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Bremen (Weltexpresso) – Following the state election in Thuringia, CDU General Secretary Paul Ziemiak has made it clear that his party will not be cooperating with the Left Party, partly because it „has not recognised to this day that the GDR was an unjust state“. The CDU’s stance on the right-wing Alternative for Germany remains unclear after seventeen CDU politicians in Thuringia called for „open-ended talks“ with the AfD, even though Ziemiak described this demand as „crazy“. The conservative Union of Values in the CDU does not rule out talks with representatives of the AfD, as its prominent member Hans-Georg Maaßen, former President of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, made clear on Deutschlandfunk radio on 7 November. He explained that refusing to talk was undemocratic.
Somehow, despite all the denials, the fronts seem to be shifting. Although both CDU/CSU parties are in danger of being eaten away by the AfD, the far-right party is not seen as the most important competitor everywhere. The challengers for first place and in the battle for the chancellorship are the Greens, said CSU chairman Markus Söder at the recent party conference of the Christian Social Union. On the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the question of how it is that the same people in East Germany who took to the streets in protest against the autocratic rule of the SED are now taking a liking to a party like the AfD, whose German nationalist policies ultimately also amount to autocratic rule – just in a different colour. Are they, as Heribert Prantl writes in the Süddeutsche Zeitung of 2/3 November, seeking retrospective revenge on the nominally anti-fascist GDR for allowing itself to be dismantled so unopposed? According to him, rarely has a dictatorship kicked the bucket so peacefully.
A remarkable process indeed. However, the fact that the revolution in the GDR was peaceful cannot only be credited to one side, but is also the merit of the other, which, with its own downfall in mind, refrained from using violence to maintain its power. Didn’t the GDR have the same „right to self-assertion“ that the Federal Court of Justice readily granted to the National Socialist unjust state when it acquitted the chief judge at the SS and police court in Munich, Dr Otto Thorbeck, who sentenced the resistance fighters around Admiral Canaris and Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer to death by hanging on 8 April 1945, of all guilt?
In its judgement of 25 May 1956, the Federal Court of Justice explained: „The starting point is the state’s right to self-assertion. In a struggle for being or not being, all nations have always enacted strict laws to protect the state. Even the National Socialist state cannot easily be denied the right to enact such laws“. The highest German criminal court thus counteracted a decision by the Braunschweig district court in March 1952, according to which the Nazi state was „not a constitutional state, but a state of injustice“ against which resistance was justified. The court thus followed an application by the Braunschweig public prosecutor and later Hessian Attorney General Fritz Bauer, who had made himself permanently unpopular with all former supporters and enforcers of the Nazi regime by classifying the Nazi state as a state of injustice.
The transfer of the term „unjust state“ to the GDR was a political manoeuvre that was as transparent as it was infamous, placing the German Democratic Republic on the same level as the murderous regime of the National Socialists, which murdered six million Jews and started the Second World War. The political opponent, already on the ground, was to be morally destroyed and socialism discredited forever as a social model. In 1991, the then Federal Minister of Justice, Klaus Kinkel, proclaimed: „I am relying on the German justice system. We must succeed in delegitimising the SED system.“ This was a „fatal sentence“, wrote the weekly newspaper DIE ZEIT on 29 August 1997, as this was not the task of the judiciary. But the judiciary went straight to the point, even if it had to throw everything it had thought up until then overboard in order to leave the servants of the Nazi state of injustice in black robes scot-free.
As far as those politically responsible are concerned, some representatives of the conservative camp have not dealt with every dictatorship as mercilessly as they did with the GDR. When the Chilean army general Augusto Pinochet used armed force against the democratically elected president Salvador Allende in 1972, the CSU chairman Franz Josef Strauß mocked the critics in the Stuttgarter Nachrichten newspaper on 25 November 1977, saying that „it is clear that a coup is not like a Franciscan handing out soup“. Anyone who does not realise that the military decision in Chile was a „tremendous blow against international communism“ is, simply put, „stupid“. To be read in „Einschlägige Worte des Kandidaten Strauß“, Steidl Verlag, 9th edition 1980, p. 79/80.
In the trial of a former GDR judge sentenced to three years and nine months in prison, the Federal Court of Justice (AZ 5 StR 747/94) came to the conclusion that during the Cold War „on both sides, ‚political justice‘ was practised with an intensity that is not always comprehensible from today’s perspective“. For the GDR, this resulted in it being labelled an unjust state, whereas the Federal Republic of Germany was just as little harmed by this as by the – according to the BGH – „momentous failure of the Federal German criminal justice system“ towards the Nazi judges, not a single one of whom was finally convicted. It may not be appropriate to commemorate this on the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, but it must be said if forgetting is to be countered and the further march of our country to the right is to be halted.