Merkel is an honest East German

A new book published in Germany about Angela Merkel claims to reveal new details about her past. What it really reveals is the West German unknowingness of life in the GDR, which has dominated the debate.

The fact that so many books are coming out about Angela Merkel just now certainly has to do with the election campaign. On the other hand, a lot of people, specifically West Germans, are puzzling over her character, which many people find difficult to assess. They are unable to see Merkel's personality as it really is, hindered by an inability to accurately assess the political environment in the GDR which shaped this sort of personality type.

One has to be familiar with the reality of the restrictive society of the GDR to understand conformed life there. Anyone who wanted to develop his or her abilities had to conform to some extent. It is no secret that the society was schizophrenic: you had to learn Orwellian doublespeak early on. Officially, you said what those in power wanted to here. Behind closed doors, you had a different opinion, known only to a few people whom you trusted.

This environment provides an explanation for Angela Merkel's reserved character. She, too, had to think very carefully before speaking. We know that nearly everyone joined the mass political organizations – Pioneer Organisation, the FDJ or the Society for German-Soviet Friendship. The level of organization membership was at ninety percent or more of the population. However, a clear line separated socially active citizens from committed representatives of the system in the GDR. This line was called membership in the SED [Socialist Unity Party of Germany]. Those who had crossed the line acted on the side of the system. Even so, not all party members were Communist believers. Many took the step solely to further their careers – without committing their hearts or minds to the party.
Angela Merkel never crossed the line. At some time or another, everyone took on duties like hers in the FDJ, or similar ones. Merkel probably did see herself more as a cultural organizer than as a political agitator, with the role of organizing the FDJ study year. The texts and ideas advocated in the FDJ were dictated by others anyway. They were learned by rote and regurgitated, just like the ABCs of Marxism-Leninism everyone had to learn. Personally, I read the ideas of Marx and Lenin with great interest, and primarily to find the contradictions to the system in place in reality.

When Angela Merkel says that community spirit also motivated her to the FDJ, her claim is credible. If you were not in the FDJ, you were isolated. It is possible that not joining would have prevented her from pursuing her academic career. As the daughter of a Lutheran pastor, she was already disadvantaged socially: in the workers' and farmers' state a background of that kind tended to come with disadvantages. Her father advised her to stay on good terms with the state; that is why she joined the mass political organization.
I personally know hardly anyone who was in the Academy of Sciences but not also a member of the FDJ. Moreover Angela Merkel's position as cultural officer was lower than that of the FDJ secretary, who was in charge of a group of perhaps 30 people within one FDJ group.

It is plausible when Merkel says that the GDR was never her state. When she is accused of having been responsible for agitation and propaganda as well as an FDJ cultural officer, it sounds bombastic. But thousands of people were officially responsible for just that despite having an attitude to the system which was to some extent fully contradictory. There were practically no other courses open – either you fled to the West or you kept your mouth shut.

Even within the FDJ groups there could be turbulent meetings, sometimes with fierce debate. The fact that an unofficial Stasi employee spied on Angela Merkel shows that she was not trusted.
As a civil rights activist, my involvement in the resistance was greater. Nevertheless, I see in Angela Merkel one of the supporters of the peaceful revolution. Someone who overcame the political reserve she had trained herself to maintain and became active. Without such people, the mass movement would have been simply inconceivable. I do not want to write a long paean to the resistance we civil rights activists offered. We founded discussion circles, authored illegal texts and established peace circles within the Protestant church – but we did so under the church's protective mantle. The fact that so many people joined us in the autumn of 1989 looking for the path to German unification reveals how much larger the potential pool of critical people actually was. And that pool included Angela Merkel. She had declared her independence from her father by studying not theology, i.e. metaphysics, but physics and clearly she had forged her own path.

Angela Merkel, I firmly believe, is an honest woman. She stands by her past actions and the fact that she lived a non-political life before the GDR's collapse, or at least kept her political opinions to herself. But she did seek the path to democratic renewal, examining the ideas and objectives of the various new political movements even before there were political posts to be filled in 1990. Apparently she found the programme of the Democratic Awakening most convincing and so became a member of that party.

Calling Angela Merkel a Reform-Communist is way off the mark. She might have been one, had she ever joined the Party. That there are parallels to be drawn between Communist ideals and Christians, with their Kingdom of Heaven on earth, is something I do not wish to dispute. There are certain areas where the left wing of the Protestant church and the Communist Manifesto do overlap. Angel Merkel hoped that with Gorbachev something would change, that we in the GDR would gain the freedom to travel, the freedoms of opinion and assembly. Many of those active in the New Forum shared those hopes. Therefore in my eyes Angel Merkel is sincere and authentic and I am sure that she was woman of a kind also to be found in the civil rights movement.

The article was published in german in the newspaper "Die Zeit" on the 15th of may.