that the East German people were content to live in the restrictive environment of one-party rule. As evidence for the happy state of affairs, they pointed to the (mandatory) mass demonstrations and the results of the (rigged) elections. They failed to see that by the late 1980s their vision of the GDR’s present and future was rejected not only by the East German people, but also by the rank-and-file members of the SED. Admonitions to intensify the party’s propaganda efforts to keep the doctrine of Marxism–Leninism pure met with little response.

Orlow, Dietrich. Socialist Reformers and the Collapse of the German Democratic Republic. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. doi: 10.1057/9781137574169.0005.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137574169.0005   Socialist Reformers and the Collapse of the German Democratic Republic

The HROs and the SED reformers were numerically weak, programmati- cally vague, and organizationally inept, but the SED hardliners took them seriously as a threat to the country’s stability and the SED’s monopoly on political power. Officially, of course, all was well and there was no need for concern. During their meetings the members of the Politburo and Central Committee assured each other and convinced themselves that the SED’s XIth National Congress (in April 1986) had provided all the necessary decisions for a smooth path to “real socialism.” [1] As a result, according to the official propaganda, the GDR was a stable society with a contented population that appreciated the benefits of socialism which the Communist Party had provided for East Germany. For evidence of this happy situation the regime cited the (mandatory) demonstrations and parades celebrating the party’s history and policies and the results of the GDR’s (rigged) elections. [2] Under the banner of Marxism–Leninism “socialism in the colors of the GDR” realized success after success. [3] According to the SED’s leaders the necessary reforms which Gorbachev had introduced in the USSR had already been realized in the GDR by the “turn-around” (Wende) (the favorite word of politicians in East and West Germany in the 1980s) which had begun with Honecker’s election as secretary general in 1971. [4] In reality, of course, this was a case of monumental self-delusion. All was not well in the GDR. The group of hardliners were a set of “intellec- tually vacuous, emotionally lacking, worthless (schäbige) human beings, who at the end of the twentieth century articulated the dreams of the early twentieth century socialist movement in Europe. It was grotesque.” [5] Moreover, the problems at the top were not lost on the SED’s foot soldiers. As Lieutenant General Manfred Hummitsch, the head of the Stasi office in Leipzig, put it in August 1989, even among rank-and-file SED members the mood was “lousy (mies).” [6] The hardliners’ response to the growing crisis in the country and the party was to tighten the ideological screws. From the perspective of Honecker and his allies the HROs were counter-revolutionary elements animated and controlled by Western imperialism. They were doing the work of the class enemy. [7] The SED reformers, if they came out into the open (which very few did), were accused of lacking ideological firmness and commitment, of being guilty of nascent factionalism, or, most seriously, sympathizing with social democratism. [8] But the hardliners did not limit themselves to verbal denunciations; in 1988 and 1989 they resorted to increasingly severe psychological, political,

DOI: 10.1057/9781137574169.0005 The Illusions of the Hardliners  and physical forms of repression. In January 1988 some of the leading HRO activists were arrested. They had called the SED’s political power monopoly into question, and were accused of having contacts with West German spy agencies. [9] The regime sent a delegation, headed by Egon Krenz, to China to learn how the Chinese had dealt with the “counter- revolutionaries” in Tiananmen Square, and the SED-controlled media praised the Chinese’s forceful repression of the threat to the rule of the Communist Party. [10] With much fanfare the GDR also awarded one of its highest medals to the Romanian dictator Nicolai Ceausescu. Throughout 1988 and 1989 Honecker repeatedly demanded more aggressive agitprop work to prevent the party’s infiltration yb Western ideas of democracy and freedom. The secretary general was also concerned that Gorbachev’s reform ideas were gaining ground in the West German and the West Berlin subsidiaries of the SED, the Deutsche Kommunistische Partei (German Communist Party, DKP) and the Sozialistische Einheitspartei West Berlin (Socialist Unity Party of West Berlin, SEW). [11] Capping his string of admonitions, on 12 October 1989, less than a week before he was purged, Honecker met with the SED’s district leaders and demanded that they do a better job of controlling their party organizations and suppressing dissent. [12] There were no objections from any of the soon-to-be conspirators. As Krenz later admitted, literally until they acted to dismiss Honecker all of the members of the Politburo and the Central Committee still marched in lock-step with the secretary general. [13] For almost all of 1989, then, Honecker and his supporters were still very much in control of the party and the country. To send a message to the suspected reformers within the party the Central Committee dispatched a visitation group, headed by Günter Mittag, Honecker’s closest ally on the Politburo, to investigate alleged problems in the SED’s district organization in Dresden. The group’s report was a scathing indictment of the Dresden party organization, and, although he was not named, its reform-minded leader, Hans Modrow. The visitation group criticized the Dresden district organization because it did not show enough “fighting spirit” and did not sufficiently emphasize the unity of politics and the economy. Moving to the ludicrous, the report noted that the district organization had not prohibited floats during the carnival season that made fun of the SED. [14] In March, two prominent SED officials were dismissed. Hans-Dieter Schütt, the editor of the FDJ journal Neue Welt, had criticized the SED for its praise of the Chinese action against the

DOI: 10.1057/9781137574169.0005  Socialist Reformers and the Collapse of the German Democratic Republic students in Tiananmen Square, and Klaus Höppke, the deputy minister for cultural affairs, had signed a petition of the writers’ organization PEN calling for the release from jail of the Czech dissident Vaclav Havel. [15] More ominously, the SED at the beginning of September announced “an exchange of party documents” which was to take place between 1 September and 31 December 1989. [16] The exchange was described as a routine measure, but such an examination of party documents was traditionally combined with an intra-party purge, although in this case the proposed exchange mattered little since the SED was losing members faster than it could purge them. All of these measures were designed to achieve the old guard’s priority goals: organizing the forthcoming cele- bration of the GDR’s 40th anniversary as an impressive show of support for the regime, and preparing for the SED’s XIIth National Congress in early 1990, when Honecker expected to be reelected for another five years as secretary general. Honecker’s private secretary, Joachim Herrmann, would later write that the efforts yb the party leadership took no account of the realities and expectations of the people of the GDR, [17] and this was especially true for two developments that became the ultimate reasons for the dismissal of the hardliners on the Politburo. In May 1989 local elections took place, an event Honecker claimed would demonstrate the “broad completion (Vervollkommnungg) of our socialist democracy.” As usual, the voters could only vote “yes” or “no” for a single, country-wide list of candidates, and, also as usual, the regime announced that 99.98 of the voters had cast a “yes” ballot in favor of the official list of candidates. Hans Albrecht, the SED’s district leader in Suhl, claimed that the results of the elections showed that in his district, “there was no room for anti-socialist activists or bourgeois thinking.” [18] This time, however, things were different. Representatives of the HROs managed to place observers in a number of polling places, and these were able to show that the officially announced results had no relation to how people actually voted. [19] But the regime remained stubborn. The Stasi ordered the local election commissions to reject all claims about election fraud, even prescribing the exact wording with which the commissions were to deny the legitimacy of the complaints. [20] Even more damaging to the regime’s prestige was the exodus in the summer of 1989 by thousands of GDR vacationers who took advantage of the now porous border between Hungary and Austria to travel to Austria and from there to move permanently to West Germany. [21]

DOI: 10.1057/9781137574169.0005 The Illusions of the Hardliners 

The old guard professed to be unconcerned. An article personally edited by Erich Honecker in the SED’s official newspaper, Neues Deutschland, proclaimed that loyal citizens of the GDR did not “weep for those who had left their fatherland; they were traitors to the working class.” [22] The stream to the West might not worry Honecker and his allies, but it did alarm both the SED reformers and the HROs. They feared that the old joke might become a reality: Would the last person leaving the GDR please turn out the lights. As summer turned to fall in 1989, the situation within the GDR and the SED grew steadily worse. Not only were thousands of GDR citizens leaving the country each day, but large numbers of rank-and-file SED members were turning in their party membership books. In the early fall the first mass demonstrations ga ainst the repressive regime took place in the cities of the GDR, and the ranks of the demonstrators swelled rapidly. On 16 October, Honecker, Mielke, and the minister of the interior Friedrich Dickel watched on closed-circuit television as 120,000 took to the streets in Leipzig. Honecker was described as “shattered, appalled (erschüttert).” [23]

Notes

[1] See the contributions by Ernst Timm, Heinz Ziegner, and Harry Tisch during the SED/CC meeting, 1 and 2 December 1988, Best. SED/ZK/698. See also Neues Deutschland, 18 September 1989, quoted in Gysi and Falkner, Sturm, p. 10. [2] “Niederschrift...Gespräch...Honecker...Ceausescu,” 17 November 1988, “Niederschrift...Gespräch...Honecker...Grosz,” 8 September 1989, “Niederschrift...Gespräch...Honecker...Rau,” 12 March 1989, Best. ZK/685 and 686; and Mittag, “Referat vor Kombinatsdirektoren,” 9 March 1989, Best. SED/PB/3198, Fiche 1. See also Stephan, SED-Dokumente 1988/89, p. 83. [3] The SED’s journal for party functionaries, Einheit, devoted an entire issue in June 1989 to the theme of “socialism in the colors of the GDR.” See Einheit, 44 (no. 6, 1989). [4] See Kurt Hager’s address to the directors of the SED’s Academy for the Social Sciences, 26 June 1986, quoted in Petzold, Parteinahme, pp. 321–22. See also Andreas Malycha, Die SED in der Era Honecker: Machtstrukturen, Entscheidungsmechanismen und Konfliktsfelder in der Staatspartei, 1971 bis 1989 (Munich, 2014). [5] Schorlemmer and Gysi, Bleiben, pp. 46–47 and 181.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137574169.0005  Socialist Reformers and the Collapse of the German Democratic Republic

[6] ZAIG, “Dienstbesprechung beim Minister für Staatssicherheit...,” 31 August 1989, in: Mitter and Wolle, MfS-Befehle, p. 127. See also Horsta Krum and Siegfried Prokop, Das letzte Jahr der DDR (Berlin, 1994); and Monika Nakath, “Ein neuer ‘Sputnik-Schock’: Die SED-Führung im Spannungsfeld von Glasnost-Perestroika,” in: Prokop, Utopie, p. 11. [7] SED/CC session, 1 and 2 December 1988 (Harry Tisch) in: Stephan, SED-Dokumente 1988/89, p. 99; and SED/PB meeting, 28 August 1989 (Schabowski), Best. SED/PB/3201, Fiche 2. See also Schabowski, Absturz, p. 221. [8] SED/PB session, 17 January 1989, Best PB/3187, Fiche 02. See also Land and Possekel, Welten, p. 29; and Daniel Küchenmeister et al., eds, “... sofort, unverzüglich”: Der Fall der Mauer am 9. November 1989 (Potsdam, 2000), p. 140. [9] Krenz, “Parteimitteilung...,” 28 January 1988, Best. Krenz/312. Honecker noted “agreed” on the report. [10] See Günter Schabowski, Das Politbüro: Ende eines Mythos, Frank Sieren and Ludwig Koehne ed. by (Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1990), PB, p. 51; and Mühlen, Aufbruch, p. 247. [11] “Niederschrift...Aussprache...Honecker...mit...DKP,” 21 October 1988, and “Niederschrift...Gespräch...Honecker...Horst Schmitt [the leader of the SED’s satellite party in West Berlin],” 16 January 1989, Best. SED/ZK/685 and 694; and Honecker to the SED’s district first secretaries, 8 October 1989, Best. Krenz, 314. [12] SED Central Committee meeting, June 1989 (Ernst Timm), Best. SED/ ZK/698; Reissig, “Niedergang,” p. 21; Modrow, Perestroika, p. 81; and Stefan Wolle, “Der Weg in den Zusammenbruch: Die DDR vom Januar bis zum Oktober, 1989,” in: Jesse, Gestaltungg, pp. 73–110. [13] Krenz quoted in Nepit, SED, p. 307. [14] “Bericht der Arbeitsgruppe des ZK zur Unterstützung der Arbeit der BZ-Parteiorganisation Dresden,” 22 Feb. 1989, Best. PB/3197. Fiche 1–2. Krenz later told Gorbachev that Honecker wanted to dismiss Modrow as district leader, but that he, Krenz, had persuaded Honecker to limit the punishment to internal criticism of the Dresden party organization. See “Niederschrift des Gesprächs...Krenz mit...Gorbachov ...,” 1 November 1989, in: Stephan, SED-Dokumente 1988/89, doc. 45, pp. 205–06. See also Rochus, Utopie, p. 156. [15] Eberhard Aurich to Honecker, 1 March 1989, and “Vorlage für das Sekretariat des ZK,” 3 March 1989, Best. SED/PB, no. 3201, Fiche 1 and 2. [16] See the documentation in, ibid. no. 3192 and Fiche 01 and 02; and SED/CC session 1 December 1988, Best. SED/ZK/687 693. See also Bortfeldt, PDS, pp. 39–43; Stolle, Aufstand, pp. 69 and 85ff. [17] Frank-Joachim Herrmann, Der Sekretär des Generalsekretärs: Honeckers persönicher Mitarbeiter über seinen Cheff, ed. by Brigitte Zimmermann and Reiner Oschmann (Berlin, 1996), p. 14.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137574169.0005 The Illusions of the Hardliners 

[18] “Niederschrift...Gespräch...Honecker mit Henning Vorschau,” 24 Feb. 1989, Best. SED/ZK, no. 694; and SED/ZK meeting, June 1989, Best. SED/ ZK, no. 698. (The speakers were Albrecht and Heinz Ziegner, the SED’s first secretary in Schwerin.) [19] SED/PB meeting, 17 January 1989, Best. SED/PB/3187, Fiche 02. See also Mühlen, Aufbruch, p. 247. [20] Mielke, “Massnahmen zur Zurückweisung...von Aktivitäten...negativer Kräfte zur Diskutierung der Ergebnisse der Kommunalwahlen am 7. Mai 1989,” 19 May 1989, in: Mitter and Wolle, MfS-Befehle, p. 43. [21] On the East Germans’ demand for free travel as a major factor in weakening the regime’s ability to hold onto power, see Norman M. Naimark,”’Ich will hier raus:’ Emigration and the Collapse of the German Democratic Republic,” in: Banac, Revolution, pp. 72–95. [22] Neues Deutschland, 2 October 1989. [23] See Mielke’s report on dissatisfaction among rank-and-file SED members, 22 September 1989, Best. Krenz/344. See also Neubert, Revolution, p. 145.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137574169.0005 5 The First Group of SED Reformers Takes Charge

Abstract: In late October 1989 a group of SED reformers forced the hardliners to give up their leadership positions. By this move the SED reformers hoped to stop the erosion of Communist power. To accomplish their goal they turned to Kaderpolitik: change personnel, not policies. In successive waves of resignations, all of the old leaders were replaced by new faces. The plan failed. Neither the SED’s rank-and-file members nor the people of the GDR were convinced that personnel changes at the top were enough. The reformers’ one popular decision, the opening of the GDR’s borders, came too late to keep them in power. By the end of 1989 they had resigned their party and state offices and vanished from the political scene, leaving the SED to reorganize itself as a new party, the SED/ Party of Democratic Socialism.

Orlow, Dietrich. Socialist Reformers and the Collapse of the German Democratic Republic. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. doi: 10.1057/9781137574169.0006.

