The GDR, socialism and the left Heidi Reichinnek

The nice thing about a column is that it works differently than other journalistic forms, such as a message, a report or a comment. I do not have to pay attention to a certain structure, do not need the seven W (who, what, when, where, how, why, why, why) and may fabulous in the first person. And if the main sentences between all the subordinate clauses are hardly recognizable, then this is my columnistic freedom.

This also applies to the content. I have just spent a long paragraph with much too long sentences to write about how I write a column. And at the latest after the second sentence, all the data analyzes of the great tell me that star-T data analysis teams, the reader called user crowned away on the mobile phone, especially since I didn’t even have some search engine-optimized east trigger (Björn Höcke! Sahra Wagenknecht! NEONAZIS!). (But now.)

There are therefore only those frugal people who are interested in accompanying me through my mental maze to my great gratitude. Because this is how a column arises for me: I have some more or less sensible idea, and then I start to write in front of myself. In the end, I sometimes surprised myself about what came out of it.

The only question remains: which idea?

For example. On Friday I cycled across the cathedral square in Erfurt and stopped at one of the market stalls to spontaneously buy bioier from the organic farm. The seller wore a deep blue T-shirt, on the back of which was in large letters, and again in the front GDR, only smaller, directly above a hammer with a circle in the ear wreath, i.e. that this should be noted for backborns, the coat of arms of the GDR.

Due to so many GDR at once, the following dialogue relaxed:
I: “Interesting T-shirt.”
Salesperson: “This is the shirt of the GDR soccer team that hit the FRG in 1974.”
I: “Oh yes, that’s right, the gate shot at the time, what was it called … savings water?”
Salesperson: “Exactly that! I was born in 1965 and lived in the GDR for 25 years. It wasn’t a bad time. It wasn’t just a good time. But it wasn’t just a bad time either.”

Unfortunately, I couldn’t think of the ES-WAR-WAR-GUT-GUT-GUT-SACHT-NONGELESTHETEDEDE. I had probably just heard her too often. The sun also seemed lovely over the east of the Federal Republic, and I also wanted to buy the house -slaughtered wild boar liver sausage on the sales car next door.

So I paid my eggs (piece 50 euro cent aka a western mark), and while I did this, she was suddenly there: the idea. I remembered how my colleague Miriam Hollstein and I sat in the Heidi Reichinnek Bundestag office a few weeks ago and talked to her about the socialism that was so persistent by her party and that it did not work so well in the past.

The left faction leader replied: “Well, that in the GDR was not socialism. So not the way my party imagines it.”
We replied: “We don’t just mean the GDR. We mean all socialist attempts, including those of a so -called democratic socialism.”
Reichinnek: “We want to change the economic system, not overturn the political system. Other parties like the AfD want to abolish democracy!”

And so on and so on. You can read it in full.

When this week the interview in the current star appeared, it was time, well, a few reactions. The only CSU Prime Minister Markus Söder took a break from “Sausage” (Robert Habeck) to tell in the leather of his car via Instagram video that the GDR “Pure socialism” and in the rest “an injustice state” was. Similarly, in an alphabetical order, the free voter chairman Hubert Aiwanger, the head of the Mittelstands- und Wirtschaftsunion called Gitta Connemann, the FDP chairman Christian Dürr (yes, is called now) and the CDU member of the Bundestag Otilie Klein and Christoph Ploß.

The colleague Hajo Schumacher I very appreciated noted that he was the interviewer, i.e. Miriam and me, one “small accusation” must do. “Because after this answer by Ms. Reichinnek – ‘that was not a socialism in the GDR’ – I would have liked a demand: what was that? How would you call that what that was? I missed it a bit.”

I accept this criticism, dear Hajo, but I would like to explain why I failed the desired demand. In contrast to him and the professional politicians, I lived in GDR socialism and believe to know how Reichinnek meant their two incriminated sentences, because there are two and not just one.

I have seen that what was real in the GDR as socialism was not socialism, as the Union partner SPD still has in the fundamental program, but a pepied dictatorship. And I have seen that the so-called working class in the GDR had nothing to say in the so-called people’s ownership, while the SED polite office Fröhlich ran mismanagement. Incidentally, the state, which called itself German Democratic Republic, was all sorts of things, just not democratic.

All of this and much more, the Heidi Reichinnek, born in 1988, probably also learned from her parents, who were not in the SED, but in the church. You would have explained to her “that the GDR does not work” I have told Reichinnek in the interview. “They don’t want them again. And we don’t either.”

At this point I just agree with this and the seller with the GDR-T-shirt probably too. But of course I will ask him hard again when I buy my organic eggs back on the cathedral square in Erfurt. Pioneering word!