Germany's Communists in New Clothes

...Perhaps appropriately, he hardly plays the role of the casual populist...

...So far so good...

...The slippery problem is that the mere mention of the well-liked, winsome and somewhat theatrical Gysi is likely to invite ill-concealed wincing both inside and outside the party...

...A professional infrastructure that includes well-trained workers, he insists, could have been salvaged...

...One of them is Stefan Heym, a popular dissident novelist in the GDR who at 81 is the Bundestag's oldest member, and who coincidentally holds an American passport...

...Friendly gestures by the new Communists, even these days, are unlikely to change the majority's conviction that the very presence of the PDS in Parliament amounts to an insult to democracy...

...To manage this, however, some accommodation with the PDS may be necessary...

...Actually, the PDS garnered 4.9 per cent of the ballots cast nationwide, or just under the "5 per cent hurdle" required for admission to Parliament...

...Kohl rather typically referred to them as a collection of "Fascists in red paint...

...It is not in the slightest attached to the idea of some sort of dictatorship of the proletariat...

...A report issued by political scientists from the Sorbonne and the University of Chemnitz-Zwickau, for instance, has compared the PDS' new Communists with the Right-wing—most people would say, neo-Nazi—Republikaner Party, whose share of the vote dwindled to 1.9 per cent (875,000) in October...

...The Republikan-ers and the PDS," it observed, "appear at first glance to be far apart...

...As a German-bom U.S...

...From his perspective as a once prominent Communist, the ongoing investigations are "psychologically devastating and humiliating...

...This entitles a party whose candidates win in three or more separate districts to its full national percentage of Bundestag seats...

...Their dyspeptic resentment, six years into the lurching unification era, is a consequence of what they regard as broken western promises and a callous exploitation of misery-laden economic dependence...

...A DANGEROUS RESPECTABILITY Germany's Communists in New Clothes BY PAUL OPPENHEIMER BERLIN EASTERN GERMANY'S retooled Communists -members of the old Socialist Unity Party (SED), now called the Party of Democratic Socialism IPDS)—had been expected to virtually disappear following the elections last October 16...

...Keeping ex-spies out of Germany's universities and political affairs is one important aim of Gauck s commission, which makes available facts in particular cases but cannot bring indictments...

...The PDS' 30 Bundestag representatives are bound to attract considerable attention, he says, if only because they are an unusual bunch...

...On the other hand, during a recent candid interview he shed light on the post-election political situation across a country whose wealth and vast influence belie its ongoing struggles against the rival, yet arguably similar, evils of authoritarian Communist collectivism and persistent crude nationalism...

...The proposal is radical enough, and possibly scary enough, to seem less an invitation to more responsive government than to mindless governmental paralysis...

...Nevertheless, none of this explains away the nagging doubts about the PDS' attitudes toward democracy...

...Speculation abounds that on the heels of Kohl's weakness in the elections, the SPD may be able to crack the conservative coalition that has governed Germany for the past 12 years...

...Last fall, however, the PDS called for a new German constitution that would guarantee "participatory democracy," or continuous public referendums...

...And that—I'm talking as a journalist, but I think it hit other people the same way— was one of the most awful blunders of the old GDR...

...on most issues...

...In reality, they are close neighbors: They distinguish themselves through a 'national' or 'social' populism, they are fighting to create "another' republic, and they thrive on East-West [German] opposition...

...Then he adds: "The SED itself was never the sort of homogeneous party it is usually depicted as being...

...He is irked by a policy of exposing individuals who may have reported on friends and relatives during the four decades of the GDR's Big Brother regime, even though careers were ruined and often the accused were condemned to prison terms...

...Prokot held the same post when the paper had a circulation four times its present 250,000 and was, in his words, "absolute must reading" for Party members as well as the hundreds of thousands of others who supported the regime in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR...

...Almost 80 per cent of all industrial production here has vanished—a monstrous fact...

...His parted brown hair was fringed with silver...

...We met at the posh, red-lacquered Peking Restaurant, not far from the offices of Neues Deutsch-land and what used to be Checkpoint Charlie—where Soviet and American tanks faced each other in a rumbly standoff at the height of the Cold War in 1961...

...Every political party, after all, aspires to reflect a "broad spectrum of social currents...