 DOI: 10.1057/9781137574169.0006 The First Group of SED Reformers Takes Charge 

A few days earlier a meeting of the Politburo with the district secretaries on 12 October provided the clinching argument for change at the top. In his lengthy report to the meeting Honecker barely alluded to the GDR’s real problems and instead highlighted – yet again – the regime’s successes under his leadership. In the discussion that followed the secretary general’s report, three of the district leaders, Hans Modrow (Dresden), Rudolf Jahn (Potsdam), and Johannes Chemnitzer (Neubrandenburg), criticized Honecker for not recognizing the problems facing the country. In response the SED’s chief accused Modrow, the most vocal of the critics, of wanting to create a “platform,” that is to say, to disrupt party unity for the sake of pursuing his own agenda. [1] Now the reformers took action. Egon Krenz, Wolfgang Herger, and Günter Schabowski persuaded the other members of the Politburo that Honecker’s continued presence at the head of the SED and the GDR would endanger the stability of the regime. At the regular meeting of the Politburo on 17 October, Willi Stoph, the GDR’s long-time prime minister and a veteran Communist, introduced a resolution asking Honecker to step down as secretary general. The resolution was adopted unani- mously with Honecker himself voting for his own dismissal; officially, the secretary general resigned for reasons of health. The Politburo also expelled Joachim Herrmann, Honecker’s personal secretary, and Günter Mittag. On the next day the full Central Committee confirmed the Politburo’s action. This time there was one dissenting voice, that of Hanna Wolf, until 1983 the rector of the SED’s Advanced Training Institute (Parteihochschule) for senior cadres, a long-time ally of Honecker, and a fervent admirer of Joseph Stalin. [2] In place of Honecker the Politburo selected (technically the Politburo “recommended” the election by the Central Committee) of Egon Krenz as the SED’s new secretary general. [3] In short order Krenz also added Honecker’s state jobs to his roster of responsibilities: He became chairman of the State Council, the GDR’s “collective” presidency, and head of the National Defense Council, the body charged with formulating defense policy and overseeing the armed forces. Modrow, who was a member of the Central Committee but not of the Politburo, attempted to start a discussion of substantive issues, but a majority of the Central Committee refused. The members felt that the personnel changes were sufficient to stabilize the situation, a decision which Modrow said meant that the Central Committee had abdicated its leadership role. [4]

DOI: 10.1057/9781137574169.0006  Socialist Reformers and the Collapse of the German Democratic Republic

The, as it turned out, very short tenure of the SED’s reformers at the head of the party and the GDR began with a mixture of hope and skepti- cism. Doubts about the new man were not unwarranted. Egon Krenz was not an unknown quantity. He was a career apparatchik, until now identified within the old guard as Honecker’s protégé (Ziehkind). There were also fears that the new secretary general would advocate the “Chinese solution” to deal with the by now ubiquitous street demonstrations demanding genuine reforms. After all, he had heaped fulsome praise on the Chinese for their effective handling of the“ counter-revolutionary threat.” In many ways, then, Krenz was one of “them.” As the future economics minister, Christa Luft, put it, Krenz’s election meant that the old rulers remained among themselves. [5] On the other hand, in some ways Krenz did represent change. He was relatively young – fifty-three when he was elected secretary general – and he appreciated the importance of media relations; his constant grin quickly made him a favorite of the caricaturists. He had also avoided any association with the corruption among the SED leaders that would soon become public knowledge and discredit the old regime. Unlike his fellow Politburo members, Krenz and his wife did not live in the gated community of Wandlitz, where the top SED leaders had access to an endless supply of Western goods in special and restricted stores. Krenz and his family lived in a modest apartment in East Berlin. Initially the new secretary general and his fellow SED reformers were confident that they would usher in a new era in the history of the SED and the GDR. Günter Schabowski remembered the first eight to ten days after Honecker’s fall were “breath-taking.” There was hope of starting “a dialog with the people” and experience “genuine, direct democracy.” Gorbachev, too, was guardedly optimistic. He told Helmut Kohl, the West German chancellor, that “briefly [I] had a faint hope” that Krenz would undertake radical reforms and put relations between East and West Germany on a new footing. [6] As was customary in Communist parties, Krenz began his tenure as the SED’s secretary general with a lengthy speech to the Politburo and the Central Committee, and a few hours later he gave the same address to the people of the GDR over national television. Krenz started his remarks with expressions of gratitude and praise for his predecessor, “the steadfast anti-Fascist, the internationally respected statesman and promoter of peace.” It was a kind gesture, but it also immediately rein- forced Krenz’s ties to the old regime. As for the rest of the speech, Krenz

DOI: 10.1057/9781137574169.0006 The First Group of SED Reformers Takes Charge  announced that his election meant a Wende (turn-around) for the GDR, but his remarks were full of glittering generalities and decidedly short on specifics.Th e new secretary general reiterated some time-worn banalities. The victory of socialism was the law of history; the loudest applause in the Politburo came when Krenz announced there would be no return to capitalism in the GDR. He insisted the party had the support of the people; “our power is the power of the working class and the entire people.” He did criticize the old leadership for its unrealistic assessment of the GDR’s problems and underscored the party’s readiness for contacts and dialog with the HROs. But Krenz also reiterated that whatever changes were needed in the GDR they would be implemented by the organs of the SED, rather than through grass-roots initiatives by the HROs. In the spirit of glasnost, Krenz admitted the party should acknowledge its past mistakes. Above all, Krenz emphasized, the party had to regain the initiative on the ideological front. He repeated this point less than a week after his election as secretary general. On 24 October he sent a telegram to the SED’s district secretaries admonishing them that “a Communist must not retreat and give oppositional forces room to maneuver.” [7] Criticism of Krenz’s initial effort was not long in coming; the new secretary general was experiencing firsthand the Fehlerdiskussion he had encouraged. Complaints came from all sides: rank-and-file SED members as well as functionaries wanted to know what concrete steps the SED’s new leadership would take to solve the country’s problems. All demanded a clean break with past policies and past personnel. [8] Krenz was not getting much support from his fellow reformers either. They also complained that the course of the future reforms remained too vague. [9] The HROs, too, criticized that Krenz, like his predecessors, was treating the East Germans as immature subjects who needed to be guided along the right path by the all-knowing party. And then there were the new leader’s hardline critics. They lamented that Krenz had included no reference to the imperialist enemy and the danger of NATO aggression, or that the daily demonstrations in the East German cities were organized by the “West German enemy.” [10] There were also ad hominem attacks on other reformers from this camp. According to Alfred Neumann, the Politburo’s long-time curmudgeon who did not think much of Honecker or the reformers, Schabowski “had no clue how to lead a party organization. [He was] a Trottel in Grössenordnungen (full- blown idiot), and [before the purge] had been a primary brownnoser of Honecker (Arschlecker von Honecker).” [11]

DOI: 10.1057/9781137574169.0006  Socialist Reformers and the Collapse of the German Democratic Republic

Initially, Krenz was not particularly worried by the barrage of criticism. He placed his faith in Kaderpolitik. It had long been an axiom in Communist parties that the parties’ policies were always right. If there were problems, it was because the wrong people were at the helm implementing the correct policies. Accordingly, since the three members (in addition to Honecker) of the Politburo who in the eyes of the public and rank-and-file SED members were held most responsible for the GDR’s and the SED’s problems – Günter Mittag, Erich Mielke, and Willi Stoph – lost their positions on the Politburo, all would be well in the future. That Krenz had not broken with the old habits showed up in other ways as well. At the end of October he sent a telegram to members and candidates of the Politburo noting that the Stasi deserved “thanks and recognition of the party.” The Stasi had made it possible that “worse damage to socialism had been prevented.” The party functionaries were admonished to correct “one-sided” reports about the work of the Stasi. And if that were not enough, Krenz also approved the Stasi’s continued planning for the establishment of internment camps for “alternative thinkers (Andersdenkende),” i f rounding up such elements should prove necessary. [12] The category of Andersdenkende certainly included the members of the HROs, and the SED reformers continued to have difficulty seeing the HROs in a positive light. The HROs wanted contact and dialog with the SED reformers, and their demands increasingly dominated the political agenda, [13] but the SED reformers found it hard to jump over their own shadows. Their first reaction was to continue to deny the HROs the right to organize, but that position proved impossible to maintain. At the end of October Krenz indicated that a dialog with the New Forum would be possible, but before the group could be officially recognized it had to acknowledge the legitimacy of the SED’s political power monopoly and articulate its demands or proposals on the basis of “Marxist–Leninist positions.” Still, Krenz’s attitudes were evolving quickly. At the end of October he had come around to accepting that the HROs who recognized the legitimacy of the GDR’s constitution (and the SED’s power monopoly) should be formally recognized. [14] While Krenz was attempting to tread a fine line between encourag- ing dialog with the HROs while denying their right to act as political partners, events in the field rendered his contradictory position increasingly irrelevant. All over the GDR SED functionaries recognized that the HROs provided a key element in keeping the popular

DOI: 10.1057/9781137574169.0006 The First Group of SED Reformers Takes Charge  demonstrations peaceful and orderly; on 26 October Schabowski was the first district secretary to formally meet with representatives of the New Forum. Still, the relationship between party and HROs remained uneasy. In early November Siegfried Lorenz, the SED’s first secretary in Karl Marx Stadt (Chemnitz), was still urging that SED activists should infiltrate (gezielte Mitwirkung) the HROs in order to keep them “loyal” to the constitution. [15] A milestone of sorts in the relationship between the HROs and the SED reformers came with the massive demonstration (some 125,000 people marched) on 4 November 1989 in East Berlin. The demonstration was organized by a group of writers and actors to show support for a “better, democratic, but socialist society.” [16] The SED reformers saw the demonstration as evidence that the people supported the “turn-around” of 18 October and the renewal of socialism, [17] but this was a rather too optimistic assessment. The organizing committee had invited twenty-three speakers to address the demonstrators, including Günter Schabowski. He ended his remarks with a call “for a socialism which makes one strong because the people want it,” but his words were drowned out by loud boos. [18] Krenz’s own evaluation of the 4 November demonstration was mixed. He criticized that the participants questioned the leading role of the party, and that they did not seem to appreciate what had been accomplished in the GDR in the last forty years under the leadership of the party. But he also felt that the SED participants had given the demonstration a positive and hopeful note. [19] At the end of October and the beginning of November Krenz was still trying to tough it out. In a series of speeches before friendly audiences (Stasi functionaries and graduates of the GDR’s military academy) he reiterated that the GDR would remain socialist and independent, and that only the SED would decide what its future function in East German society would be. On that score he left no doubt that the party would retain its leading role. [20] But this was whistling in the dark. As the pressure from rank-and-file SED members increased, and the demonstrations against the regime became ever larger, even Krenz realized that something dramatic needed to be done. As was tradition, the SED reformers turned first to Kaderpolitik. At the Central Committee meetings on 8 and 9 November the Kaderpolitik dominated the discussions. [21] On 7 November Willi Stoph had resigned as prime minister and at the Central Committee meeting Krenz announced that all of the remaining members of the old

DOI: 10.1057/9781137574169.0006  Socialist Reformers and the Collapse of the German Democratic Republic

Politburo had also resigned. But replacing them proved more of a challenge than Krenz and the reformers had anticipated. Previously, under the rules of democratic centralism, members of the Politburo were coopted by that body itself, with the secretary general making the actual selections. The Central Committee had always ratified the selections without discussion or dissent. This time things were different. Reflecting the turmoil within the party, the Central Committee, an unwieldy body of 160 members and 50 candidates, insisted on discussing and voting on the individual candidates. In the subsequent balloting the Central Committee turned down several of the nominees. Others had to with- draw their names because they lost votes of confidence in their district organizations. [22] Despite Krenz’s valiant efforts to stabilize the situation with new cadres, the party base remained in turmoil. Increasingly the party members who retained their SED affiliation were distrustful of the “rejuvenated” party leadership. They demanded a special party congress which would adopt a new program and elect new leaders on a truly democratic basis. [23] Under pressure from the base, Krenz attempted to put some substance behind his promise to carry out “thorough-going reforms.” This was the background for the Action Program (Aktionsprogramm) which, according to Krenz, answered the questions about what the SED wanted and which concrete proposals the party would advance. [24] As adopted by the Central Committee the Action Program did contain some novel ideas for a Communist platform. It promised free elections, freedom of the press, more transparency in the Stasi’s activities, an independent judiciary including a constitutional court, independent unions, and educational reforms. For the economy the program proposed retaining the centralized planning system, but increasing the incentives for independent initiatives and achievement. The document alsop romised reforms to increase agricultural productivity and urged simplification of the GDR’s vast and complicated system of social subsidies. [25] But there were also some familiar aspects of Communist doctrine. These concerned above all the function of the party: There would be no change to the constitutionally mandated, leading role of the SED. The party would maintain its monopoly on political power; after all, as Krenz’s successor, Gregor Gysi, put it, the SED had important theoretical knowledge about the evolution of society. As for the economy, the Action Program emphasized the importance of managerial autonomy for the GDR’s industrial enterprises, but this premise was essentially nullified yb

DOI: 10.1057/9781137574169.0006 The First Group of SED Reformers Takes Charge  the simultaneous commitment to the system of centrally planned micro- management that had put a stranglehold on the country’s economy for the last forty years. [26] Criticism of the Action Program was not long in coming. The main complaint was that, aside from the civil rights section, it was all too vague. This was especially true for the proposals for economic reforms. Gysi, hardly a neutral commentator, admitted that there was no “action” to be seen. Still, he thought the program might have produced some results, “if we had had some time.” [27] But that was precisely what the SED reformers did not have. Within hours of the Central Committee adopting the Action Program, the opening of the Berlin Wall profoundly altered the GDR’s political landscape; the Action Program was suddenly an irrelevant piece of paper. Actually, the hope that the SED reformers were setting a credible “turn-around into action” was shattered even before then. By the time the Action Program was adopted there was a consensus inside and outside the SED that everything the reformers did was too little too late, because the new leaders remained stuck in the old ruts. [28] Honecker himself subtly undermined Krenz’s position. In his letter of resignation the old secretary general at the last moment included a recommendation that Krenz should be elected his successor. Günter Schabowski called this move the curse of the pharaoh. The SED’s chief in East Berlin also noted that among the reformers only Krenz had the confidence of the old guard. They accepted him because they trusted him to continue the old policies with new faces. [29] The party was reacting, not acting. As the president of the GDR’s Author’s Association (and member of the Central Committee), Hermann Kant, put it, “the people are pushing us and we are still talking about our leading role – that is a grandiose self- deception.” [30] Krenz himself justified his loyalty to Honecker and the old guard by comparing his position to that of Gorbachev: The Soviet leader, too, was only elected because at least initially he was unquestion- ably loyal to his predecessors. [31] In retrospect the SED’s reformers’ failure to jump over their own shadows is not surprising. The SED reformers, no less than their hardline predecessors, were men whose life revolved around the party and its self-appointed task of implementing a set of unshakable ideological truths. After his fall from power Krenz wrote that “the party was my life,” while Hermann Axen, one of Honecker’s closest allies on the Politburo, entitled his memoirs, “I was a servant of the party.” [32] For all his

DOI: 10.1057/9781137574169.0006  Socialist Reformers and the Collapse of the German Democratic Republic enthusiasm for Gorbachev’s glasnost, when the GDR media began to report on the privileges which the SED’s top leaders enjoyed while living in their Wandlitz gated community, Krenz reminded the journalists that it was the duty of the media to act as the party’s “militant partner” and not to pursue some abstract notion of freedom of the press. [33] Both the SED reformers and the HROs underestimated their ability to control events, [34] but at the beginning of November the SED reformers, unlike the HRO activists, were still able to make policy decisions. The SED reformers knew that they had to do something dramatic to gain time and political capital. So far Krenz’s promise of changes to come had done nothing to stop the continuing large-scale anti-regime demonstrations in all parts of the GDR. Consequently, on 7 November, the Politburo “recommended” to the Stasi and the minister of the interior that they draft a revised travel law which would essentially open the GDR’s borders, including the Berlin Wall, to all who wanted to leave either temporarily or permanently. [35] The new law was to go into effect on 10 November. Günter Schabowski, the Politburo’s newly minted press officer, announced the new regulation at a press conference on the early evening of 9 November. When asked by an Italian journalist when the new law would take effect, he answered, “immediately, without delay (sofort, unverzüglich).” Since 1989 those two words uttered by Schabowski have elicited much comment and criticism, but in retrospect it is clear that he only made public the Politburo’s decision to open the borders. In handing Schabowski the documentation for his press conference Krenz himself commented, “this is going to be a bombshell for us (das wird ein Knüller für uns).” [36] After Schabowski’s press conference, which was broadcast live on East German television, thousands of East Berliners went to the border crossings with West Berlin and demanded the right to exercise their newly proclaimed freedom to travel to the western part of the city. The border guards, who had no instructions what to do, eventually opened the border crossings in order to prevent either panic or bloodshed. The Berlin Wall had become porous. Remarkably, during the dramatic hours in the evening of 9 November, the SED’s leadership was paralyzed. Krenz, Schabowski, Mielke, Modrow – none of the leaders took charge; they demonstrated their incompetence in the face of this genuine crisis. The decision to open the borders, which was the SED reformers’ only really popular policy decision, [37] was intended to provide them with a much needed infusion of political capital, and initially they thought

