Germany's postcommunists

...Jens Reich, a former GDR dissident and prominent figure in the Green/Alliance 90, explains that the PDS is a significant presence throughout the East, and that no other party offers knowledgeable, practical advice in matters arising from unification such as property, rents, pensions, labor issues, welfare, and debt...

...One Social Democratic member of the commission, the historian Heinrich August Winkler, exploded...

...These questions are essential to an understanding of the tumult caused by recent electoral successes of former communists in eastern Germany...

...But there are also those in the PDS whose biographies attest to their opposition in the GDR, like writer and winning PDS candidate Stefan Heym, who, though he also cooperated with the Stasi, reminded Thierse that his files demonstrating that he was constantly being watched by the Stasi "comprise thirteen volumes...

...In March of 1994 the commission delivered its report: Marx, Luxemburg, and Karl Liebknecht could remain, but street names honoring communists who "actively contributed to the destruction of the first German Republic," like Zetkin Strasse, had to be changed...

...The success of Manfred Stolpe, who was elected minister president of Brandenburg in September by an overwhelming majority despite the fact that he frequently cooperated with the Stasi as president of the Evangelical church in the GDR, demonstrates that for eastern voters, collaboration with the old regime is not in itself a handicap...

...Does a democratic and unified Germany require the public disavowal of GDR icons, or is a legitimate part of German history being erased...

...Period...

...These included large intersections such as the Rosa Luxemburg Platz and the Marx-Engels Platz, and main thoroughfares such as the Wilhelm Pieck Strasse (named for East Germany's first president) and the Clara Zetkin Strasse...

...A conservative politician had "fallen to his knees," he charged, "capitulating" to the power of the former Communist party in Berlin...

...Resolutions strained with contradictory claims...

...Many agree with Gysi, who maintains that support for the PDS "is not a product of the GDR, but of the Federal Republic...

...If there were to be coalitions at the state level, they would be only with Kohl's Union, declared Rudolf Scharping, the Social Democratic candidate for chancellor: "There will be no conversations, no agreements, no negotiations, absolutely nothing with the PDS...

...Does their principled position not also tacitly indict the party's attitude of compromise 204 • DISSENT Politics Abroad with the Communist leadership during the era of "Ostpolitik...

...For the Social Democrats, whose firm "no allies on the left" stance prevents them from governing in much of the East (apart from grand coalitions), the question is what price the party will pay for holding fast to the 1959 Bad Godesberg Program, which declared Marxism dead and cooperation with communists anathema...

...In the case of Stolpe, who is a Social Democrat, his collaboration may indeed have served a higher (church) purpose...

...The PDS claims that the ministry's calculations are entirely invented, that its own treasury is nearly depleted, and that the charges are aimed at pushing the PDS out of politics...

...Equally dismayed at the prospect, most Bonn Social Democrats rushed to declare unthinkable any "Red-Green" (Social Democrat and Green) coalition dependent on the former communists...

...The alarm rang this past summer after the state election in the small, deindustrialized, economically and ecologically ravaged eastern province of Saxony-Anhalt...

...Most observers consider a coalition of the two larger parties likely in the next few years...

...In September 1993 Berlin's transport secretary, Herwig Haase, a Christian Democrat, impaneled an Independent Commission for the Renaming of Streets...

...Its most decisive opponents, like the East Berlin Social Democrat Wolfgang Thierse, regard the party as an undemocratic residue of the old GDR: "The PDS will not become a democratic party just because it was democratically elected...

...But many eastern Social Democrats, who believe that as a manifestation of the historical failures of unification the PDS is likely to last, stop short of such absolutes...

...The party's image in the West is not helped by its financial indiscretions...

...Helmut Kohl's squeak-through victory—by a mere ten seats in the Parliament—last October 16 demonstrated the weakness of what he openly admits is his last chancellorship, and it positioned the Social Democrats for participation in a grand coalition, or even for a victory if new elections are held before the current term ends...

...If the PDS is a regional party, it also represents the "really existing" experience of the former GDR, a beleaguered and outmoded industrial society swallowed up by the powerful German economy: distrust of the market, belief in the beneficial effects of a powerful benevolent state, and suspicion of democracy...

...Winkler acknowledged that Zetkin had been a prominent social democrat for forty years, and is considered by German feminists to be the founder of the women's rights movement...

...Critics argue that the PDS's solidarity comes not so much from a sentimental attachment to the communist regime as from resentment against the West, from its vision of the missed opportunity for "third way socialism," from a shared regional history, and from a pofitSPRING • 1995 • 205 Politics Abroad ical mentality expressed in Gysi's prideful claim that "unlike the other parties of the last 'People's Chamber' of the GDR, we did not subordinate and attach ourselves to a West German party...

...Instead Haase ignored the recommendations and asked only that Marx-Engels Platz and Pieck Strasse be renamed...

...According to German electoral law, the Berlin seats entitle the PDS to be represented in Parliament even if the party's total vote falls short of five percent...

...They look toward long-term integration of PDS voters rather than permanent confrontation...

...Those who reject cooperation emphasize that the party is a "veterans' association of the old SED," and that its members consistently mask their own compromised pasts with resentment against the West...

