Thorsten Zopf was Dietmar Bartsch’s chief driver for eight years. Now the left faction is history and Zopf has lost his job. Visiting a man who doesn’t want to give up his job or party.
The last trip was another challenge. The bad weather, all the traffic. Full concentration was required. “We managed to get around it,” says Thorsten Zopf. They were on time – despite everything.
A day later, the Left Party’s parliamentary group is history, but the sign is still hanging next to the door. Jakob-Kaiser-Haus, room 3835, Thorsten Zopf, chief driver. Knock once, come in friendly, ask the most important question first: How are you?
“How are you supposed to go?” says Zopf, 56, warm smile, gentle voice. “It’s all kind of surreal.”
He offers water and takes a bottle for himself. Then he looks at the crate of drinks in the corner of the office and shakes his head. “It all has to go too.”
Zopf spent this St. Nicholas morning at his desk. He entered his working hours for the last time and accounted for travel and fuel costs for the last time. “Everything has to be right,” says Zopf. He then locked the fuel card away. It’s now invalid anyway, he says.
Zopf’s old workplace is parked a few floors below. An Audi A8, 250 hp, black on the outside, comfortable on the inside. “He’s standing in the underground car park, warming himself up,” says Zopf. “And the driver now becomes a foot hunter.”
He says this with a laugh. But it’s not just the three Audi model cars on the cupboard behind him that show how difficult this must be for Zopf. He likes his job. The long journeys, the many encounters, the good conversations with the boss.
This is all over now. At least for now.
Could the split be prevented?
There was a lot of sadness the day before the end, says Zopf. He has been driving Dietmar Bartsch since 2015, often leaving far too early in the morning or returning home far too late in the evening. Bartsch was the parliamentary group leader until midnight on Tuesday evening, but now he is simply an individual member of parliament. He still has an office, but no longer has a driver.
Zopf’s contract runs until the end of March. He is no longer allowed to work for the MPs. Not even for Bartsch. The Die Linke faction, where he was employed, is being liquidated. Because Sahra Wagenknecht wants to found her own party, Thorsten Zopf has to look for a new job. Left-wing politics can sometimes be quite lacking in solidarity.
Some on the remaining left are now hoping for a liberation. Without Wagenknecht, the theory goes, we can finally get started again. For Zopf and the other 107 members of the group, it’s now a practical matter: pack up, clear out, goodbye!
“Maybe it didn’t have to happen like this,” says Zopf. Could the split be prevented? He sighs. The question bothers him.
Two years ago, a portrait of chief driver Zopf appeared in the “Süddeutsche Zeitung”, a full page three, it hangs framed in his office. The SZ called him “the man in the wheel” because, like many other thousands of employees, he ensures in the background that the policy factory runs smoothly.
“Heads up, not your hands”
The last tour went to Hagenow in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. Of all things. Back then, eight years ago, the second trip together took Zopf and Bartsch there. Since then, they have visited the comrades every year for Advent coffee. Not an appointment like any other.
“You think about it so much,” says Zopf. “The route here: How often have you driven it? What have you experienced here?”
On the last trip it was mostly quiet in the car, between him and Dietmar. “And then when you have a conversation, you say: It has to go on somehow. And it will go on somehow.” Zopf hasn’t given up his left yet. “That has to be the credo of the party and also of us employees: keep your head up, not your hands!”
Zopf now often quotes the saying. It comes from his first boss at the Left, then still PDS. Lothar Bisky has been dead for ten years, but when Zopf sits at his desk, he looks gently over his shoulder from a photo on the wall. Every now and then Zopf looks up at him.
Bisky told him about his friend Fausto Bertinotti, an Italian ex-communist who was chairman of the European Left Party for several years. He experienced that too: the left in Italy split, as did the left in Greece. “And we always warned against it,” says Zopf.
In the end they warned in vain. What has long been a reality elsewhere in Europe now also applies to Germany. The extreme right is becoming stronger and stronger. And the left is falling apart. “We can’t accept that. It’s all cheese,” says Zopf. His father died last year. “If he were still alive, he wouldn’t have understood.” Many older comrades feel this way now. “The world is collapsing for them.”
Zopf almost became a fighter pilot
Zopf grew up in Berlin-Friedrichshain. The Berlin dialect cannot be ignored; it can be quoted faithfully to the original. “That’s how I talk.” His stepmother was a teacher, and his father was actually a chauffeur. He drove a department head from Günter Mittag, who was responsible for the GDR’s planned economy in the SED’s Politburo. Zopf experienced the turning point at the officers’ school of the National People’s Army in Bautzen. He was supposed to become a fighter pilot. Then things turned out differently.
At 22, Zopf had to start over. For more than ten years he drove money through Brandenburg for a security company. Later, back in Berlin, he applied to the PDS. Bartsch, then federal manager, liked him. Zopf got the job.