DOI: 10.1057/9781137574169.0006 The First Group of SED Reformers Takes Charge  it might work. Modrow remembered that in November there was still a chance that the GDR might have a socialist future, and Krenz basked in the – few – expressions of praise and approval that reached his office. [38] For the moment the SED reformers worked hard, if ineffectively, to regain the initiative. On 10 November they organized a massive demonstration in East Berlin; some 150,000 people gathered to listen to speeches by the party leaders. But the participants were disappointed by what they heard from their new leaders. There was a surfeit of time- worn empty phrases. Krenz’s remarks set the tone: “We are planning great things, a revolution on German soil which will bring us a socialism that is economically effective, morally clean, and always people- centered (in allem den Menschen zugewandt).” Krenz countered criticism that so far the reformers had produced few substantive reforms with the admonition that what was needed now was “not complaints, but hard work (nicht meckern, sondern ackern).” [39] It was all to no avail. Hermann Kant, who at the secretary general’s request had written part of Krenz’s speech, concluded truthfully, “nobody wanted to hear from him or me.” [40] Things went downhill from there. On 10 November, the Central Committee, which had been in continuous session since 8 November, still seemed unable to grasp the significance of the events of the previous night. There were calls for mobilizing the Workers’ Militia (Kampfgruppen), but it quickly became clear that the workers would refuse to follow orders. A full-scale “military solution” to close the borders again was also rejected. In the end, the party leaders went back to the time-honored device of Kaderpolitik: The Central Committee accepted the resignation of what remained of the Politburo. [41] While the SED was stuck in the old ways, the opening of the Berlin Wall had profoundly altered the GDR’s political landscape in a manner which neither the SED reformers nor the HROs wanted: It put German reunification on the national and international agenda. Suddenly, some of the East German demonstrators carried placards reading not just “we are the people,” but also “we are one people.” [42] This is not what the HROs and the SED reformers wanted to hear. Neues Forum issued a statement that “the open borders do not solve any of our domestic problems.” As late as 19 December NF, DJ, IFM, the Greens, and VL called for demonstrations against “reunification, neo-fascism, and hatred fo foreigners.” Gratifying as such sentiments were, even more comforting for the SED reformers was the assurance by the Soviet ambassador in

DOI: 10.1057/9781137574169.0006  Socialist Reformers and the Collapse of the German Democratic Republic

East Berlin that Western efforts to absorb East Germany would fail because the USSR stood firmly behind the GDR. [43] These diplomatic assurances could not prevent the GDR’s domestic problems from growing worse with each day. The demonstrations demanding real reforms grew larger and more frequent, but from the SED reformers’ perspective even more ominous was that the party which Krenz implored to be united in implementing the new socialism was literally disappearing. Between January and November 1989, 66,000 SED members turned in their party membership books; between November 1989 and January 1990 the SED lost almost a million members. [44] By 20 November 1989 all of the district first secretaries had either resigned or been voted out of office; three committed suicide. [45] The reasons for the internal upheaval were not hard to find.Th e rank- and-file party members had lost confidence in their leaders’ ability to reform the SED and renovate the country. Krenz’s office was bombarded by telegrams and letters from the district and county organizations. The demands and complaints were always the same: an honest admis- sion and investigation of past mistakes, punishment of those guilty of corruption and personal gain, and a clear indication of the party’s future. Increasingly, too, there were demands for the dissolution of the SED and the creation of an entirely new party. As the leaders of the district organization in Potsdam put it, “we have no confidence in you, Comrade Krenz, or the entire leadership.” [46] Confronted with a wave of protest and distrust from the bottom, the SED reformers reacted with little more than platitudes and calls for unity. Schabowski would later complain that the think tank (his words) advising Krenz on his important speech on 10 November was narrow and ineffective: “In his [Krenz’s] inner circle I saw only the old apparatchiks scurrying around (herumschwirren), waving paper.” [47] The SED’s reformers’ failure to take charge of the deteriorating situation meant that other forces, both outside and inside the GDR, determined the political dynamics in East Germany. The so-called block parties, which for forty years had acted as junior partners of the SED, began to free themselves from the Communists’ tutelage. In mid-November one of the block parties, the Liberal-Demokratische Partei Deutschlands (Liberal Democratic Party of Germany, LDPD), introduced a resolution in the Volkskammerr to amend the GDR’s constitution by eliminating Article 1 which enshrined the SED’s political power monopoly. (The GDR’s constitution could be amended by a simple vote of the legislature.) Krenz rated

DOI: 10.1057/9781137574169.0006 The First Group of SED Reformers Takes Charge  it as a success that the SED’s delegation in the legislature “in agreement with the other parties” had rejected this initiative. [48] But that hardly ended the matter. Increasingly even within the SED there were suggestions that the party had better get used to a new role as a political force that stood among, but not above other parties. [49] The prospect of a level playing field in East German politics also put the SED reformers’ relationship with the HROs into a new perspective. But before the two sides could enter into a new relationship obstacles had to be removed – on both sides. For the HROs Krenz continued to be a representative of the old guard who could not be trusted to initiate genuine reforms. [50] The SED’s assessment of the HROs was mixed. The Communists appreciated the NF’s commitment to socialism and an independent GDR, but they were suspicious of DJ and DA. Functionaries in the Central Committee’s apparatus described DJ as an alliance of Christians and critical Marxists, and DA as a group whose commitment to an independent GDR was questionable, because the organization favored a common head of state for both the GDR and the FRG. [51]) The only HRO which the SED considered as a potential political partner was the VL, the weakest and least popular among the HROs. The SED welcomed the VL’s commitment to a “socialism of liberty and democracy” and its willingness to work together with the SED. Krenz’s evaluators even suggested that the VL be invited to submit an article outlining its program for publication in the SED’s periodical for functionaries, Einheit. [52] At the end of November the SED reformers made an effort to coopt and neutralize the HROs. The Communists proposed the establishment of a Round Table. Here representatives from the SED, the block parties, the mass organizations (all of which were controlled by the SED), and the HROs would meet and discuss topics of common interest. Krenz described the proposal rather melodramatically as an initiative “for a process which life put on the agenda.” At first glance the proposal looked like an East German copy of the Polish original, but that was decidedly not what the SED reformers had in mind. In fact, from the SED’s perspective the Polish Round Table was the “horrible example (abschreckende Beispiel).” Unlike the Polish Round Table, which acted as an independent political institution, the SED proposed that the East German Round Table would have no control functions. In addition, it was to meet infrequently, and it would be chaired by a representative of

DOI: 10.1057/9781137574169.0006  Socialist Reformers and the Collapse of the German Democratic Republic the SED. Not surprisingly, the HROs rejected this version of the Round Table. [53] Increasingly, Krenz and his supporters were eclipsed by forces outside the SED. On 28 November, the West German chancellor Helmut Kohl presented a Ten Point Program outlining the future relations between the two Germanys. Taking up Hans Modrow’s suggestion of a “treaty community” between the two countries, Kohl’s plan envisioned first a confederation between the GDR and the FRG and eventually a federal state encompassing both Germanys. The chancellor was careful not to suggest a specific timetable for this development, but Kohl had pointed to the six hundred pound gorilla in the room: German national reunification. [54] It is indicative of Krenz’s and his group’s rapid disappearance from the political scene that the SED’s Politburo offered neither a reaction nor an alternative to Kohl’s plan. [55] Instead, the East German alternative was entitled “For Our Country.” It was presented by a group of intellectuals, some of whom did not have any party affiliation. The final version of the document wast wri - ten by two of East Germany’s most famous writers, Christa Wolf and Stefan Heym. “For Our Country” was not a specific answer to Kohl’s proposal. The two documents were drafted independently and only coincidentally made public on the same day, but “For Our Country” certainly laid out a fundamentally different vision for the GDR’s future than that proposed by Helmut Kohl. The East German initiative rejected any union between the GDR and the Federal Republic. Instead, the initiators proclaimed, “We still have a chance [to create] a socialist alternative to the FRG.” [56] While the SED reformers had no part in drafting “For Our Country,” once it was made public they quickly jumped on the bandwagon. Neues Deutschland published the full text of “For Our Country” twice, and Krenz, ebullient as always, called the proclamation “the most important document of this fall.” [57] The plan’s authors had invited the people of the GDR to sign the proclamation as a sign of support for the continued existence of an independent, socialist GDR, and in the next few days more than 1,000,000 East Germans signed the document, including Krenz and Modrow. Among the signatories were also many of the HRO activists; one of the first to add his signature was DA’s Friedrich Schorlemmer. To be sure, some HRO activists refused to sign the document, not because they rejected its goals, but because they did not want their signature to appear alongside that of Egon Krenz. [58]

DOI: 10.1057/9781137574169.0006 The First Group of SED Reformers Takes Charge 

In the background materials assembled for a meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev, Hans Modrow cited the signature campaign as evidence that “the overwhelming majority (übergrosse Mehrheit)” of East Germans wanted the GDR to continue as a socialist state under the leadership of the SED reformers, [59] but this was wishful thinking. In fact, the role of the SED reformers as the leaders on the path to a better, socialist GDR was quickly coming to an end. On 1 December the GDR’s fellow-traveling legislature, the Volkskammer, voted to delete Article 1 of the country’s constitution, thereby eliminating the SED’s monopoly on political power. Two days later Krenz presided over what was to be the last meeting of the Central Committee. After expelling Honecker and some of his close associates from the Central Committee and the party, the Central Committee accepted Krenz’s resignation as secretary general. The group then dissolved itself and turned the future of the SED over to the Working Committee which had been elected at the Central Committee meeting in early November and which was in the process of planning a special party congress. This was to pre-empt growing sentiment in the party for dissolving the SED altogether and creating an entirely new organization. In a survey of rank-and file-SED members in mid-December almost half (46.2) favored the dissolution of the party. [60] Krenz attempted to hold onto his state jobs, but after a few days he also resigned as head of the Council of State and chairman of the National Defense Council. Why did Krenz and the first group of SED reformers fail? Since the disappearance of the GDR many explanations have been offered, some more convincing than others. Krenz himself claimed that because he and his fellow reformers had no knowledge about the true problems facing the party and the country, they were constantly on the defensive, reacting rather than acting throughout their brief time in office. [61] In addition, the Fehlerdiskussion brought its own problems for the SED reformers. The people of the GDR, including many rank-and-file SED members, certainly welcomed the new era of glasnost, but with glasnost came almost daily revelations of widespread corruption in the old regime, discrediting not only the old leaders, but also the reformers who had served with them for so many years. Consequently, the reformers remembered, the people of the GDR did not want a better socialism, they wanted no socialism. [62] Perhaps most important was the disconnect between the reformist leadership and the ferment among the SED’s rank-and-file members. It apparently came as a total shock to the members of the new Politburo

DOI: 10.1057/9781137574169.0006  Socialist Reformers and the Collapse of the German Democratic Republic that the rank-and-file membership did not trust them. [63] The district leader in East Berlin, Günter Schabowski, remembered, “I felt as though I were anesthetized (ich war wie betäubt); no one needed us anymore.” [64] All of the new district leaders, many of whom had just been coopted to the Politburo in early November, and most of the county leaders were quickly forced out of office by the rank-and-file members through votes of no confidence.Th is distrust led the remaining rank-and-file membership to reject Krenz’s proposal for a party conference. [65] Under the SED’s statutes, a party conference did not have the authority to make any changes in the personnel of the leadership. Those rank-and-file members who favored continuing the SED’s organizational life demanded a full- scale party congress, precisely because it would have the authority to make both fundamental personnel and policy changes.

Notes

[1] See Modrow quoted in Bortfeldt, PDS, p. 77; and Hans Modrow, Aufbruch und Ende (Hamburg, 1991), p. 19. [2] A transcript of the Politburo meeting is printed in Hertle and Stephan, Ende ... SED, pp. 166ff. See also the documentation in Best. Krenz/706. [3] In reminiscences written in March 1990 Honecker blamed tactical errors for his fall: He had underestimated the degree of dissatisfaction in the party, the ideological and propagandistic work of the GDR’s media was not up to date, and the easing of travel restrictions was hindered by “unnecessary bureaucratic [hurdles].” See Erich Honecker, Erich Honecker zu dramatischen Ereignissen (Hamburg, 1992), p. 17. [4] Modrow, Deutschland, p. 310; and Richter to Pätschke, 19 October 1989, Best. Krenz/317. [5] Luft, Wende, p. 39. [6] Schabowski, Absturz, pp. 276–77; and Gorbachev, Memoirs, p. 526. [7] SED/ZK meeting 18 October 1989, Best. SED/ZK/702. The speech is reprinted in Hertle and Stephan, Ende ... SED, pp. 106ff; and Krenz to SED district secretaries, Stasi regional leaders et al., 22 October 1989, Best. Krenz/314. See also Hans-Hermann Hertle, “Der Sturz Erich Honeckers: Zur Rekonstruktion eines innerparteilichen Machtkampfes,” in: Klaus-Dietmar Henke et al., eds, Widerstand und Opposition in der DDR (Cologne, 1999), p. 343; and Hans-Hermann Hertle, Chronik des Mauerfalls: Die dramatischen Ereignisse um den 9. November 1989, 12th ed. (Berlin, 2009), p. 87. [8] See the documentation in Best. Krenz/317. [9] Schabowski, Absturz, p. 276; and Modrow, Deutschland, p. 289.

