Uwe Holmer, East German dissident

Uwe Holmer and his wife in their younger years

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.

Uwe Holmer's story is one of those in in the book that particularly caught my attention.

Holmer was a veteran of the Second World War. After his wartime experiences, he resolved to always follow his conscience in the future. He began studying theology in Jena in 1948. Religion was not formally welcomed in Communist East Germany (the DDR). But it was grudgingly tolerated, though church members had some serious personal restrictions placed upon them, at some periods of the DDR's history more burdensome than others.

Holmer soon became an active promoter of the Protestant Junge Gemeinde, the church youth organization which the ruled SED (Communist Party) saw as a competitor to the Freie Deutsche Jugend (FDJ) youth organization.

Because Holmer was an early internal opponent of the SED regime, he gained attention at the highest levels.

Erich Honecker

Erich Honecker became the top leader of the DDR - First Secretary of the SED - in 1971, General Secretary in 1976, when he also became formally the head of state (Chairman of the State Council, or State Soviet if you prefer). He was also in charge of planning and building the Berlin Wall. But in 1946-55, he was head of the FDJ. So Holmer came to his attention early.

Margot Feist (born 1927) became Erich's second wife. She became a senior official in the im Ministerium für Volksbildung (Ministry of Education) in 1955, two years after her marriage to Erich. (Their daughter Sonja was born in 1952, when Erich was still married to his first wife Edith.) Margot became deputy minister for Education in 1958, and Minister of Education in 1963, in which role she served until a week before the opening of the Berlin Wall in 1989, when the DDR was coming completely undone. (The Wall was opened on Nov. 9, 1989.) She herself did not have a college education. (For more on the First Lady of the DDR, see Margot Honecker: Die meistgehasste Frau der DDR Die Welt 16.04.2007.

Margot Honecker

According to Huber, Margot Honecker personally made sure that none of the Holmers' ten children were allowed to attend university or enter an Abitur program, the latter being the college-track high school education in American terms (more-or-less).

Holmer also attracted the unfavorable attention of the authorities by his solidarity with farmers who were unwillingly being forced into collectivized farms.

Honecker found himself forced to resign his leadership position in the DDR in October 1988, when the opposition movement was in full swing and the DDR was seeing its possibilities of survival rapidly decreasing. In January 1990, Honecker at age 77 was arrested on charges of corruption and abuse of office, but held only one day because of his poor health.

But his fellow Party members didn't want him and Margot to keep living in their home in a neighborhood where many other SED members lived. The Evangelical [Protestant] church agreed to give him a place to live.

And the place he would up living was in Lobetal, near Berlin - with Uwe Holmer and his family. They lived there for just over two months, from January 31 to April 3, when Erich went back to the hospital. During their time with the Holmers, they attracted occasional protests, and there were a couple of times they all had to evacuate the house due to bomb threats. But otherwise, their stay was uneventful. Their daughter Sonja came by to visit them regularly bringing groceries and a newspaper.

Huber writes:

Mit den Worten der Bibel hatte Holmer es stets genau genommen. Vergebung war ein zentraler Wert seines christlichen Glaubens, und davon war kein Mensch auszunehmen. Auch nicht die Honeckers, die ihm beide viele Jahre lang das Leben schwergemacht hatten. "Hier braucht ein Mensch Hilfe, dem können wir uns nicht versagen. Jesus hätte ihn auch nicht abgewiesen." Doch es war auch die Freude über die politische Wende, die Uwe Holmer für diese Geste stark gunug machte. Der Pfarrer und seine Familie zögerten nicht, das berühmteste Ehepaar der DDR bei sich aufzunehmen.

[Holmer had always taken the words of the Bible literally. Forgiveness was a central value of his Christian faith, and no person was excluded from that. Not even the Honeckers, who had made life hard for both of them for many years. "Here a person needed help, we couldn't fail him. Jesus would also have not have turned him down." But it was also the joy over the political change that made Uwe Holmer strong enough for these guests. The minister and his family did not hesitate to accept the the most famous married couple of the DDR.]

I picture it as like being asked to have Dick Cheney and his wife Liz stay in your guest room while they are waiting for Saudi Arabia or Paraguay or somewhere to approve their request for asylum. I just don't think I'm that good of a Christian. It would take a road-to-Damasacus type vision to get me to that point, I'm afraid.

Holmer talks about the Honeckers' stay in this interview, Frau Honecker schickt noch Briefe by Marijke Engel Berliner Zeitung 28.01.2000.

Uwe Holmer in more recent years

The Honeckers were later flown to Moscow, where they became no longer welcome guests after the fall of the Soviet Union. In 1992, they were returned to then-unified Germany, where Honecker was again arrested on charges of ordering border guards to shoot to kill when people tried to escape the DDR borders. But again he was released on grounds of poor health. He joined Margot and Sonja in Chile, where he died in May 1994 of liver cancer.

Margot is still alive. She still lives in Chile. She was invited to Nicaragua in 2008, which she was honored with the Reuben Dario Prize for the "independence of culture". It was her first appearance in a public function since she arrived in Chile in 1993.

According to Huber, the Holmer still receives letters from her occasionally. In the 2000 Berliner Zeitung article linked above, he says Margot writes at least every Christmas.

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, erich honecker, florian huber, margot honecker, uwe holmer

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