While George H.W. Bush, Michail Gorbachev, and Helmut Kohl meet in Berlin to celebrate the peaceful fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the East German GDR, a video has surfaced of the 82-year old widow of Erich Honecker – Margot Honecker – celebrating the 60th anniversary of the founding of the Stasi-state in her home in Chile. Germans, Frau Honecker insists in the video, are beginning to realize that "they had it better in the GDR – in socialism." The former education minister even holds out the hope that Germans would embrace a new, revitalized German Democratic Republic; she is "an optimist":
“Things in Germany are going downhill for the working class, so things
are looking good for the left,” she said. “I’m optimistic, always was
and always will be.”
Frau Honecker also points to the recent success at the polls for Die LINKE (the Left Party) which traces its roots back to the East German Communist Party SED as a positive sign of the coming proletarian revolution in Germany. I'm sure that Oskar Lafontaine is not happy with this endorsement.
Meanwhile, one of Margot Honecker's dissident victims from "the good old days" – Carl-Wolfgang Holzapfel – has been reenacting his days in a Stasi prison cell for all to see on the Web. Checking the site today, however, I found this announcment:
Liebe Besucher, aufgrund der emotionalen Belastung, die das erneute
Erleben der Zelle für Carl-Wolfgang Holzapfel bedeutete, sah er sich
dazu gezwungen, die Kunstaktion trotz der großen Resonanz abzubrechen. (Dear visitors, in view of the emotional reaction for Carl-Wolfgang Holzapfel of once again experiencing the prison cell he felt compelled to end this project even though the response has been tremendous.)
Obviously, Herr Holzapfel's memory of the GDR workers' paradise was far different from that of Frau Honecker.