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[10] SED/ZK meeting, 18 October 1989, Best. SED/ZK/702. (The speakers were Hans-Joachim Hoffmann and Heinz Kessler.) [11] Alfred Neumann, Poltergeist im Politbüro: Siegfried Prokop im Gespräch mit Alfred Neumann, ed. by Siegfried Prokop (Frankfurt a.O., 1996), p. 279. [12] Krenz to members and candidates of the Politburo, SED district secretaries, and department heads of the Central Committee, 30 October 1989, Best. Krenz/314. See also Michael Richter, Die Staatssicherheit im letzten Jahr der DDR (Weimar, 1996), pp. 42 and 262. [13] Geisel, 3. Wegg, pp. 89 and 119; and Schabowski, Absturz, p. 296. [14] Krenz to members and candidates of the Central Committee and the SED’s district secretaries, 31 October 1989, Best. Krenz/314. [15] SED/ZK meeting 8 November 1989, in: Hertle and Stephan, Ende ... SED, p. 198. [16] Bollinger, 1989, p. 77; and Geisel, 3. Wegg, pp. 148–49. [17] “Information für das SED-Politbüro über Stand und Vorbereitung der Demonstration auf dem Berliner Alexanderplatz am 4. November 1989, eingebracht am 31. Oktober,” in: Stephan, SED-Dokumente 1988/89, p. 198. [18] Schabowski, Absturz, p. 282; and Stolle, Aufstand, p. 187. [19] Krenz to first secretaries of the districts and counties, 4 November 91 89, Best. Krenz/314. [20] Krenz’s address to the leading Stasi generals, 22 October. 1989, quoted in Richter, Staatssicherheit, p. 32; and Krenz’s speech to the graduates of the GDR’s military academy, 30 October. 1989, Best. Krenz/314. [21] In the reprint of the meeting’s transcript in Hertle and Stephan, Ende ... SED, personnel questions take up pp. 137–72. [22] SED/ZK meeting, 8–10 November 1989, Best. SED/ZK/705. See also Ralf Georg Reuth and Andreas Bönte, Das Komplott: Wie es wirklich zur deutschen Einheit kam (Munich, 1993), pp. 151–52; Günter Schabowski, Das Politbüro: Ende eines Mythos, ed. by Frank Sieren and Ludwig Koehne (Reinbek b. Hamburg, 1990), p. 198; Rödder, Vaterland, p. 100; and Modrow, Deutschland, p. 318. [23] SED/ZK meeting, 8–10 November 1989, Best. SED/ZK/704. See also Hertle and Stephan, “Einführung,” in: Ende...SED, p. 62; Reuth and Bönte, Komplott, p. 146; F. Klein, Drinnen, pp. 340–41; and Uschner, Etage, p. 150. [24] Egon Krenz, Herbst ‘89 (Berlin, 1999), p. 173. [25] Rochus, Utopie, pp. 152–53. [26] Krenz’s address to the Central Committee, 8 November 1989, in: Hertle and Stephan, Ende ... SED, pp. 188 and 216; and Gysi and Falkner, Sturm, pp. 44–45. [27] Bollinger, 1989, p. 146. [28] Michael Brie (head of the research project Historical Materialism at the Humboldt University) quoted in, Knabe, Aufbruch, p. 184; Schabowski,

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Absturz, pp. 276, 290–91, and 312–15; and Siegfried Lorenz and Hans- Joachim Hoffmann quoted in Zimmermann, Funktionäre, pp. 129. [29] Ibid. [30] Kant speaking at the Central Committee meeting, 9 November 1989, in: Hertle and Stephan, Ende ... SED, p. 276. [31] See Küchenmeister et al., Sofort, p. 80. (The source is Markus Wolf.) [32] Krenz, Herbst ‘89, p. 66; and Hermann Axen, Ich ear ein Diener der Patei: Autobiographische Gespräche mit Harald Neubertt (Berlin, 1996) . [33] SED/ZK meeting, 9 November 1989, and Krenz to Central Committee, 8 November 1989, Best. Krenz/706–07. [34] Jens Reich, one of the founders of Neues Forum, admitted after the collapse of the GDR, “the people used us as a battering ram (Rammblock) to open the door [to democracy and reunification] and then they cast us aside.” Quoted in Rödder, Vaterland, pp. 122–23. [35] Küchenmeister et al., Sofort, p. 33; and Hertle, Mauerfall, pp. 108–09. [36] Schabowski, Absturz, p. 306. [37] Schabowski, PB, p. 139, and Wir haben fast alles falsch gemacht: Die letzten Tage der DDR, 3rd. ed. (Berlin, 2009), p. 39; and Reuth and Bönte, Komplott, p. 212. [38] SED/ZK [Abteilung Parteifragen], “Fünfte Auswertung der Zuschriften an den Staatsrat zur Entwicklung in der DDR,” 27 November 1989, Best. Krenz/317; and Modrow, Aufbruch, p. 118. [39] Quoted in Neubert, Revolution, p. 232. See also Egon Krenz, “Der 9. November 1989: Unfall oder Logik der Geschichte?” in: Prokop, Utopie, p. 86. [40] Hermann Kant, Abspann: Erinnerungen an meine Gegenwartt (Berlin, 1991), p. 115. [41] Jens Reich, “Ich habe mich in der DDR nie zuhause gefühlt,” in: Jesse, Revolution, pp. 35–36; Küchenmeister et al., Sofort, pp. 37 and 43; and Hertle, Mauerfall, pp. 118, 186–87, 206–07, 210, and 227. [42] SED/ZK, Abteilung Parteiorgane, “Aktuelle politische Lage in der DDR,” 27 November 1989, Best. Krenz/317. [43] Kotschamassov, “Ratschläge an Krenz,” 16 November 1989, Best. Krenz/314; Stolle, Aufstand, pp. 217, 219, and 269; and Rochus, Utopie, p. 209. [44] Krenz to SED first secretaries of the districts and counties [1 December 1989], Best. Krenz/314. See also Wilfriede Otto, “Widerspruch und abweichendes Verhalten in der SED,” in: Enquête-Kommission des Deutschen Bundestages, ed., Aufarbeitung von Geschichte und Folgen der SED-Diktatur in Deutschlandd (Baden-Baden, 1995), VII/2: 1480. [45] Hertle and Stephan, “Einführung,” in: Ende ...SED, pp. 84–85. [46] SED/District Potsdam to Krenz, 1 December 1989, Best. Krenz/317. A collection of letters and telegrams from the districts and counties is in, ibid.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137574169.0006 The First Group of SED Reformers Takes Charge 

[47] Schabowski, Absturz, pp. 318–19. [48] Krenz to the first secretaries of the SED districts and counties, 16 November 1989, Best. Krenz/314. [49] Hans-Jürgen Audehm (SED district leader in Schwerin) to Krenz, 17 November 1989, Best. Krenz/317; and the contributions at the SED/ZK meeting, 9 November 1989 by Modrow and Possner in: Hertle and Stephan, Ende ... SED, p. 285 and 319. [50] David Gill and Heinz Küchler (DJ) to H. Klein (a member of the Volkskammer), 19 November 1989, Best. Krenz/326. [51] N.a., “Zu den Aufrufen der Bürgerbewegung,” ca. November 1989, ibid.; and SED/ZK, Abteilung Parteiorgane, “Anlage 1,” ca. 28 November 1989, ibid./317. [52] Uwe Stelbrink to Krenz, 27 November 1989, ibid./326. [53] Krenz to first secretaries of the SED districts and counties, 22 November 1989, ibid./314; SED/ZK, Abteilung Parteiorgane, “Anlage 2,” 24 November 1989, and “Zum Runden Tisch,” ca. 28 November 1989, ibid./317. [54] Helmut Kohl, Erinnerungen, 1982–1990 (Munich, 2005), pp. 990–99, and Mauerfall, pp. 10–11; and Michael Mertes, “Die Entstehung des Zehn- Punkte-Programms vom 28. November 1989,” in: Heiner Timmermann, ed., Die DDR in Deutschland: Ein Rückblick auf 50 Jahre (Berlin, 2001), p. 34. The “10 Points” are reprinted in Rödder, Vaterland, pp. 139–40. [55] Gysi and Falkner, Sturm, p. 51; Heinz Kessler, Zur Sache und zur Person: Erinnerungen (Berlin, 1996), p. 317. [56] See Weiss, “Macht,” p. 52; Rochus, Utopie, p. 216; and Schorlemmer and Gysi, Bleiben, p. 80. [57] Krenz to the initiators of the proclamation “For Our Country,” 29 October 1989, Best. Krenz/314, and Herbst ‘89, p. 331. [58] Petzold, Parteinahme, p. 361; F. Klein, Drinnen, p. 342; and Ilko Sascha Kowalczuk, Endspiel: Die Revolution von 1989 in der DDR (Munich, 2009), pp. 483–84. [59] “Vorbereitungsmaterial von...Modrow ...für ein Gespräch mit...Gorbatschov ...4. Dezember 1989 in Moskau,” in: Detlef Nakath et al, eds, “Im Kreml brennt noch Licht”: Die Spitzenkontakte zwischen SED/PDS und KPdSU, 1989–1991 (Berlin, 1998), p. 73, doc. 5. [60] Eckard Jesse and Jürgen P. Lang, Die Linke: Der smarte Extremismus einer deutschen Partei (Munich, 2008), p. 35. [61] Krenz at the Central Committee meeting, 3 December 1989, in: Hertle and Stephan, Ende ... SED, p. 465. See also Rochus, Utopie, p. 173; and Bortfeldt, PDS, p. 131. [62] Schabowski, PB, p. 140; Modrow, Perestroika, p. 88; and “Interview with Gustav Just,” 14 July 1991, GDR/OHP, box 4.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137574169.0006  Socialist Reformers and the Collapse of the German Democratic Republic

[63] See the documentation in Best. Krenz/344. [64] Schabowski, Politbüro, p. 149. See also Neubert, Revolution, p. 261; and Thomas Klein, “Reform von oben? Opposition in der SED,” in: Poppe, Eckert, and Kowalczuk, Selbstbehauptungg, p. 139. [65] See Krenz’s remarks at the Central Committee meeting, 10 November 1989, in: Hertle and Stephan, Ende ... SED, p. 426. See also Reuth and Bönte, Komplott, p. 154.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137574169.0006 6 A New Group of SED Reformers Tries Its Luck

Abstract: This chapter covers the few months in the fall and winter of 1989/90, during which a new group attempted to preserve an independent and socialist GDR. Led by Hans Modrow, this group recognized the futility of trying to hold onto the SED’s political power monopoly. Instead, these reformers relied on their control of the state apparatus to institute their program of reformed socialism in the GDR. This second group of reformers was no more successful than the first. With the country’s borders now open, Modrow and his allies no longer controlled the GDR’s future. The possibility of German reunification moved onto the national and international agenda. And in the GDR’s first genuinely free elections in March 1990 the voters decisively rejected any form of socialism in favor of union with West Germany.

Orlow, Dietrich. Socialist Reformers and the Collapse of the German Democratic Republic. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. doi: 10.1057/9781137574169.0007.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137574169.0007   Socialist Reformers and the Collapse of the German Democratic Republic

The SED’s future now lay with the Working Committee which had the task of preparing for the party’s special congress. The group consisted of twenty-five members, and it was dominated by the newly democratically elected district first secretaries. All of the district leaders were members of the Working Committee; it was headed by Herbert Kroker from Erfurt. The other members represented a variety of occupational interests ranging from an economist (Dieter Klein) to the former head of the Stasi’s espio- nage unit (Markus Wolf). The members of the Working Committee had different ideas on what the party congress should do, but they were united in their determination that the old guard (and that included Krenz) should play no role in organizing or leading the congress. Here they succeeded completely. Only two members of the old Politburo were even elected as delegates to the congress by their district organizations – Krenz and Schabowski – but neither played a role in the deliberations. [1] In mid- December the special congress, long demanded by the SED’s rank-and-file members and long resisted by Krenz, took place in Berlin. Recognizing the signs of the future, the congress abolished the time-honored institutions of Central Committee and Politburo, replacing them with a presidium. The delegates also renamed the party the SED/Partei desdemokratischen Sozialismus (Party of Democratic Socialism, SED/PDS). Before the congress met Modrow had expressed the hope that the deliberations would not be a “grand judgment of the past (das grosse Gericht),” but a congress of “new thinking.” [2] That hope was only partially realized. The delegates cheered a contribution by Michael Schumann, a law professor at the GDR’s Academy for Political and Legal Sciences, somewhat clumsily entitled, “On the Crisis in Society and its Reasons, on the Responsibility of the SED.” Schumann blamed the party’s present problems on the SED’s Stalinist structures which had led to abuses of power, corruption, arbitrariness (Selbstherrlichkeit), and the persecution of “alternative thinkers (Andersdenkende),” t he SED’s reformers’ term for the HRO activists. Schumann did not blame the party’s rank-and-file members (who were sitting in front of him), but held the deposed leaders “personallypyy [sic]” responsible for the GDR’s and the SED’s crisis. [3] Two years later Günter Benser, the last director of the SED’s Institute for Marxism–Leninism and one of the authors of the paper delivered by Schumann, still thought the address was a “respect- able accomplishment.” [4] The SED/PDS’s leadership was a mixture of the familiar and the new. The party chairman (the post of secretary general was also abolished)

DOI: 10.1057/9781137574169.0007 A New Group of SED Reformers Tries Its Luck  was Gregor Gysi, a complete newcomer to East German politics; he first appeared on the political scene as a member of the Working Committee. Gysi, a charismatic personality and first-rate orator, had been a member of the SED, but played no role in party affairs before 1989. In fact, as a lawyer in private practice he had defended many leaders of the human rights organizations. [5] Gysi took great pains to create a custom-tailored pre-history for the new party. The villain of the moment was Egon Krenz, whom Gysi accused of repeatedly violating the SED’s statutes. In contrast, Erich Honecker, who was now without political office and under criminal indictment, became an elder statesman whose “historic merits (historische Verdienste)” should not be denied. [6] The new party’s two vice-chairmen represented continuity with the old group of SED reformers. They were Ludwig Berghofer, the mayor of Dresden, and Hans Modrow, the SED’s district leader in that city and, since 13 November 1989, the GDR’s prime minister. Berghofer had become known for arranging a “security partnership” in Dresden between the city administration, the HROs, and the demonstrators in the street that had preserved the peace in the city. [7] The new party proclaimed itself to be a democratic, parliamentary party which no longer claimed to embody the laws of history. Instead, the SED/PDS saw itself as an integral part of the German left, which included the Social Democrats. There was little mention of Lenin at the congress, but Eduard Bernstein and Karl Kautsky, until now denounced as renegades, opportunists, and traitors to the working class, were welcomed back into the pantheon of respected pioneers of German working class politics. The new party’s proposed program, which was based on a “platform” submitted to the congress by three SED rank-and-file members working at the Television Electronics Factory, was a typical “third way” document. It endorsed representative democracy, human rights, and the “self-realization of the individual,” and rejected both “administrative-centralized socialism” and free-wheeling private enterprise. Instead, the party program wanted to keep collective ownership of the dominant sectors of the economy, while creating a decentralized “free-planned economy (freie Planwirtschaft)” that would shift major decision-making functions to individual enterprises. [8] The SED/PDS also welcomed joint ventures with Western companies. (Such plans were not universally welcomed. Demonstrating that he held fast to the old ways, the delegate Norbert Nowakowski objected to any cooperation with capitalist enterprises

DOI: 10.1057/9781137574169.0007  Socialist Reformers and the Collapse of the German Democratic Republic because it “would end in social democracy.” ) [9] On the national question the party’s primary focus was the preservation of the GDR as an independent and sovereign country. Reunification with West Germany, according to Gysi, would mean the rise of a new Greater German Reich and the destabilization of international relations in Europe. [10] Criticism of the congress’s programmatic efforts was not long in coming. In an effort to assure intra-party democracy the new party permitted the creation of so-called platforms within its overall organization. Almost immediately, a number of such platforms – the Third Way, the Social Democratic Study Circle, the Communist Platform – sprouted like mushrooms after a rainfall. All criticized the SED/PDS’s leadership either for going too far or not going far enough in creating the party’s new image. [11] The critics noted that the delegates discussed a potential program at great length, but such a document was never formally adopted. Not surprisingly, the concept of a “free, planned economy” was described as an oxymoron. One prominent delegate, the later party chairman Michael Brie, complained that the SPD’s new program did a better job of expressing the goals of democratic socialism than the SED/ PDS. [12] Within a few months the party abandoned its efforts to square the circle and endorsed the free market economy provided it was coupled with social safeguards and effective ecological measures. [13] The SED/PDS would eventually morph into the present-day Left Party and become a significant player in the politics of the reunited Germany. At the end of 1989, however, the party’s future was decidedly unclear. Gregor Gysi admitted that the party had done very little planning for the time after the special congress. [14] The founding meeting was also not able to stem the flood of resignations, including some of the just elected new leaders. Ludwig Berghofer and the entire leadership of the Dresden district organization, with the exception of Hans Modrow, resigned in mid-January. The party activists who remained loyal to the party increasingly demanded a totally new beginning. They wanted to dissolve the SED/PDS altogether and create an entirely new organization, but here the leaders balked. They feared that creating an entirely new organization would jeopardize their control of the SED’s still formidable financial assets. [15] The party also had no answers for the looming national question. Officially, the SED/PDS continued to endorse a “contractual community (Vertragsgemeinschaft) between two sovereign German states. As this concept increasingly lost support among the East German people, the

