Merkel defends her East German past

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Merkel defends her East German past
Published: 19 May 09 17:01 CET
Online: http://www.thelocal.de/politics/20090519-19387.html

In the ongoing German debate about the legacy of the GDR, Chancellor Angela Merkel has roundly condemned the former communist regime while defending her membership in communist youth organisation the Freie Deutsche Jugend (FDJ).

“The GDR was built on injustice. It could never have become a constitutional state,” Merkel said on Tuesday in an interview for the ARD TV show Menschen bei Maischberger. “My nostalgia for socialism is non-existent,” she added, before saying that former GDR leader Erich Honecker had been “committed to the dictatorship of the working class.”

Merkel’s statements were made partly in response to the intimations of Oskar Lafontaine, leader of the hard-line socialist Left party, who said that Merkel had been complicit in the regime in her youth. Lafontaine claimed in a recent interview that Merkel’s position in the FDJ as a functionary for propaganda and agitation could only have been occupied by a “convinced young Communist.”

Merkel shot back that Lafontaine should stop such “schematization.”

“These black and white discussions do not help,” she said, emphasing that in the GDR she had been a scientist, a member of the FDJ, and had “accepted compromises.”

She said that she had always made clear that “there were certainly activists who fought against the system more than me.”

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Stasi officer tried to recruit me: Merkel

Reuters May 19, 2009 1:01 PM
http://www.canada.com/news/national/...089/story.html

BERLIN - Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Tuesday communist East Germany's Stasi secret police tried to recruit her when she was applying for a job at a university, but she quickly turned down the offer.

Merkel, who grew up in East Germany and became the first chancellor from the East in 2005, recalled how the Stasi approached her after an interview for a job as a scientific assistant at the Technical University in Ilmenau.

After the interview, she was shown to a room where she was expecting to claim her travel expenses but a Stasi officer was waiting for her.

"I said very quickly that it was not something for me," Merkel said in a recording of an ARD television chat show to be broadcast later on Tuesday.

It is the first time she has publicly mentioned the approach. A number of east Germans in political life have come to grief after Stasi files identified them as former informants.

Merkel, a physicist, said she had worked out an answer in advance as she was aware the Stasi might approach her. The plan was to say she couldn't keep her mouth shut and would tell all her friends.

"That was it then because silence was a basic condition," she said, adding she never got offered the university job.

This year's 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall has prompted a look back at aspects of life in the communist state. In the program, "Menschen bei Maischberger", Merkel also described how she and her friends lived with the Stasi, viewed as one of the most effective and repressive intelligence and secret police agencies in the world. She said she often tapped on lamps in pubs and said: "If there is a microphone there — switch on now!"

"The thing was not to let them drive you crazy," she said.