...The youthful looking 54-year-old editor was dressed conservatively in a buff-brown suit and red striped tie...

...Phrases like "class struggle" and "ruling classes" crop up frequently...

...He struck a conciliatory note, repudiating both resurgent German nationalism and Stalinism, but this did not keep Kohl and his supporters from scowling through the speech and refusing tojoin in the ritual applause afterward...

...And Christina Schenk, a noted lesbian feminist...

...WHATEVER the ultimate outcome of the continuing battles over these questions on television and in the newspapers, Prokot is right in contending that the PDS, by gaining a foothold in the Bundestag, has moved from relative obscurity to real participation in the developing struggle involving Germany's immediate political future...

...Any former German citizen, even if he emigrated to the U.S...

...Instead, they occupy 30 seats in a precariously divided 672-seat Bundestag where Chancellor Helmut Kohl's ruling coalition—consisting of his Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Free Democratic Party—has a fragile 10-seat majority...

...It is flatly rejected by Joachim Gauck, head of the nationally famous commission charged by the Bundestag since 1990 with evaluating the voluminous confiscated Stasi files...

...Christa Luft, a former economics minister in the GDR...

...A journalist with 30 years of experience in the East, Protok not only appreciates some of the harsher conflicts troubling many eastern (and lots of western) Germans, he seems to personify them...

...One might easily have mistaken him for an aluminum-smooth western German businessman...

...Like his insistence that the PDS is fully committed to democracy, Prokot s stance on the Stasi is bitterly controversial...

...Prokot is fairly optimistic on this score...

...Old Marxist habits of thought, it seems, die hard...

...After unification, he maintains, '"groups of the older functionaries switched into the CDU and other parties...

...Everything political was considered established and fixed from a theoretical standpoint, and you were simply not permitted to criticize it...

...He understands that therefore his words may, and probably should, be greeted with skepticism...

...The party itself is "social-democratic in its main thrust, without any significant Marxist orientation...

...after the War he returned to East Germany...

...One or two thousand at most" of its 130,000 or so members, he says, are probably radical in the revolutionary sense...

...Marxism, he avows, does not seem any more "sacrosanct" to him than Leninism, "with its 'theory' of imperialistic capitalism...

...These Paul Oppenheimer, a professor of English at the City College of New York, is currently writing a book on Germanv...

...But Prokot, who is visibly anxious about the withering dismissals of the smallish, almost exclusively eastern formation by nearly every mainstream politician, frankly admits that 90 per cent of the PDS belonged to the SED...

...Prokot stoutly denies that violent extremists are influential in the PDS...

...Eastern Germans," Protok said in response to my question about the reasons for quickening PDS support, "have the feeling—no, not merely the feeling, the certainty, demonstrated to them through plenty of instances—that they have been run over by the unification process...

...A few of the party's eastern representatives, not including Gysi, have admitted to collaborating with the Stasi...

...This led to an intellectual crippling of discussions...

...Neat boxy gestures tended to emphasize his points when he spoke, as did his acute blue eyes...

...It seeks a form of parliamentarianism, one that would serve neither group nor party interests, but the broad spectrum of social currents...

...The PDS won four such direct mandates, all in the East...

...SCUH BARELY SUPPRESSED anger surely accounts in part for the PDS' growing appeal...

...Thinking back to the decades under Communism, he concedes that "in the GDR doubts of this type were impermissible...

...range from idealistic-Communist-old Christian views to a social democratic reformist platform...

...What they come down to, he argues, is "pushing people around who might be ready to acknowledge their mistakes, their own guilt, but fear that some judgment can be brought against them without any inquiry into the reasons for their having acted as they did...

...The ghoulish possibility, repeatedly denied by Gysi (who resigned as titular head of the PDS when the accusations first surfaced), raised its ugly head anew on October 17 with the publication of what appeared to be fresh evidence in Dei-Spiegel...

...Some of the other potential attention-getters are: Count Heinnch von Einsiedel, Bismarck's great-grandson and an ex-Fascist who has switched political allegiances...

...Under Bundestag rules, the oldest sitting member, in this case Heym, has the right to welcome everybody else...

...As he speaks, though, the impression deepens of an Easterner who has found adjustment to Germany's current political realities a bit awkward...

...Gysi's father was Minister of Culture under the SED's Erich Honecker...