DOI: 10.1057/9781137574169.0007 A New Group of SED Reformers Tries Its Luck  party, or more specifically Gysi, hoped that international pressure would be able to prevent German reunification. In the course of December, Gysi met with Gorbachev, the French president François Mitterand, and the vice-chairman of the West German Social Democrats, Egon Bahr. Each told Gysi what the SED/PDS chairman wanted to hear: Only a strong SED/PDS could prevent chaos in the GDR. [16] But the SED/PDS was no longer in control of East German politics. Soon the new party would have to be content with being a minority East German regional party in a reunited Germany. While the SED/PDS was attempting to find its way in the GDR’s political landscape, a new group of Communist reformers turned to the other bastion of SED influence and power, the state apparatus, to implement their vision of reformed socialism in the GDR. [17] This group was led by Hans Modrow, who became the GDR’s prime minister in mid-November. Modrow’s election as prime minister still followed the time-worn scenario: He was nominated by the SED’s Politburo on 7 November 1989 and the selection was duly rubberstamped by the still thoroughly unrep- resentative Volkskammer six days later. Although they shared a passion for jogging, Krenz and Modrow were uneasy allies. Krenz was reported to have told Willy Stoph, Modrow’s predecessor as prime minister, “Willy, there is no other way; we have to take Modrow.” [18] Although the new prime minister came to personify a path of SED reformism that was different from that of Krenz and his allies, until the fall of 1989 Modrow’s career path was actually that of a typical party apparatchik. Modrow was born in 1928 and served in the Wehrmacht on the Eastern front during World War II. He became a prisoner of war, and was selected by the Soviets for attendance at one of the Comintern’s anti-fascist schools. Upon his return to Germany he joined the SED and subsequently spent his entire working life as a party functionary, eventually rising to the post of SED district leader in Dresden. Modrow’s reputation as an SED reformer began in the 1980s. He was an early, enthusiastic supporter of Gorbachev’s reforms and urged the SED to follow the Russian leader’s example. This earned him the ire fo the SED’s old guard; Honecker made sure that Modrow was not elected a member of the Politburo. Modrow also became something of a poster child for East German reforms in the West. The Western media dubbed him the German Gorbachev, an attribute that did not improve Modrow’s standing with Honecker. [19] Unlike most of his fellow functionaries in the SED, whose travels, especially in Western countries, were tightly

DOI: 10.1057/9781137574169.0007  Socialist Reformers and the Collapse of the German Democratic Republic scripted, Modrow actually seemed to enjoy the repartee with Western reporters and politicians. Western politicians in turn were not sparing in their praise of Modrow. Willy Brandt called him “a man of integrity,” an d the later US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, wrote that hopes for reforms in the Soviet bloc rested upon the shoulders of men like Hans Modrow. [20] After his election as prime minister Modrow tried hard to convince the East Germans that he believed in political pluralism, and that he would be a genuine father of his country, not subject to the dictates of any party. He later wrote that he realized very quickly that the SED’s political power monopoly would have to end. [21] Although Modrow was proud that for many he represented the hope for a new beginning in the GDR, [22] his government’s tenure was actually marked more by continuity than by a break with the past. Modrow did reduce the bloated cabinet from forty-four to twenty- eight ministers, but the SED/PDS held onto a majority of the posts: seventeen out of twenty-eight. Nine of the cabinet members were hold-overs from the Stoph government, including the ministers for the environment and the foreign minister. Modrow, like virtually all SED reformers, was also convinced that the key to the GDR’s future lay in a continued close relationship with the Soviet Union, which meant tying the fate of East Germany to an increasingly weakened pillar of support. [23] Modrow may have seen himself as a servant of the people of the GDR, but he was rather reluctant to ask for a democratic mandate from the people. On assuming office he expressed the hope that parliamentary elections would not need to be scheduled until the middle of 1991, although he admitted that the fall of 1990 was more realistic. [24] (Actually, as it turned out, the parliamentary elections were held in March 1990.) Despite his best efforts, the question of national reunification dogged Modrow’s tenure. Initially, Modrow, like Krenz, insisted the GDR would solve its problems on its own without input from West Germany, but the political dynamics quickly demonstrated that the GDR and the FRG would need to establish a new relationship. Buoyed by the seem- ing success of the proclamation “For our Country,” Mo d row t h ou ght he had popular support for expanding his concept of a “treaty community” between East and West Germany into some form of confederation. He also thought he had two years to reach this goal. [25] This, too, proved to be an illusion. Less than a year after Modrow came into ffio ce the GDR had been absorbed by the FRG.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137574169.0007 A New Group of SED Reformers Tries Its Luck 

Despite his charismatic personality and genuine popularity Modrow labored under a number of political liabilities. One of these was his and his government’s relationship to the SED and later the SED/PDS. On the one hand Modrow tried hard to present himself and his cabinet as a broad-based coalition serving the people, not a party. To underscore his commitment to democracy Modrow endorsed eliminating Article 1 of the constitution. The prime minister and his government were also proud that the cabinet neither sought nor received advice and instruction from the SED’s Politburo and Central Committee when those bodies were still in existence. [26] At the same time, Modrow remained vice-chairman of the SED/PDS and, somewhat reluctantly, he also agreed to head the party’s list of candidates for the GDR’s first free parliamentary elections in March 1990. As he and others later admitted, nothing depleted Modrow’s political capital as a genuine reformer more than his mistaken attempt to continue the existence of the Stasi under the guise of an Office for National Security (Amt für Nationale Sicherheit) (quickly dubbed the Nasi by pundits and people). To be sure, Modrow’s government dismantled the Ministry for State Security; the new Nasi would be part of the Ministry of the Interior. But the Nasi’s mission statement and its functionary corps aroused justified suspicions that the new agency would be little more than the Stasi under a new name. Modrow defined the Nasi’s primary purpose as the observation and control of the enemies of socialism, and as head of the Nasi he selected one of Mielke’s trusted associates, Lieutenant General Wolfgang Schwanitz. It did not help that the functionaries of the new internal security service continued to see themselves primarily as true servants of the SED/PDS. [27] After all, the Stasi’s motto had been “sword and shield of the party.” Protests set in almost immediately. Massive popular demonstrations and spokespersons for the HROs demanded the dissolution of the Nasi before it could begin to function. [28] Modrow backtracked. In mid-December the prime minister proposed dividing the Nasi into two separate agencies, an Office for the Protection of the Constitution and a civilian Intelligence Service (Nachrichtendienst). The focus of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution was to be the emerging neo-fascist groups in the GDR, but the office was also interested in those advocating “premature” national reunification. It was all too little, too late. When angry demonstrators occupied the Stasi’s headquarters in East Berlin, Modrow gave up. He conceded that in his administration there would be no internal security apparatus. [29]

DOI: 10.1057/9781137574169.0007  Socialist Reformers and the Collapse of the German Democratic Republic

Modrow knew that fundamental economic reforms were needed if the GDR was to survive as a viable state. [30] He attempted to set the stage for change by selecting as his economics minister Christa Luft, the rector of the Advanced Institute for Economics (Hochschule für Ökonomie). Luft’s institute was not an SED-affiliated institution, but a state-run office, which, according to Modrow, had already done some useful work on the needed reforms. (Modrow noted that the SED-affiliated research institutes “had nothing to offer” in the way of useable proposals. [31] Ironically, the new minister of economics’ husband, Hans Luft, had for many years been a department head at one of the major SED-affiliated research institutes, the Academy for Social Sciences.) Modrow and Luft wanted to create a “socialist market economy” in the GDR, a concept that Modrow later admitted was not unlike being a little pregnant. [32] In testimony before the Round Table Luft indicated that the future economic organization would continue to be based on state-run enterprises and an office of central planning, although the decisions of the central apparatus would be subject to genuine democratic control. [33] Luft and Modrow expected theirg oals to be accomplished by a combination of joint ventures with Western companies, greater autonomy for the GDR’s Kombinate, and curtailments in the GDR’s system of elaborate social subsidies – all this without cutting benefits for the people. Theg overnment hoped to achieve its economic reforms in three or four years. [34] The “socialist market economy” concept was doomed from the start. In addition to the unrealistic timetable, the lack of concrete plans, and the Western investors’ lack of interest in putting money into a failed state-controlled economy, there were the inherent contradictions of the project. It made no sense, for example, to retain the Central Planning Agency in what was to be a decentralized economy. (Recognizing this, in late December the Modrow government abolished the office.) Christa Luft also noted sarcastically that the CEOs of the newly autonomous Kombinate turned out to be enthusiastic disciples of Ludwig Erhard, the father of the West German “economic miracle” in the 1950s. They exhibited the manner- isms if not the capabilities of private entrepreneurs. [35] In the end, the Modrow economic reforms were a failure, although in retrospect Luft saw a bright spot on the Modrow government’s bleak economic landscape: By introducing the East German people to the ideas of a market economy, the Modrow government had smoothed the transition to the free enterprise system that would come with German reunification. [36]

DOI: 10.1057/9781137574169.0007 A New Group of SED Reformers Tries Its Luck 

Modrow’s relationship to the HROs was a work in progress with pitfalls along the way. The prime minister and hisg overnment did reach out to the HROs in a number of ways. This began with a change in the SED’s traditional view of the HROs as part of the “enemy picture (Feindbild).” Instead of classifying the HROs as agents of imperialism, Modrow and his designated Nasi chief, Wolfgang Schwanitz, proposed a “security partnership” with groups that supported “democratic socialism.” [37] The minister of the interior in Modrow’s cabinet, Lothar Arendt, promised greater transparency in government operations and an end to the progressive militarization of East German society, both major concerns of the HROs. [38] After initially ignoring the Round Table (RT), Modrow appeared several times before the RT, the body on which the leaders of the HROs and the old parties were represented. There was also ga reement on the principles of economic reforms. This was because initially the HRO leaders and the Modrow government were committed to a state- controlled economy for the GDR. When Christa Luft appeared before the RT to attest that the GDR would remain a “sovereign, socialist state” in which the state-owned (officially “people’s owned”) enterprises would dominate the means of production, Wolfgang Ullmann, DJ’s chairman, noted that he “agreed without reservation” with this statement. [39] Still, some of the old HRO leaders complained that Modrow did not really accept them as political partners. They charged that the prime minister ignored the RT until it was obvious that he needed the HROs’ support in order to stabilize the political situation in the GDR. Modrow vigorously denied the charge. [40] Understandably, Modrow and the HROs were most at loggerheads over the issue of the internal security apparatus. The HROs were deeply suspicious of any successor organization to the Stasi, and on 27 December 1989 an overwhelming majority of the RT demanded that the government suspend any efforts to perpetuate an internal security office. [41] As we saw, reluctantly Modrow acceded to the RT’s demand. If the conflict over the Nasi represented the nadir in the relations between Modrow and the HROs, the formation of a Government of National Responsibility was the high point. On 28 January, Modrow asked representatives of the HROs to join his government as ministers without portfolio. All of the HROs agreed (VL withdrew its agreement one day later), although some retained reservations about the decision. The HROs complained that the proposal that they join the government as ministers without portfolio gave them little actual authority or

DOI: 10.1057/9781137574169.0007  Socialist Reformers and the Collapse of the German Democratic Republic decision-making power. The prime minister defended his decision by yet another reference to the lack of time: There was simply not enough time, Modrow claimed, for the HRO leaders to master the knowledge needed for substantive decision-making. In addition, giving the HROs responsibility for specific ministries would have meant reshuffling the cabinet leading to increased instability. [42] In the end it was all a case of what might have been. In retrospect Modrow thought something could have been accomplished by working together with people like Wolfgang Ullmann (DJ) and Rainer Eppelmann (DA and later SdP), but “we [the SED reformers] did not seize the opportunity.” [43] Assessments of Modrow’s brief tenure as leader of the GDR cover a wide spectrum. He was certainly not the man who set East Germany on its way to democratic socialism, as some had hoped. [44] There are those who give him and his government credit for preventing chaos and societal disintegration, and preparing the way for the free elections of March 1990. [45] But there are also the critics. Some claim that he attempted to perpetuate the rule of the SED, albeit with a democratic veneer and improved public relations. These critics insist that he surrounded himself with old SED apparatchiks and that the program of the Modrow government was little more than the SED’s Action Program of early November 1989. Even Christa Luft, who certainly admired Modrow, thought he had selected too many of the old faces for his cabinet. [46] Others claim that Modrow stabbed the idea of an independent, socialist GDR in the back, when in February 1990 he jumped on the patriotic bandwagon with his call for “Germany, united fatherland.” Modrow thought he had no choice. In a meeting with Gorbachev at the end of January he acknowledged that a majority of East Germans wanted national reunification. So“ it seems that it has become impossible to preserve the Republic.” [47] And then there are those who contend that whatever Modrow might have done, it was all irrelevant, because by this time Gorbachev had already decided to sacrifice the GDR in favor of better relations with and financial help from the Federal Republic. [48] While Hans Modrow and his government were trying, unsuccessfully, to steer the GDR in the direction of the third way, this was also the time for the fifteen minutes of fame for the HROs and the institution they dominated, the Berlin Round Table. Actually, there were numerous regional and local Round Tables throughout the GDR, but the Central Round Table meeting in Berlin was the most important. Deliberating from December 1989 until March 1990, this was the body which Egon

DOI: 10.1057/9781137574169.0007 A New Group of SED Reformers Tries Its Luck 

Krenz had tried to prevent from coming into existence. A similar institution in Poland had been instrumental in ending Communist rule, and as Krenz noted on several occasions, “my model is Gorbachev, not Poland.” [49]

Notes

[1] Bollinger, 1989, pp. 283–84; Stolle, Aufstand, p. 252; Bortfeldt, PDS, p. 132; and Hertle and Stephan, “Einführung,” in: SED...Ende, p. 93. [2] Modrow, “Ausführungen...Modrows anlässlich...Diensteinführung...Schwanitz als Leiter [Nasi],” 21 November 1989, in: Stephan, SED-Dokumente 1988/89, p. 264. [3] Quoted in, Bortfeldt, PDS, p. 143. See also SED/PDS, Ausserordentlicher Parteitag der SED/PDS: Protokoll der Beratungen am 8./9. und 16./17. Dezember 1989 in Berlin, ed. by Detlev Nakath et al. (Berlin, 1989). [4] Günter Benser, DDR – gedenkt ihrer mit Nachsichtt (Berlin, 2000), p. 435. [5] For a brief biography of Gysi see Elitz, Profile, pp. 212ff. [6] “Vermerk über ein Gespräch...Gysi...mit...Jakowlew [member of the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union]...14. Dezember 1989,” in: Nakath, Licht, p. 115, doc. 14. [7] Bortfeldt, PDS, p. 136. [8] Rochus, “3. Weg,” pp. 103, 178–79, and 189–91; and Gysi and Falkner, Sturm, pp. 104–05. [9] SED/PDS Parteitagg, December 1989, p. 103. [10] Ibid., p. 302 (Gysi). See also Reuth and Bönte, Komplott, pp. 192–93 and 208. [11] Gero Neugebauer, “Von der SED zur PDS 1989 bis 1990,” in: Andreas Herbst, ed., Die SED: Geschichte, Organisation, Politikk (Berlin, 1997), pp. 110–11. [12] Gysi and Falkner, Sturm, pp. 57 and 108; and Bortfeldt, PDS, p. 146. [13] Bortfeldt, PDS, p. 60. Bortfeldt is quoting from the SED/PDS platform for the March 1990 parliamentary elections in the GDR. [14] Gysi, Sturm, p. 114. [15] Uwe Thaysen, Der Runde Tisch- oder: Wo blieb das Volk: Der Weg der DDR in die Demokratie (Opladen, 1990), pp. 119–20; and Bortfeldt, PDS, p. 166. [16] Gregor Gysi, Ein Blick zurück, ein Schritt nach vorn (Hamburg, 2001), pp. 39 and 45–46, and Gysi and Falkner, Sturm, p. 136. [17] Modrow, Deutschland, p. 329; and Krenz at the Central Committee meeting, 3 December 1989, in: Stephan, SED-Dokumente 1988/89, p. 272. [18] Karl-Heinz Arnold, Schild und Schwert: Das Ende von Stasi und Nasi (Berlin, 1995), p. 105; and Modrow, Deutschland, p. 253. [19] Modrow, Deutschland, p. 237; and Bollinger, 1989, p. 147. For Western criticism of Modrow’s role as an SED functionary see Kohl, Mauerfall, p. 63.

