Tuesday, November 5, 2024

How Close Was [Chancellor] Merkel to the Communist System?

I don't think she could have done more damage to Germany's society and economy if she had been directly employed by the Soviets to do so.

From Der Spiegel, May 14, 2013:

A biography focusing on Chancellor Angela Merkel's time growing up in East Germany is making headlines because it suggests she was closer to the communist system than hitherto known. Her spokesman has denied she has covered anything up. 

A new biography covering Chancellor life in East Germany has caused a stir by suggesting she was closer to the communist apparatus and its ideology than previously thought.

Published this week and written by journalists Günther Lachmann and Ralf Georg Reuth, the book quotes Gunter Walther, a former colleague of hers at the Academy of Sciences in East Berlin, as saying she had been secretary for "Agitation and Propaganda" in the Freie Deutsche Jugend (FDJ) youth organization at the institute. Merkel, a trained physicist, worked at the academy from 1978 until 1989.

Excerpts from the book, "The First Life of Angela M.," were published in the newsmagazine Focus on Monday. The mass-circulation Bild newspaper has also given the book prominent coverage in recent days.

The book explores Merkel's life growing up in German Democratic Republic (GDR), where her father Horst Kasner was a Protestant pastor and a committed socialist. He moved to East Germany from West Germany in 1954.

Merkel has said in the past that her FDJ role at the academy was more that of a cultural secretary and that her duties included buying theater tickets and organizing book readings.

'Closeness to the System'

But former German Transport Minister Günther Krause -- an eastern German politician who worked with her in the final months of the GDR and as a fellow minister in the government ex-chancellor Helmut Kohl in the early 1990s -- contradicts her in the book and says she propagated Marxism-Leninism.

"With Agitation and Propaganda you're responsible for brainwashing in the sense of Marxism," he said. "That was her task and that wasn't cultural work. Agitation and Propaganda, that was the group that was meant to fill people's brains with everything you were supposed to believe in the GDR, with all the ideological tricks. And what annoys me about this woman is simply the fact that she doesn't admit to a closeness to the system in the GDR. From a scientific standpoint she wasn't indispensable at the Academy of Sciences. But she was useful as a pastor's daughter in terms of Marxism-Leninism. And she's denying that. But it's the truth." ....
 
Intro and outro from February's "Germany’s Days as an Industrial Superpower Are Coming to an End"

What did they do to themselves? 

How much does a person or a political entity have to hate themselves to, to not just commit suicide, but to do it slowly?

***

...Mutti and her ministers have a lot to answer for and it is becoming more and more apparent, with each passing day. that she was the second worst Chancellor in Germany's history.

Related, October 2022 - "Germany’s Apokalypse Now"