...The conventional "Wessi" (West German) view that the PDS represented unification's economic and social "losers," the aging victims of academic purges, political disenfranchisement, and unemployment, was shaken by the October results, which showed wide support even among younger and better off easterners...

...Wolfgang Schaible, party chief of the CDU (Christian Democratic Union), called any hint of cooperation between the Social Democrats and the PDS "an unbelievable scandal in German politics...

...But he denounced the outcome on the grounds that if a street could still be named for "a virulent Leninist" and a "champion of a totalitarian dictatorship," then the fate of Clara Zetkin Strasse demonstrated that "former East Berlin mentally still remains the capital of the GDR [German Democratic Republic, or East Germany] and not a part of the national capital of the Federal Republic of Germany...

...Its leader, the mediagenic lawyer Gregor Gysi, won handily over his SPD opponent, claiming 49 percent of the vote in his Berlin district...

...Gysi's remark notwithstanding, those on the left who cut their teeth in the "cadre-parties" of the 1960s are experiencing déjà vu, calling the PDS a "musee imaginaire" of socialism...

...Shortly before Christmas the PDS was charged by the Finance Ministry with concealing a substantial part of the huge financial empire it inherited from the former Communist party, known as the Socialist Unity party (SED), when it disintegrated in 1989...

...Many in the GDR complain that the collaboration issue was distorted by the Western media, presented without an adequate understanding of the choices people faced in the GDR...

...For all these reasons, the fierce debate over whether to cooperate with the PDS has intensified among Social Democrats...

...The fall campaign was dominated by the scenario of the Social Democrats and the Greens governing in a minority coalition "tolerated" by the PDS...

...The controversy goes to the heart of a larger question...

...Though the former communists won only 4.4 percent of the overall vote, they registered enormous gains in the East, winning more than 20 percent of the vote in such cities as Dresden, Leipzig, and Chemnitz, and winning a plurality in four East Berlin electoral districts...

...All this is part of the wider debate over whether a future role for the Social Democrats in the five new states must involve concessions to the former communists, whose showing in the last election was formidable...

...The PDS, Berlin journalist Klaus Hartung counters, is not primarily a party still devoted to communist principles but an expression of the failure of the unification process to find a way to permit easterners, particularly the old elite, to deal with their own history...

...Perhaps even more important, as Reich concedes, the PDS provides "spiritual and emotional ties...

...Once again in German history the question is being asked: should a party that has refused to draw a clear line separating itself from its past, and some of whose leaders took part in a totalitarian regime, participate equally in a German democracy...

...Less charitable observers see the PDS as "populist" and "fundamentalist," a party of "east nostalgia" for the social advantages of the old GDR...

...Gysi himself has been implicated as an informer for the Stasi, and, like many PDS supporters, considers questions arising from the recent totalitarian past as an illegitimate imposition by westerners and an abuse of history...

...On January 15 fifty thousand PDS supporters marched to the graves of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht on the anniversary of their 1919 murder, reviving an antiquated GDR ritual...

...Now the prospect of relocating the government has been dampened by the power of a provincial party in Germany's center...

...its membership ranges from hardline former communists to GDR opposition figures...

...The problem is that the PDS represents a broad spectrum of former East German society, and has the overwhelming support of its intellectual "milieu...

...The party is remarkably heterogeneous...

...For many, however, the PDS remains the "successor party of the SED," not merely because of its membership and its financial ties to the past, but because of its failure to confront the issue of cooperation with the State Security Apparatus (Stasi...

...And that's final...

...Yet the big story in the election was not Kohl's tremulous triumph but the sharp decline of his liberal coalition partner, the Free Democratic party (FDP), and the remarkable comeback of the successor to the East German Communist party, the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS...

...For 206 • DISSENT Politics Abroad example, a plank declaring "anticommunist attitudes" incompatible with party membership was replaced with one declaring them legitimate among persons who had suffered under communism, but which rejected "criminal, reactionary, and rightist" anticommunism...

...The PDS won almost twenty percent of the vote, raising the specter of a "popular front" to the left of the ruling conservatives with the former communists playing a key role (even if they are not formally part of the governing coalition...

...As the third strongest party throughout the east (11 percent), the PDS commands a stable core of eastern voters and has become a potent factor in the complex arithmetic of coalition building...

...from youthful Stalinists to anti-militarist, feminist, and environmentalist activists...

...Composed of four historians and several other prominent individuals, it was to make recommendations about twelve "politically compromised streets...

...At least for the time being, Clara Zetkin Strasse still leads to the new Reichstag...

...Ironically, just two years ago there was much euphoria about creating a new "metropolitan" Germany by moving the capital to Berlin away from provincial Bonn...

...More important, the PDS gains its "strategic strength" from its adherence to what Reich calls the most enduring "axiom" of the communist epoch: that the market economy and "private property [are] the root of all injustice...

...q SPRING • 1995 • 207...

...The PDS leadership, too, has unsuccessfully tried to limit the influence of the hardliners...

...At the party's congress in late January the so-called "Communist Platform," a coalition of younger Stalinists and old-timers, denounced PDS chairman Lothar Bisky for promoting "social democratization...