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[20] Willy Brandt quoted in Nakath, Deutschlandpolitiker, p. 60. See also Andreas P. Hamberger, “Ein ‘Dolchstoss’ ? Über das vermeintliche Demokratiekonzept Modrows und die Wiedervereinigung,” in: Prokop, Utopie, pp. 100–101; Neubert, Revolution, p. 67; and Philip D. Zelikov and Condoleezza Rice, Germany Unified and Europe Transformed: Study in Statecraftft (Cambridge, MA, 1995), p. 110. [21] Modrow, Aufbruch, pp. 38–39 and 56. [22] SED/ZK meeting, 8 November 1989, Best. SED/ZK/705. See also Thaysen, Tisch, p. 163. [23] Schabowski, Tage, p. 179; and Modrow, Deutschland, p. 425. [24] Modrow, “Ausführungen...Schwanitz,” in: Stephan, SED-Dokumente 1988/89, p. 258. [25] Ibid., p. 257; and Modrow, Aufbruch, pp. 119 and 125. [26] Modrow, Aufbruch, p. 28; and Luft, Wende, p. 155. [27] Government of the GDR, “Information für den Runden Tisch,” 5 January 1990, in: Thaysen, RT, V: 64–67, doc. 6/5. For Modrow’s justification of the Nasi see Aufbruch, pp. 33–34, and for the details of the Nasi’s convoluted history, Richter, Staatssicherheit; and Gerda Haufe, “Die Bürgerbewegungen im Jahr 1990,” in: Haufe and Karl Bruckmeier, eds., Die Bürgerbewegungen in der DDR und den ostdeutschen Bundesländern (Opladen, 1993), pp. 98–99. [28] Thaysen, RTT, II:304 (Schnur), 15 January 1990, II:384 (Schult), 3 January 1990; and the discussion in III:752–53, 12 February 1990. See also the documentation in ibid., V:95ff, docs.7 /6, 7/7, and 9/8. [29] Jesse, Linke, p. 38. [30] Modrow offered his assessment of the GDR’s economicp roblems in his remarks at the meeting of the SED’s Central Committee, 9 November 1989, in: Hertle and Stephan, Ende ... SED, pp. 288–89. [31] Modrow, Aufbruch, pp. 31 and 37. For Modrow’s praise of Luft see Deutschland, p. 341. [32] Modrow, Deutschland, p. 338. [33] Thaysen, RTT, II:264 (Luft), 3 January 1990. See also Wenzel, “Reinhold,” pp. 322 and 324. [34] Modrow, Aufbruch, pp. 42ff; Luft,Wende , pp. 99, 102, and 108; and Rochus, Utopie, pp. 87–88, 160 and 173. [35] Modrow, Aufbruch, p. 35; and Luft, Wende, p. 80. [36] Luft, Wende, pp. 12 and 89–93. [37] Richter, Stasi, p. 54. [38] Thaysen, RTT, II:875–76 (Arendt), 15 January 1990. [39] Ibid., II:271 (Ullmann), 3 January 1990. [40] Th. Klein, “Vereinigungen,” in: Gerd-Rüdiger Stephan et al., eds, Die Parteien und Organisationen der DDR (Berlin, 2002), p. 218; and Thaysen, RTT, II:489 and 793 (Modrow), 22 January and 19 February. 1990.

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[41] Richter, Stasi, pp. 123 and 158–59. [42] Modrow, Aufbruch, p. 81; Luft, Wende, pp. 151ff; and André Hahn, Der Runde Tisch, das Volk und die Macht: Politische Kultur im letzten Jahr der DDR (Berlin, 1998), p. 115. [43] Hans Peter Schütt, “Gespräch mit Modrow, November 1997,” in: Modrow, Deutschland, p. 11. [44] Gysi, Blick, pp. 300–301; and Kohl, Mauerfall, p. 182. [45] Luft, Wende, pp. 11 and 153–54. [46] Ibid., pp. 47–48; Hamberger, “Modrow,” pp. 100ff; Stolle, Ausfstand, p. 300; and Uwe Thaysen, “Fortwirkende Massnahmen der Regierung Modrow,” in: Enquete-Kommission, Aufarbeitungg, VII/2: 1996–2007. [47] Gorbachov, Memoirs, p. 528. [48] Reuth and Bönte, Komplott, p. 209. [49] Krenz, Herbst ‘89, pp. 94, 129 and 146. See also Neubert, Revolution, p. 204.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137574169.0007 7 The Round Table: The HRO Reformers’ Fifteen Minutes of Fame

Abstract: In December 1989 the HRO reformers briefly moved to the center stage. They wanted to accomplish three goals: supervise the Modrow government, write the rules for the upcoming parliamentary elections, and draft a constitution that would embody the “better socialism” for the GDR. The HRO reformers certainly did not meet their first two goals. Modrow coopted them to become members of his government. As for the election rules, these were written by the GDR’s parliament, not the HRO reformers. They did draft a new constitution for the GDR, but it was a stillborn effort. The now democratically elected Volkskammerr had no interest in a new GDR constitution. The RT’s draft document is of interest primarily for the vision of the “third way” that it embodied.

Orlow, Dietrich. Socialist Reformers and the Collapse of the German Democratic Republic. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.doi: 10.1057/9781137574169.0008.

 DOI: 10.1057/9781137574169.0008 The Round Table: The HRO Reformers’ Fifteen Minutes of Fame 

But by the end of November Krenz’s views had become irrelevant and the SED was desperate to catch up with the fast-moving events. The SED found itself in a situation like that of Mahatma Ghandi when he supposedly said “there go the people; I must follow them because I am their leader.” Neues Deutschlandd reported that the SED’s Politburo had proposed the establishment of the RT, [1] but the RT that came into existence bore little resemblance to what the SED had envisioned. In its actual form the RT was an initiative of the HROs and the Protestant churches. [2] The Round Table first met on December7 . The venue was actually not a round table, but a rectangular one with representatives of the old parties and some of the officially recognized mass organizations sitting across the table from representatives of the HROs. The membership of the RT fluctuated widely as the various organizations frequently changed their representatives at the table. In the course of its deliberations the RT also received numerous petitions from newly formed organizations for recognition as members of the RT. Some of these petitions were granted, others were not. The meetings of the Round Table were moderated and chaired by three officials from the Christian churches in the GDR, two Protestants and one Catholic. The members of the RT had rather different visions of the institution’s mission. As far as the HROs were concerned the Round Table had a triple function: It was to supervise the work of the government and the GDR’s legislature, the Volkskammer, expose the corruption and arbitrary rule of the old regime, and draft a new democratic, but socialist constitution for the GDR. [3] In contrast, the SED/PDS (which was usually represented on the RT by the party’s chairman, Gregor Gysi, and one of its vice-chairmen, Manfred Berghofer) denied that the RT had any control or legislative functions. Rather, the new body was to discuss suggestions which would then be passed on to the government and the (undemocratic) Volkskammerr for their consideration and decision. In essence, the SED/PDS hoped that the discussions at the RT would defuse the continuing popular dissatisfaction in East Germany and give the Modrow government some breathing room. [4] Ironically, when the Round Table began meeting in December 1989 the body had no more democratic legitimacy than the Volkskammer or the Modrow government. The members of the legislature had been selected by the SED-dominated National Front, while the members of the Round Table coopted themselves. True, the representatives of the HROs sitting at the Round Table had the moral bonus of having opposed

DOI: 10.1057/9781137574169.0008  Socialist Reformers and the Collapse of the German Democratic Republic the SED regime, and in many cases suffering for their political stand in a number of ways, ranging from jail time to Berufsverbot (prohibition to enter a chosen profession). The situation changed abruptly with the parliamentary elections on 18 March 1990. Now the Volkskammerr was democratically elected, while the members of the RT were still self- coopted. In anticipation of this development, at least some of the HROs attempted to transform their moral bonus into institutional authority. Ulrich Poppe (IFM) demanded that even after the parliamentary elections “those who created the preconditions for the revolution must not be deprived of their legitimate rights.” [5] As we saw, the RT’s relationship to the Modrow government began on an uneasy footing. The HRO members of the RT saw themselves as morally legitimized controllers of the government, and they complained that Modrow and his cabinet were either ignoring the RT or using it as a “fig leaf for creating facts on the ground.” [6] Things did not improve during the battle over Modrow’s proposal to transform the Stasi into a Nasi. In fact, it was not until the Modrow government in mid-January gave assurances that the Stasi would be completely dissolved and that the Nasi would not be established that relations between the SED reformer and the HROs became more cordial. This is not surprising since on many issues of public policy the members of the Round Table and the Modrow government were on the same page. [7] This was certainly true for economic reforms. During her first testimony before the RT the economics minister, Christa Luft, stressed the need for greater decentralization and transparency in the economy, but she also insisted that the basis of economic life in the GDR would continue to be the state-owned and state-controlled (what in GDR parlance were termed “people’s-owned enterprises”) sector of the economy. Similarly, she wanted to retain collectivized agriculture in the form of large-scale agricultural cooperatives. The HRO representatives agreed. [8] Rather naively, the members of the RT and the Modrow government also expected that West Germany would finance the needed reforms in the GDR with a “solidarity contribution (Solidarbeitragg)” in the amount of between ten and fifteen billion DM. [9] When Christa Luft appeared before the RT again in early February 1990, her and the HROs’ enthusiasm for a state-controlled economy had largely disappeared. The economics minister now called for a “real social market economy” with Freiräume (autonomy) for individual entrepreneurs. As part of the move toward resurrected free enterprise she promised that the Modrow government would return all businesses that had

DOI: 10.1057/9781137574169.0008 The Round Table: The HRO Reformers’ Fifteen Minutes of Fame  been seized by the state since 1972 (these were mostly small firms) to private hands. [10] An official“ commentary” by the minister for industries, Karl Grünheit, noted that “the goal of the [government’s] radical economic reforms is to end the past system of a centralized, bureaucratic, administrative, and command management of the economy [and replace it] with a market economy based upon a developed (entwickeltes) relationship of supply and money.” [11] Most of the HROs also came around to a more positive view of private enterprise. Neues Forum, Demokratie Jetzt, Demokratischer Aufbruch, and the SdP/SPD all now endorsed the equivalent of the West German social market economy for the GDR. [12] Among the HROs only the Vereinigte Linke insisted that private enterprise in any form was incompatible with the “socialist character of the GDR.” The VL demanded that control of the East German economy must be exercised by elected workers’ councils. [13] The looming question of national reunification also drew the Modrow government and the HRO representatives on the RT closer together. When the RT first met, the HROs, like the SED reformers, were still committed to an independent, socialist GDR. [14] In reply to an inter- viewer’s question Egon Krenz noted wistfully that he and Wolfgang Ullmann (DJ) were really in full agreement in maintaining the GDR’s sovereignty. [15] By the beginning of 1990, as the national question came to dominate the political agenda, cracks opened up in the unified front of the reformers. Increasingly, they adopted a “unity yes, but with conditions” attitude. [16] The SED/PDS wanted German reunification embedded in European unification. [17] In a similar vein, the Green Party, along with other HROs, demanded that a reunited Germany must not be a member of NATO. [18] Ulrich Poppe (IFM) and Wolfgang Ullmann (DJ) rejected German reunification under Article 23 of the West German constitution. [19] Under this article the East German states would simply join the Federal Republic as new Länder (federal states). It was last used in 1957 when the Saarland joined the Federal Republic after having been under French administration since 1945. Instead, the HROs wanted both the East and West German constitutions to be scrapped and replaced by a new document written by a democratically elected constitutional convention. Here the HRO reformers actually had history on their side. The last article of the West German Basic Law called for the replacement of the Basic Law by a new constitution after reunification.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137574169.0008  Socialist Reformers and the Collapse of the German Democratic Republic

None of these “yes, but” conditions had any significant popular support, and in the end the HROs either joined the bandwagon for reunification or became politically marginalized. Neues Forum split into pro- and anti-unification factions. DA and DJ aligned themselves with the West German Christian Democrats, while the SdP (by now renamed the East German SPD) joined forces with its West German counterpart. [20] Unaware of (or unwilling to recognize) its increasing irrelevance, the RT plowed on with its self-appointed task of writing a national election law and a new constitution for the GDR. Members of the RT spent considerable time debating proposals for the GDR’s new election law. [21] It was a daunting task. Ironically, it was Egon Krenz, the SED’s last election commissioner, who, in testimony before the Round Table, confirmed what everyone knew: In the forty years since its inception the GDR had never had truly free elections. [22] The Round Table, then, set out to draft guidelines for the GDR’s firstg enuinely democratic election. There was ready agreement among the members of the RT that the GDR should adopt a parliamentary system based on proportional representation, and that all legitimate parties should be able to compete for votes on an equal footing. (VL, of course, objected to parliamentary democracy altogether, insisting that all aspects of public life in the GDR should be controlled by democratically elected workers’ councils.) The most obvious model for a well-functioning parliamentary democracy in Germany was the Federal Republic, and the RT certainly consulted West German election experts. Still, some members of the RT objected to a wholesale takeover of the West German election provisions. Halm (SED/PDS) and Wolfgang Templin (IFM) both urged the RT to improve on the West German rules, not copy them. Perhaps anticipating their lack of appeal among the voters, some of the HROs as well as the SED/PDS objected particularly to the Sperrklausel in the West German election law. [23] This provision restricted representation in the Bundestag to parties that had obtained at least 5 of the popular vote in a federal election. It had been designed to prevent the multiplic- ity of splinter parties which plagued the German parliament during the Weimar years. Another point of controversy was the nature of parliamentary representation. Not surprisingly the established parties argued that only formally organized political parties should be able to field candidates for the Volkskammer. Some of the HROs, like Neues Forum, Demokratie

DOI: 10.1057/9781137574169.0008 The Round Table: The HRO Reformers’ Fifteen Minutes of Fame 

Jetzt, and the SPD, agreed because by the beginning of 1990 they had become affiliated with one of the established parties. Other HROs, like VL and IFM, which saw themselves primarily as loosely organized grass- roots citizens groups, protested that HROs which were not organized as parties as well as the numerous local “citizens’ committees” constituted democratic organizations unique to the “new” GDR, and their representatives should also be eligible for election to parliament. [24] Equally controversial was the date for the GDR’s first democratic election. As we saw, Modrow had hoped to delay elections until late 1990 or early 1991, but dissatisfaction with the lack of a democratically elected parliament persuaded the government to move the elections up to May 1990. But public pressure forced an even earlier date, 18 March. On the RT a minority of the HRO’s representatives felt this new date was too early because it did not allow them sufficient time to organize for the campaign, but they were overruled. [25] The RT was also divided on the question of inviting West German “guest speakers” to participate in the upcoming East German election campaign. With the opening of the GDR’s borders numerous West German politicians visited and spoke publically in the GDR. Some of the HROs, notably the representatives of Neues Forum, Demokratie Jetzt, and the SPD, not only welcomed the participation of West German politicians in the East German campaign; they also eagerly accepted organizational and financial aid provided yb the West German parties. Others saw the West German participation as unwarranted interference in the GDR’s domestic politics. IFM introduced a resolution in the RT prohibiting West German politicians from campaigning in the GDR. The resolution passed twenty-two to seven with seven abstentions, but the vote was meaningless since the Round Table had no way of controlling the actions of its member organizations. Christian Democratic Union (Christlich-Demokratische Union, CDU), SPD, and DA promptly announced that they would not be bound by the RT’s vote. [26] For the members of the Round Table drafting a new constitution for the GDR was simultaneously the high point of their political career and their most disappointing experience. SED reformers and HRO representatives alike thought it was axiomatic that they had a mandate to draft a constitution for the DDR, and, when reunification became inevitable, to write a document that would serve as a model for the constitution of a reunited Germany. [27] Consequently, most members of the RT were very disappointed that a large majority of the delegates elected to

