Vera Lengsfeld, East German dissident

Vera Lengsfeld Wollenberger, circa 1982

This post is a belated continuation of comments on Florian Huber's book Meine DDR (2008) that I began in Life in East Germany, aka, the German Democratic Republic 12/14/08.

One of the opposition activists Huber describes is Vera Lengsfeld. As Huber puts it, Lengsfeld set out to undertake seemingly everything in "dem Verbotskatalog der DDR: ausserparlamentarische Opposition, Gruppenbildung, Anfertigen einer Zeitung, Gründung eines Veriens oder einer Partei, Veröffentlichung eines Buches" (... the DDR's catalog of the forbidden: extra-parliamentary opposition, formation of groups, preparation of a newspaper, founding of a club or a party, publication of a book).

Lengsfeld's background was different from most dissident activists in that her father was a senior officer of the Stasi (Staatssicherheitsdienst, the secret police). She herself was able to attend university, where she studied philosophy. Born, in 1952, she joined the SED (Sozialistische Einheitspartei, e.g., the Communist Party) in 1975 out of conviction.

During her activist days in the DDR, she was married and went by her married name Wollenberger. After the fall of the DDR and the Stasi's files were opened, she discovered that her own husband had been an IM (Inoffizieller Mitarbeiter, i.e., spy) reporting on her to the Stasi. The marriage didn't last. She went back to her maiden name.

She became a dissident in the 1980s, when she had three children. Her father had to agree to have no contact to her and her mother asked her to stay away. Her emphasis in her work was on environmentalism, which was a major concern in the seriously industrially-polluted DDR, and for personal civil liberties. She co-founded the Pankower Friedenskreises (Pankow Peace Circle) in Berlin, which was one of the more significant opposition groups in the 1980s.

She was eventually arrested in 1988 for taking part in a state-sanctioned annual march honoring the martyred German Communist leaders Karl Leibknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. Some opposition groups decided to participate, bringing their own unapproved signs. As did Lengsfeld, who the Stasi shortly before had characterized as one of the 60 "fanatischen und unbelehrbaren Feinde des Sozialismus" (most fanatical and incorrigible enemies of socialism). She was arrested, held in prison for a month, then expelled to Britain, where she settled in Cambridge.

While moving to England was a fate many East Germans might have welcomed, leaving one's home and family and friends behind isn't an easy thing. Plus, many of the opposition activists wanted to reform the DDR itself. Lengsfeld was one of them. She, like other activists, advocated a form of "reform communism" or a "Third Way" between the old Soviet-style model and Western capitalism. In fact, there was some tension between those who actively sought to emigrate to West Germany and the Third Way activists who wanted to stay in the DDR and democratize it, though both groups had common interests in resisting the SED government.

Lengsfeld actively sought to return to the DDR, which she was able to do on November 9, 1989, when the Berlin Wall was first opened. She returned that very day to rejoin the activist opposition. But she found herself out of touch over the next few months with the rapidly-developed public demand for unification with western Germany, which formally occurred in October, 1989.

Huber describes how she gave a speech in Leipzig that year at the beginning of the Christmas season (which starts much nearer to December 25 in Germany than it does in the US!). She was heckled a bit during the demonstration as she talked about reforming the DDR, apparently not because the hecklers were defending the system but because they though her Third Way talk was not about unification with the rest of Germany. During that speech, Huber writes, "erfasste Vera Lengsfeld, wie wenig das Modell einer selbständigen, sich demokratisierenden DDR bei der Menge auf Gegenliebe stiess" (recognized how little positive reception her model of an independent, democratized DDR found among the audience).

She was elected the following year as a member of the one and only freely-elected DDR parliament, whose main task was to approve the dissolving of the DDR and the incorporation of the eastern states into the Federal Republic of Germany (BRD, previously "West Germany").

Vera Lengsfeld, circa 2008

But her later career in unified Germany didn't take the road of becoming a permanent Green Party activist, or a Social Democrat, or a member of the SED's successor party, the PDS (now merged into the Left Party). Instead, she served from 1990 to 2005 as a Member of Parliament, until 1996 affiliated with the Greens. Then she switched to the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU), today's Chancellor Angela Merkel's party.

And along with it, she become pretty much of a reactionary, it appears. She decided that the principle of equality - one of the basic "bourgeois" principles as in the "freedom, equality and brotherhood" of the French Revolution - leads directly to Stalinist Communism. Since various forms of that basic principle are defended by all the five parliamentary parties in Germany, that's a pretty extreme and eccentric position. Her Web site today features the "libertarian"-type slogan, "Freiheit and Fairness statt Gleicheit und Gerechtigkeit" (freedom and fairness instead of equality and justice).

Explicitly opposing the equality and even justice in general is, it's safe to say, a pretty unusual position. (Maybe she absorbed more of her father's Stasi values than she realized.)

And her concern for the environment seems to have, uh, slipped a bit. Of the 19 links she features on her Web site as of this writing, three are from climate-change denial sites, one of them sneering at the "fabrizierte Klimakatastrophe" (manufactured climate crisis) and no small-g green sites, it seems. From defying the East German Communist government over ecological activism in the 1980s to climate-change denial today. Wow!

In fact, from her list of Web links, she pretty much a dogmatic libertarian, which in German terms would be a "rightwing liberal", a concept which just doesn't translate in American political terms. "Free-market zealot" is probably the closest you could come. (But that's not that good a translation, either.) She says in the "links" section of her Web site that her favorite magazine is Novo. In the most current issue featured at Novo's Web site, the chief editor explains that the current world financial crisis was not caused by "neoliberalism" (free-market deregulation), but rather by too much regulation.

But still, she was one of many who fought for democratic rights in the DDR. And it's not surprising that she first affiliated with the Green Party. The Greens were the party in West Germany that was most emphatic about expressing solidarity with the democratic movements in East Germany. But she seems to have wound up today with her head stuck in some kind of ultra-conservative doctrine that would make her right at home with the Sarah Palin fans in America. Weird.

All three posts on Meine DDR:

Life in East Germany, aka, the German Democratic Republic 12/14/08
Vera Lengsfeld, East German dissident 01/21/09 (this post)
Uwe Holmer, East German dissident 01/22/09

Tags: ddr, east germany, florian huber, vera lengsfeld