From 2006 to 2015 he chauffeured the party leaders, first Bisky, then Gesine Lötzsch. Her book “Always beautiful at eye level” is now on the desk in front of Zopf; he found it while tidying up. Lötzsch dedicated a paragraph to him. It’s about October 4, 1957. What happened that day? Lötzsch liked to ask students this question. Rarely did anyone know the right answer. Zopf, the almost-pilot and space enthusiast, of course knew them: On that day, the Soviets launched Sputnik 1, the first satellite, into space.
Gesine Lötzsch’s office is just a few doors away. “She now suffers with me to a certain extent when she sees me,” says Zopf. He would have liked more solidarity from other MPs.
Zopf shared the office with Amira Mohamed Ali’s driver. She left the Left with nine others and is now chairwoman of Wagenknecht’s predecessor organization BSW. Did he ever ask her driver what that was all about? No, says Zopf, that’s not common among drivers. “You don’t ask: What does she do? It doesn’t work.” What is discussed in the car stays in the car. Chief Driver Honor.
Carman? “A quick-witted woman”
If you believe Sahra Wagenknecht, Zopf’s biography makes him a type of voter that the Left Party no longer reaches. Someone who gets up early in the morning and earns his money through honest work. Someone who knows that an impeccable CV does not protect you from the course of life. And that you don’t need a degree to make sense of the world.
One of those “normal people” for whom Wagenknecht is doing all the work with the new party. At least that’s what she says. In her bestseller “The Self-Righteous,” she accuses the left of betraying the working class because it focuses primarily on “lifestyle issues” and “bizarre minorities.” Gender, LGBTQI rights, things like that.
Zopf has little use for the accusation. “Lifestyle issues? What’s that supposed to mean? Everyone can live according to their own style. I don’t have a problem with that at all.” The party may have somewhat forgotten how to emphasize the social differences between East and West over and over again. “We could have, should have, should have been louder.”
But does that mean splitting? Braid waves away. A lot has been achieved even from the opposition: the practice fee of ten euros was abolished and the minimum wage was introduced. “We have to learn again to always keep this in front of us: If we hadn’t been there, this wouldn’t have happened.”
Zopf says he can’t say anything negative about Wagenknecht. He was never her driver, but she used to be his boss as co-leader of the group. “I got to know her as a calm and thoughtful woman, but also as a funny and quick-witted woman.” Why are you pursuing your project now? “Well, there are reasons for that.”
When it comes to a divorce, says Zopf, no one person alone is to blame. “As a member, I would have liked my party to close the door and shout at me, but if you think about it, one or the other could have been right.”
The driver is Dietmar
Zopf now has to do without his new ex-boss Bartsch as a passenger. But no one can take his Dietmar away from him. Their relationship is more friendly than professional. Bartsch says. And Zopf nods energetically when asked about it. Because the parliamentary group leader did not yet have an Instagram account and Zopf likes to take photos, they in the Bartsch office thought it would be a good idea before the 2017 federal election to leave the social media work on this channel to the driver. It has remained that way to this day.
“I have to say, they took me on something, an adventure like this. I never thought that was possible,” says Zopf, folding his arms behind his head and leaning back. And for a moment he smiles as contentedly as Bisky above him.
Zopf says he was already happy when he had 100 followers, and then politicians from other parties began advertising for him, and now almost ten thousand people follow him. Zopf posts photos of the Audi. Photos from events. Photos of Bartsch in various situations. Mostly for business purposes, occasionally for private purposes.
When Bartsch spoke at the Left party conference in mid-November, Zopf was driving his car somewhere else. “Just stopped to hear my boss and friend’s speech,” he writes on Instagram. “Yes and I have tears in my eyes.”
“Dem Dietmar his driver” is the name of Zopf’s account. That’s what it says on the back of his jersey when he and Bartsch go to Union Berlin’s home game at the Alte Försterei. Bartsch’s jersey says: Dietmar to the driver.
It’s hard to say who is less successful right now: the Left Party or Union Berlin. Maybe there’s a connection, says Zopf. “Union is unlucky in the shoe, we are unlucky in the shoe.” But he believes things will get better for both of them. His outlook for the season: “Union manages to stay in the league and the Left manages to be stronger as a faction again in 2025.”
Zopf doesn’t give up hope
Zopf is getting a lot of messages on Instagram these days: How’s it looking? What’s next? The solidarity is good for him. “That helps.” But he doesn’t know exactly what will happen next. In January he will bring the A8 back to the manufacturer. “I’ll dress it up a day before.” Otherwise, his wife probably has ideas about what he can do with his unwanted free time. The two children have long since left the house.
Zopf doesn’t let his confidence be taken away. He hopes that the remaining Left MPs can now quickly form a group. That this group also gets a driver, like back in Bonn. “And that people remember me and say: Yes, he was a good driver, he was solid.”
In the best case scenario, says Zopf, next spring he will be sitting in the car smiling, with the new group chair next to him. You take a selfie and write underneath: “Let’s go. Forward!”
Source: Stern
I have been working in the news industry for over 6 years, first as a reporter and now as an editor. I have covered politics extensively, and my work has appeared in major newspapers and online news outlets around the world. In addition to my writing, I also contribute regularly to 24 Hours World.