DOI: 10.1057/9781137574169.0008  Socialist Reformers and the Collapse of the German Democratic Republic the Volkskammerr in March 1990 exhibited no interest in a new, separate East German constitution, and instead favored immediate unification with West Germany under the terms of Article 23 of the West German constitution. Politically, the RT’s draft constitution was an eloquent statement of its authors’ belief in humanism, democracy, and federalism. The preamble by the eminent author Christa Wolf stressed the “humanist traditions” of the GDR and the “responsibility of all Germans for their history and its consequences.” The draft constitution contained a full catalog of individual rights, the establishment of a parliamentary democracy, and the reestablishment of the GDR’s federal structure. [28] (After World War II the five states that had existed in East Germany during the Weimar years were reestablished, but in 1952 the Länder were replaced with fifteen districts, each headed by a district secretary of the SED. In early 1990, the Volkskammer reestablished the old states.) There were two unique features of the draft constitution. One was the obstacles put in the path of German reunification. As we saw, many members of the HROs (not to mention the SED/PDS) were very skepti- cal of German reunification, and even as the train toward reunification accelerated, the mood around the RT remained “why the rush?” [29] In a last-ditch effort to make reunification as ffidi cult as possible, the RT’s draft constitution provided that any union between the FRG and the GDR had to be approved both by a two-thirds vote of the Volkskammer and in a referendum by a majority of the East German electorate. [30] All to no avail. On 22 August 1990 the democratically elected Volkskammer voted 294 to 62 for reunification under Article 23 of the West German Basic Law. Only the SED/PDS and some of the HROs voted against the resolution. The other unusual aspect of the RT’s draft constitution was the decision to include a “social charter” as part of the document. Around the RT this portion of the draft was among the most discussed and least controversial parts of the document. It was also intended to be the “constitutional concretization (Verankerungg) of the third way.” [31] The members of the RT were convinced the social charter represented a distinct improvement over the “ideology of exploitation of an antiquated shareholder liberalism” embodied in the West German Basic Law. [32] The social charter was a long catalog of “social rights” which the draft constitution guaranteed alongside the traditional individual rights. They included the right to a job, democratization and humanization of the

DOI: 10.1057/9781137574169.0008 The Round Table: The HRO Reformers’ Fifteen Minutes of Fame  workplace, equality of the sexes, the right to education, health insurance, social security, social integration of the disabled, the right to housing, and the right to be covered by a comprehensive social net. [33] It was an impressive list, but it was also a stillborn effort. There were a number of reasons for the RT’s failed attempt at constitution writing. Certainly the most important was the fact that the voters of the GDR in a free election decided the RT’s draft constitution belonged the dustbin of history. [34] By the beginning of 1990 the old GDR parties and the HROs that had aligned themselves with West German parties recognized this, but a “strong majority” of the HRO representatives on the RT continued the drafting process, although the discussions were increasingly irrelevant. [35] When the RT disbanded in March 1990 it left a mixed, but on the whole negative legacy. On the positive side the SED reformers rather belatedly praised the RT’s efforts. Modrow wrote that the body “was an extraordinarily important institution for [the GDR’s] democratic renewal”. [36] Not surprisingly, the RT agreed. In its final declaration the RT concluded that the institution was an indispensable component of a country-wide effort to force the SED hardliners to relinquish power. [37] Independent analysts were less effusive. They concluded that in practical terms the RT accomplished little of lasting value. [38] Actually, there is some truth on both sides. The RT did play a major part in weakening the grip of the SED regime, but its proposals for the “third way” in the GDR were rejected both by the new political establishment in East Germany and the East German people. In early 1990, when the West German takeover of the GDR emerged as the likely outcome of the East German revolution, Bärbel Bohley, one of the most prominent leaders of NF, concluded wistfully, “this is no longer my turn-around (Wende); this is no longer my revolution. Perhaps it never was.” [39]

Notes

[1] Thaysen, Tisch, p. 33; and Krenz, Herbst ‘89, pp. 307 and 312. [2] Modrow, Aufbruch, p. 66; Neubert, “Überblick,” pp. 462–63; Martin Gutzeit, ed., Opposition und SED in der Friedlichen Revolution: Organisationsgeschichte der alten und neuen politischen Gruppen 1989/90 (Düsseldorf, 2011), p. 148. [3] Thaysen, RT, I:18 (Lange, moderator), 7 December 1989; and Neubert, “Überblick,” p. 449.

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[4] Krenz to SED district first secretaries, 29 November 1989, Best. Krenz/314; and Thaysen, RTT, I:16, 28, and 114, and II:353 (Berghofer), 7 and 18 December 1989, and 15 January 1990. [5] See also the criticism of this demand by Schröder (SPD) in Thaysen, RTT, IV:1105, 12 March 1990. [6] Thaysen, RTT, I:22–24 (Schult), and I:224 (Gehrke, quotation), 27 December 1989. See also Findeis et al., Interviews, p. 107. [7] In her memoirs Christa Luft lamented the “unnecessary chasm between human beings who...should have been allies.” See Wende, pp. 144–46. [8] Thaysen, RTT, I:156 and 167 (Luft), 22 Dec. 1989. [9] Ibid., III:757 (Stief), and III:703–704, doc. 12/6, 12 Feb. 1990. See also Rödder, Vaterland, p. 190. [10] Thaysen, RT, III:632ff (Luft), 5 February 1990. [11] “Kommentar des Industrieministers...Karl Grünheid zum Bericht über die Lage der Volkswirtschaft ...” in:Th aysen, RT, V:248, doc. 11/6, 5 February 1990. [12] See the resolution of the Working Group Economy in ibid., IV:1063, IV:1077–78, doc. 14/51, and the discussion on IV:1079ff, 12 March 1990. See also Geisel, 3. Wegg, pp. 121 and 221–22. [13] Ibid., “Initiative der VL,” IV:52, doc. 5/5, 9 January 1990; and the discussion, I:109 (Gehrke), 18 December 1989, and IV:960 (Klein), 26 February 1990. [14] Ibid., II:288 (Poppe), and II:485 (Ullmann), 22 January 1990. [15] Krenz, Herbst ‘89, p. 322. [16] Modrow, Deutschland, p. 386; and Haufe, “1990,” pp. 121ff. [17] Thaysen, ed., RTT, V:1001 (Gruch), 16 March 1990. [18] Ibid., IV:928 (Heyne), 26 February 1990. [19] Ibid., IV:1105 and 1110 (Poppe and Ullmann), 12 March 1990. [20] Haufe, “1990,” p. 120; and Stolle, Aufstand, p. 303. [21] See the discussion in Thaysen, RTT, III:740ff (19 February 1990). [22] Quoted in Thaysen, Tisch, pp. 111–12. [23] Thaysen, RTT, II:541 (Haln), 22 Jan. 1990, and III:749 (Templin), 12 February 1990. [24] Ibid., II:393ff and II:542 (Poppe and Klein), 15 January and 22 January 1990. [25] Ibid., I:56ff, III:551 and 626–28. The vote was nine for keeping the May date, twenty-two against, and seven abstentions. [26] Ibid., III:628–29 and 730 (Poppe and Junghanns), 5 and 12 February 1990. [27] Ibid., IV:1110 (Wolfram), 12 March 1990. See also Uwe Thaysen, “Der Runde Tisch und die Entmachtung der SED,” in: Enquête-Kommission, Aufarbeitung, VII/2: 1832; and Rochus, “3. Weg,” p. 106. The entire document is reprinted in Pabst et al., Wende, pp. 121–60. [28] Thaysen, RTT, IV:1096ff (Gruch), 12 March 1990, and V:679ff (doc. 16/8); and Bollinger, 1989, p. 298.

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[29] Thaysen, RTT, I:15 and 34–35 (Klein and Gehrke), 7 December 1989; and Rödder, Vaterland, pp. 186–87 and 222. See also Volkmar Schöneburg, “Vom Ludergeruch der Basisdemokratie: Geschichte und Schicksal des Verfassungsentwurfes des Runden Tisches der DDR,” Jahrbuch für Forschungen zur Geschichte der Arbeiterbewegungg, 9 (May 2010), 30–31; Günter Nooke, “Wir trauten uns nicht, die auf der Strasse liegende Macht aufzuheben,” in: Jesse, Revolution, p. 103. [30] Thaysen, RT, I:117ff. (Stellungnahme des Runden Tisches zum Besuch von BRD-Kanzler Kohl), 18 December 1989. [31] Rochus, Utopie, pp. 245 and 255. For the discussion see Thaysen,RT T, IV:963–97, 5 March 1990. [32] Thaysen, RT, IV:967 and 1100 (Böhm and Wolfram), 5 and 12 March 1990. Wolfgang Ullmann, “Der Verfassungsentwurf des Runden Tisches: Reelle Chance oder Utopie?” in: Pabst et al., Wende, pp. 116. [33] Thaysen, RTT, IV: 1839. [34] Modrow, Deutschland, p. 117; and Thaysen, “Entmachtung,” VII/2:1789. [35] Poppe, “Gesperrt,” p. 217; Bollinger, 1989, p. 299; and Ullmann, “Verfassungsentwurf,” p. 112. [36] Modrow, Aufbruch, p. 69. [37] Thaysen, RTT, IV:1077–78, doc. 14/51. [38] Hahn, RTT, p. 133. [39] Quoted in Findeis et al., Interviews, p. 57.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137574169.0008 8 Conclusion

Abstract: This chapter offers some perspectives on why the socialist reformers failed to realize their vision of a “better, more beautiful” socialism. Certainly the SED reformers labored under heavy burdens from the past. Socialized with the conviction that the Communist party embodied the laws of history, they found it very difficult to accept political pluralism. Krenz and his group remained convinced that a change of leaders would solve the GDR’s problems. Modrow and his allies looked beyond Kaderpolitik, but defended the old far too long. As for the HRO reformers, when they took center stage the discussion of a better socialism had been superseded by the people’s desire for union with West Germany and no socialism at all.

Orlow, Dietrich. Socialist Reformers and the Collapse of the German Democratic Republic. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. doi: 10.1057/9781137574169.0009.

 DOI: 10.1057/9781137574169.0009 Conclusion 

Since the demise of the GDR the SED reformers, the leaders of the HROs, as well as a small army of analysts have filled many volumes trying to explain why the efforts to create a democratic, but socialist GDR failed so dismally. With the benefit of hindsight, the SED reformers admitted that they could not free themselves from the conviction that not only was Marxism–Leninism destined to defeat capitalism, but the fulfillment of this historical law could only be done with the power monopoly of the Marxist–Leninist party intact. As a result, the SED reformers presented no new ideas on how to overcome the regime’s increasingly obvious inability to cope with the GDR’s existential crisis. As one analyst put it, the SED as a whole was characterized by intellectual stagnation. [1] There was a good explanation for this. For many years all SED functionaries had internalized the maxim that embarking on reforms was a slip- pery and dangerous slope. As Otto Reinhold, the rector of the Central Committee’s Academy for Social Sciences, reminded his comrades, reforms meant capitalism and the self-destruction of the GDR. East Germany had no choice but “to be or to become more socialist.” [2] The sense of not knowing any way forward certainly included the SED’s reformers’ response to the looming national question. The SED/ PDS’s campaign platform for the parliamentary elections in March 1990 still included the expectation that the GDR would remain a “sovereign, socialist alternative [to the FRG].” [3] In the spring of 1990 this position represented something of a head-in-the-sand attitude, but for the SED reformers the national question posed a genuine conundrum. Once again it was the ubiquitous Otto Reinhold who repeatedly pointed to the horns of the dilemma. On a number of occasions both in public and during internal party discussions Reinhold warned the SED that to raise the national issue was to question the very existence of the GDR. The other European socialist countries had existed as nations before becoming socialist, but the GDR had not. The sole reason for its existence was to be a socialist alternative to the Federal Republic. Reinhold asked rhetorically, “what reason for existence would there be for a capitalist GDR next to a capitalist FRG?” He answered his own question, “obvi- ously none.” [4] Other problems were more of the SED reformers’ own making. From the beginning, they lacked credible, charismatic leaders. Egon Krenz, who claimed to have inaugurated the turn-around, could never escape his association with the old regime. Moreover, he was too focused on limiting the reforms to changes in the nomenklatura. As a result, Krenz

DOI: 10.1057/9781137574169.0009  Socialist Reformers and the Collapse of the German Democratic Republic was never taken seriously. An enthusiastic jogger, Krenz quickly acquired the derogatory nickname “the sweatpants putschist.” [5] Modrow was a more believable reformer, but even he tried to preserve too much of the old system. His attempt to keep the internal security apparatus, and his efforts to delay free elections as long as possible, quickly eroded the democratic support base which he desperately needed. [6] With the benefit of hindsight, many of the SED reformers regretted their reluc- tance to make common cause with the HROs, but in the fall of 1989 and the beginning of 1990 even Modrow’s relationship to the RT was characterized “more [by] tactical game-playing than [by exercising] a serious option for political partnership.” [7] Like many losers in history, the SED reformers also liked to cite factors beyond their control as reasons for their failure. These included the lack of support from West German sympathizers, notably the Social Democrats. SED reformers complained that West Germany’s Social Democrats, who in the 1980s were dominated by the party’s left wing, were taken in by Honecker’s claim that the GDR was a stable country with a contented population, and that the only way to improve relations between East and West Germany was in cooperation with him and his regime. For far too long, according to this argument, the West Germans regarded both the SED reformers (and the HROs) as negligible factors which would play no significant role in the GDR’s political life. [8] The lack of West German support was also part of the explanation for the failure of the SED reformers’ economic efforts. Modrow listed two reasons for the failure of economic reforms: the stream of East Germans resettling in West Germany, which severely disrupted economic life in East Germany, and West Germany’s refusal to grant the GDR financial support in the form of a sizable “solidarity contribution.” [9] And finally, there was the conspiracy theory that eventually became a favorite of both the SED hardliners and reformers. In this scenario, the SED reformers were doomed to failure no matter what they did. The GDR was the“ incubator baby of the Soviet Union (Retortenbaby der Sowjetunion)” (Krenz’s phrase) which was viable only as long as the Soviet Union was willing to guarantee its existence and the SED’s leading role in it. However, somewhere around 1986 or 1987 Gorbachev decided to sacrifice the GDR in the interest of improving relations between the Soviet Union and the Federal Republic. Without the Soviet Union’s life support the GDR quickly died. Even Modrow, once a fervent admirer of the Soviet leader, later concluded that Gorbachev was really a Social

DOI: 10.1057/9781137574169.0009 Conclusion 

Democrat “whose policies contributed significantly to the fall of the Soviet Union and the erosion of real socialism in Europe.” [10] In the final analysis the SED reformers’ contribution to the changes taking place in East Germany were decidedly limited. They did have “some influence” in blocking the hardliners from pursuing their agenda, but the reformers’ “most important function” was to break up the ideo- logically rigid construct of Marxism–Leninism in the SED. [11] Some of the reasons for the HROs’ inability to forge a new political culture in the GDR paralleled those of the SED reformers. The HROs also lacked concrete plans for the future democratic, but still socialist East German society, not to mention how to finance the plans they did have. [12] As was the case with the SED reformers, there was a disconnect between the socialist future envisioned by the HROs and the intended beneficiaries of this “better socialism.” Most of the demonstrators in the streets did not want an improved socialism, they wanted no socialism at all. Increasingly, the HRO activists lost contact with the people of East Germany. While the people of the GDR wanted national reunification, and the transfer of West German democracy to the GDR, the HROs talked mostly among themselves about “identity creation, self-determination, and community building.” [13] For the participants to have been there meant to have had a lasting success experience. Friedrich Schorlemmer remembered twenty-fivey ears after the events, “for the rest of ym life the fall [of 1989] will remain a momentous political moment.” [14] On a more mundane level the HROs also had serious organizational problems. They prided themselves on their hyper-democratic structures with a maximum of local autonomy and a minimum of central authority. At the same time, there was a lack of trust and cooperation between the HROs’ Berlin organizations and their provincial counterparts. There were numerous complaints about the Scheißberliner, who wanted to control everything. [15] After the collapse of the GDR, the HROs were widely criticized for their unwillingness to seize the mantle of power from the SED, but here the HROs had convincing responses: They did not want to replace one unelected regime with another. They also feared that any precipitous action on their part would result in a violent counter-action by the regime. “We visualized (stand uns vor Augen) the Chinese solution,” wrote one of the HRO leaders. [16] The HROs, like the SED reformers, had no adequate response to the rapidly growing sentiment for national reunification in the GDR. For the week from 20 to 27 November 1989 polls showed that 48 of the

DOI: 10.1057/9781137574169.0009  Socialist Reformers and the Collapse of the German Democratic Republic