...It's impossible to say at this point who has the upper hand...

...Stefan Heym delivered the opening address to the newly-elected Parliament last November 10...

...say, Chemnitz or Rostock, can come back today and expel the family living in that house for two generations...

...In contrast to a majority of Germans...

...the more reformist-minded PDS leader in the Bundestag...

...He does not believe this was inevitable, although he acknowledges the East's antiquated, noncompetitive industrial methods...

...At a minimum," Prokot remarks with a quixotic smile as he reflects on the PDS' parliamentary future, "the experience will be a stimulating one...

...The larger CDU and the Socialist Party (SPD) are often seen as western interlopers, or what Prokot terms "neocolonialists...

...It is also one reason for my having no regrets over the GDR's necessary demise, and why I find it inconceivable now to prohibit free thought...

...Prokot's description of the PDS could be dismissed as a mere slurry of slogans...

...Even before the Wende [unification], various distinct currents were to be found within it...

...Prokot is persuaded that despite the PDS' settling into its novel respectability, a showdown is in the offing between the party's chairman, Lothar Bisky, who represents those favoring a "radical change in the political and economic system," and Gregor Gysi...

...But Germany's Grundgesetz, or Basic Law, provides a loophole known as "direct mandates" for bantam political groups...

...It is precisely the PDS" brand of obvious populism that sets alarm bells ringing among specialists investigating Germany's extremist political scene...

...Few would disagree...

...Among those cited are anarchists and supporters of the Red Army Faction, the outfit responsible for the terrorist bombings in West Germany during the '70s and '80s...

...During the campaign...

...In addition, it emerged as the second strongest party in several eastern state contests...

...Only minutes after the start of our conversation, conducted in German, the bitterness that marks most easterners became apparent...

...The unanticipated turn of events has provoked widespread concern about the depth of the renamed Communists' commitment to democracy...

...soldier of Jewish descent, he took part in the D-Day invasion of France...

...Certainly the effect on the PDS would be damaging—a prospect that brings no tears to the eyes of politicians in Rudolph Scharping's SPD or Kohl's CDU...

...confides Prokot, but the reformist wing feels its victory over the party's other factions is essential if the PDS is to reach beyond its 2-million-strong voter base in eastern Germany...

...As a result, I would say that of the former SED members who now belong to the PDS...

...His grim complaints, familiar to anyone who has spent time in eastern Germany, included housing problems: "When the two German states were brought together, the SED surrendered tragically, as it had to, on the principle of give-back compensation...

...As analyst Volk-er Zastrow pointed out in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, they have become "officially respectable," and "the customary perception of the Communists as a splinter party no longer holds true...

...When it is noted that the Greens cover the same territory, and pulled in 7.4 per cent of the vote, he becomes vague and defensive: "The PDS is as different as possible from the traditional organizations to be found in other parties...

...The report castigates attempts by the PDS leadership to "integrate" a variety of extremist Left-wing groups...

...His predictable scorn is shrugged off these days by Gerd Prokot, editor-in-chief of Neues Deutschland, the quasiofficial PDS daily—which, he insists, is "completely independent...

...ages ago but his grandparents had owned a house in...

...So far the SPD has refused all deals, but as the new Communists make their presence felt, SPD resistance may lessen...

...Prokot rejects the notion that the PDS could act as an insolent spoiler either in the Bundestag or in state and local governments...

...Nine of the PDS parliamentarians are from western Germany...

...most were not dogmatic types but more critical spirits...

...Giinther Maleu-da, once president of the GDR's kowtow Parliament...

...If confirmed, and so far it has not been, it could send Gysi's career into a fatal tailspin...

...and stones persist that Gregor Gysi himself may have worked for the notorious Stasi, the East German secret police...

...Efforts by outraged CDU and Christian Social Union members to stop Heym from doing so failed...

...Pressed on the matter, Prokot answers rather irrelevantly that the "pluralistic" PDS has managed to make itself "attractive to younger people" by embracing ecological, feminist, pro-immigration, and antimilitarist positions...

...Prokot takes a dim view of investigating the Stasis huge domestic spying activities...

...There exists in the PDS today," he says, trying to sound reassuring, "a strongly pronounced pluralistic spirit, a striking spectrum of Left-wing, but not at all extreme Left-wing, positions...