GDR’s population favored reunification; for the week from 18 to 25 April 1990 that figure had increased to 85. [17] To be sure, the HROs did not share the SED’s Feindbildd of West Germany as the imperialist enemy. They wanted better relations with the Federal Republic, and like the SED reformers they hoped – naively – that West Germany would offer financial aid to transform the GDR into a democratic socialist state. But the HROs did not want a political union between East and West Germany, because they knew reunification would mean the end of any prospects for a future third way society in the GDR. [18] In the face of the growing sentiment for national union, the HROs split. Most recognized that there was little support for an independent GDR, and aligned themselves with the established West and East German parties. Only a small minority held fast to a separate GDR identity and this group paid a heavy political price. None of the candidates who had been nominated by one of the HROs which continued to reject national reunification was elected to the Volkskammerr in March 1990. [19] Finally, in their retrospective reminiscences which flooded the market after the demise of the GDR, the HRO activists also looked back on their complicated relationship to the SED reformers. Although in retrospect it was clear that Krenz and his allies envisioned a GDR that was not that far different from the ideas of the HROs, the HROs’ leaders profoundly distrusted the first wave of SED reformers who took charge of the SED after the fall of Honecker. And for good reasons. Krenz came with a heavy burden of negative baggage: Identified as Honecker’s crown prince for a number of years, he had been the member of the Politburo who worked most closely with the Stasi, and he was responsible for manipu- lating the local elections in May 1989. And it did not help that Krenz initially wanted to retain the SED’s monopoly on political power. He regarded the HROs as participants in a dialog, but not as partners in decision-making. [20] It was not until Modrow replaced Krenz as leader of the GDR and the SED/PDS that the two groups of socialist reformers began to coop- erate, but even then they moved cautiously and hesitantly toward one another. After all, initially Modrow, too, hoped to retain the dominant position of the SED reformers in the GDR. Only after the HROs had won the bitter battle over the Nasi did Modrow invite representatives of the HROs to join his cabinet in a last-ditch effort to preserve some sort of independent GDR. Gysi, the chairman of the SED/PDS, and Schorlemmer, one of the leaders of DA, regretted that the SED

DOI: 10.1057/9781137574169.0009 Conclusion  reformers and the HROs had been unable to forge a “great, left force” in the spring of 1990. Modrow, too, would eventually praise the HROs for their vision of a democratic, socialist GDR, but it was too late. By the spring of 1990 the voices of the SED reformers and the HROs were drowned out by the overwhelming desire of the East German people for complete, quick, and unequivocal national reunification and the introduction of the successful parliamentary and social market economy of the FRG. Both the SED reformers and the HROs were left standing on the sidelines, bitterly disappointed. [21] Not all remained there, of course. As the reunited Germany took shape, a number of the reformers of 1989 pursued political careers in the enlarged Federal Republic. Gregor Gysi, the founding chairman of the SED/PDS is now the head of the Left Party’s parliamentary group in the Bundestag. Angela Merkel, the present chancellor of Germany, and Joachim Gauck, the president, both got their start in politics as activists in the HROs. True, others continued to sulk. Their reaction to German reunification and Westernization was what the Germans call Ostalgie, the nostalgic yearning for the lost “ideals” of the GDR. But twenty-five years after reunification the group of nostalgists has pretty much disappeared. [22]

Notes

[1] Knabe, Aufbruch, p. 18. [2] Quoted in Aymerich, “Kapitulation,” p. 37. [3] Bortfeldt, PDS, p. 153. [4] Reinhold in a contribution for Radio DDR, 18 August 1989 quoted in Bollinger, 1989, p. 185; and Reinhold’s remarks at the SED/ZK meeting 9 November 1989 in Hertle and Stephan, Ende ... SED, p. 334. [5] Bollinger, 1989, p. 105. See also Modrow, Deutschland, p. 282. [6] Luft, Wende, p. 229. [7] Bollinger, 1989, p. 227 and 248 (quotation); and Krum and Prokop, Letztes Jahr. See also “Interview with Egon Krenz,” 31 May 1990, GDR/OHP, box 4; Reissig, “Niedergang,” pp. 8–9 and 34; Bernd Gehrke, “1989 und keine Alternative?” in: Bernd Gehrke and Wolfgang Rüddenklau, eds,... das war doch nicht unsere Alternative: DDR Oppositionelle zehn Jahre nach der Wende (Münster, 1999), p. 431; Uschner, Etage, p. 149; and Modrow, “Gespräch,” in: Günter Gaus, ed., Deutsche Zwischentöne: Gespräche-Portraits aus der DDR (Hamburg, 1990), pp. 125 and 135.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137574169.0009  Socialist Reformers and the Collapse of the German Democratic Republic

[8] Frank Fischer, “Im deutschen Interesse”: Die Ostpolitik der SPD von 1969 bis 1989 (Husum, 2001), p. 215; and Heinz Niemann and Siegfried Prokop, Sozialdemokratie als Idee und Tradition in der DDR: Versuch eines Problemaufrisses (Berlin, 1995), pp. 19–24. For an eloquent lament about the SPD’s leftward drift in the 1980s see Helmut Schmidt, Ausser Dienst: eine Bilanzz (Munich, 2008), pp. 151ff. [9] Modrow, Aufbruch, p. 43. [10] Hans Modrow, “Die sozialistische Linke in Deutschland, 1989–2004,” Marxistisches Forum (no. 50, February 2005), 3–6; Gerhard Niebling, “Zwei Grenzöffnungen mit schweren Folgen,” in: Küchenmeister et al., Sofort, pp. 103–22; and Bollinger, 1989, p. 227. [11] Wilhelmy, Zerfall, pp. 254–55. [12] Hahn, RTT, p. 123; and the interviews in Knabe, Aubfruch. [13] “Interview with Gustav Just,” 14 July 1991, GDR/OHP, box 4. See also the discussion of domestic politics in Thaysen, RTT, III:620ff, 5 February 1990; Gehrke, “1989,” p. 439; and Pollack, Protest, p. 186. [14] Schorlemmer and Gysi, Bleiben, p. 383. [15] “Interview with R. and C. Klingenberg,” 16 July 1990, HIA, Tymowski Collection. [16] Reich, “Revolution,” p. 46. [17] Bollinger, 1989, p. 149. [18] Rochus, “3. Weg,” p. 99. [19] Elitz, Profile, p. 34; and Mühlen, Aufbruch, p. 278. [20] “Interview with Wolfgang Ullmann,” 17 November 1991, GDR/OHP, box 7. [21] Jesse, “Oppositionelle,” p. 321; Peter Schwarz, “Einleitung,” in: Bund Sozialistischer Arbeiter, ed., Das Ende der DDR: Eine politische Autopsie (Essen, 1992), p. 59; Neubert, Revolution, p. 203 and Schorlemmer and Gysi, Bleiben, p. 254. [22] On the post-reunification identity problems in Germany and the nostalgia for the past see the essays in Konrad Jarausch, ed., After Unity: Reconfiguring German Identities (Providence, RI, 1997); and Lahann, Zone.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137574169.0009 Index

Academy for Political and Czechoslovakia, 3 Legal Sciences, 52 Academy for Social Sciences, Democracy Now (Demokratie 58, 75 Jetzt, DJ), 18–19, 21, 41, 43, Advanced Institute for 59, 67–69 Economics, 58 Democratic Start Albrecht, Hans, 28 (Demokratischer Aufbruch, Arendt, Lothar, 59 DA), 9, 21, 43–44, 60, Austria, 5, 28 67–68, 78 Axen, Hermann, 9, 39 Dickel, Friedrich, 29 Dresden, 9, 27, 33, 53–55 Bahr, Egon, 55 Benser, Günter, 52 Einheitt (journal), 43 Berghofer, Manfred, 53–54, 65 Eppelmann, Rainer, 19, 60 Berlin Wall, 18, 39–41 Erfurt, 52 Bernstein, Eduard, 53 Erhard, Ludwig, 58 Bohley, Bärbel, 71 Brandt, Willy, 56 For Our Country (document), Brezhnev, Leonid, 4 18, 44, 56 Brie, Andre, 10 Free German Youth (Freie Brie, Michael, 10, 54 Deutsche Jugend, FDJ), Bundestagg (German 9–10 parliament), 68, 79 Burckhardt, Stephan, 19 Gauck, Joachim, 79 German Communist Party Ceausescu, Nicolai, 27 (Deutsche Kommunistische Chemnitz (Karl Marx Partei, DKP), 27 Stadt), 37 German Democratic Republic Chemnitzer, Johann, 9, 33 Central Planning Christian Democratic Union, Commission, 12, 58 20, 68 Communist party in, 2–3 Cold War, 2 constitution, 3, 12, 42, Communist International, 55 45, 57

DOI: 10.1057/9781137574169.0010   Index

German Democratic Republic relationship to SED, 17 – Continued self image of, 17 demands for change, 3 and third way, 18, 78 demonstrations in, 35, 37 Human Rights Organizations economic system in, 2 (Bürgerrechtsbewegungen, elections, 17, 26, 28, 56, 66 HRO), 3, 17 judicial system, 12 Humboldt University, 10, 12 and Marxism-Leninism, 3 Hummitsch, Manfred, 26 mass demonstrations in, 29 Hungary, 3–4, 28 National Defense Council, 33, 45 relations with Federal Republic, 12 Initiative for Peace and Human State Council, 33, 45 Rights (Initiative für Frieden und travel policies, 21, 28 Menschenrechte, IFM), 19, 41, Germany, 2, 12 66–69 Germany, Federal Republic of, 58 Institute for Marxism-Leninism, 52 constitution, 67, 70 Intelligence Service, 57 economic system, 2 Iron Curtain, 2 and elections, 68 and German reunification, 44 Jahn, Rudolf, 33 Ghandi, Mahatma, 65 glasnost, 4, 10, 11, 35, 40, 45 Kant, Hermann, 39, 41 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 2–4, 10–12, 26–27, Kautsky, Karl, 53 34, 39, 45, 55, 60, 76 Klein, Dieter, 52 Green Party, 21, 41, 67 Kohl, Helmut, 34, 44 Grünheit, Karl, 67 Kombinate (state-owned Gysi, Gregor, 5, 38, 53–54, 65, 78 enterprises), 58 Krenz, Egon, 3, 9, 20, 27, 33–34, Havel, Vaclav, 21, 28 36, 38, 40, 42–45, 52–53, 55, 61, Herger, Wolfgang, 9, 33 67–68, 75–76, 78 Herrmann, Joachim, 28, 33 Kroker, Herbert, 52 Heym, Stefan, 44 Honecker, Erich, 3–4, 9–12, 20, Left Party, 11, 54, 79 26–29, 34–35, 39, 45, 53, 55, Leipzig, 9, 26, 29 76, 78 Lenin, Vladimir, 53 Höppke Klaus, 28 Liberal Democratic Party of Germany, HRO Reformers (Liberal-Demokratische Partei and economy, 19 Deutschlands, LDPD), 42 and elections, 28 Lorenz, Siegfried, 37 failure of, 75, 77 Luft, Christa, 34, 58–60, 66 and Federal Republic, 18 Luft, Hans, 58 and German reunification, 18, 41, 67, 77 Merkel, Angela, 79 ideas of, 18 Meyer Kurt, 9 motivation of, 17 Mielke, Erich, 4, 29, 36, 40, 57 problems of, 21 Mittag, Günter, 12, 27, 33, 36 relations with SED reformers, 78 Mitterand, François, 55

DOI: 10.1057/9781137574169.0010 Index 

Modrow government Schabowski, Günter, 9, 33–40, 42, assessment of, 60 46, 52 and coalition with HROs, 59 Schorlemmer, Friedrich, 9, 44, 77, 78 and demonstrations, 57 Schult Reinhard, 20 and economic reforms, 58, 66, 76 Schumann, Michael, 52 failure of, 57 Schürer, Gerhard, 12 and German reunification, Schütt, Hans-Dieter, 27 56–57, 60 Schwanitz, Wolfgang, 57, 59 and Ministry of the Interior, 57 Social Democratic Party and Round Table, 59 (Sozialdemokratische Partei, SdP), and SED Central Committee, 57 19, 60, 67–69 and SED Politburo, 57 social democratism, 4 and third way, 60 Social Democrats (West German), personnel, 56 55, 76 relations with HRO reformers, 57 Socialist Unity Party (Sozialistische Modrow, Hans, 9, 27, 33, 40, 44–45, Einheitspartei, SED), 3–4 53–55, 71, 76, 78 Action Program, 60 Advanced Training Institute, 33 Nasi (Office for National Security), 59, and China, 17, 27, 34, 77 66, 57 Central Committee, 9, 12, 26–27, Nazi-Soviet Pact, 5, 11 33–34, 37, 41, 45, 75 Neubrandenburg, 9, 33 exchange of party documents, 28 Neue Welt (journal), 27 and Marxism-Leninism, 26 Neues Deutschland (newspaper), 9–10, national congresses, 28 29, 44, 65 and party conference, 46 Neumann, Alfred, 35 Politburo, 9–12, 20, 26–27, 33–35, 38, New Forum (Neues Forum, NF), 20, 37, 40, 44, 46, 52, 55, 65, 78 41, 43, 67–68, 71 rank-and-file members, 5, 26, 29, 35, North Atlantic Treaty Organization 37, 42, 45, 52–53 (NATO), 35, 67 Reformers, 5 Nowakowski Norbert, 53 relations with SPD, 9 repression of HRO reformers, 27 Office for the Protection of the Working Committee, 45, 52–53 Constitution, 57 Socialist Unity Party, Reformers, Ostalgie, 79 5, 9 Action Program, 38 perestroika, 4, 10 criticism of, 35 Poland, 3, 4, 43, 61 and demonstrations, 41–42 Poppe, Ulrich, 66–67 failure of, 42, 45, 75 Potsdam, 33, 42 and economy, 12 and German reunification, 41, Reinhold, Otto, 9, 10, 75 75, 77 Reissig, Rolf, 9 and HRO reformers, 35, 43, 78 Rice, Condoleezza, 56 and HROs, 36, 76 Romania, 3 ideas of, 11 Round Table, 19, 21, 43, 58–60, 65–71 and Kaderpolitik, 36–37, 41, 75

DOI: 10.1057/9781137574169.0010  Index

Socialist Unity Party – Continued Soviet Union, 2, 4, 11, 26, 42, 76 and Marxism-Leninism, 36, 75, 77 Sputnik (journal), 17 organizational problems of, 11 Stalin, Joseph, 5, 11, 33 policies of, 34 Stasi (Ministry for State Security), relations with Social Democrats, 11 4–5, 18–19, 26, 28, 37, 40, 52, 57, 59, and Soviet Union, 56 66, 78 and Stasi, 36 Stoph, Willi, 33, 36–37, 55–56 and travel policies, 40 Streitpapier, 9, 11 Socialist Unity Party of West Berlin Suhl, 28 (Sozialistische Einheitspartei West Berlin, SEW), 27 Templin, Wolfgang, 68 Socialist Unity Party/Party of Ten Point Program (document), 44 Democratic Socialism Trotsky, Leon, 21 (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands/Partei des Ullmann, Wolfgang, 59, 67 Demokratischen Sozialismus, SED/ United Left (Vereinigte Linke, VL), 21, PDS), 79 41, 43, 59, 67–69 and critics, 54 Uschner, Manfred, 9 and economics, 53 and elections, 75 Volkskammerr (GDR parliament), 42, 45, founding congress, 52, 54 55, 65, 68–69, 78 and German reunification, 54, 67 leadership, 52 Walesa, Lech, 21 organization, 54, 57 Wandlitz (gated community), platforms, 54 34, 40 program, 53 Wehrmacht, 55 and Round Table, 65 West Berlin, 27, 40 and third way, 53 Wolf, Christa, 44, 70 Solidarity (labor union), 3–4 Wolf, Hanna, 33 solidarity contribution Wolf, Markus, 52 (Solidaritätsbeitragg), 66, 76 Workers’ Militias (Kampfgruppen), 41

DOI: 10.1057/9781137574169.0010