In the hope of a better country.
Sebastian Gerhardt and Erhard Weinholz talking about the initiative for a United Left (VL) *
[This article published in July 2020 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://www.sozonline.de/2020/07/in-der-hoffnung-auf-ein-besseres-land/.]
1. the target
Erhard Weinholz: In the following we want to talk about something that is closely connected with our own lives, about the work of the VL. In other words, a citizens' movement from the autumn of 1989, a group that almost no one knows today and which in many respects had a different orientation than earlier socialist organizations in this country. A new approach, therefore, which - I don't want to overestimate it - has also had a certain impact on others. But we are not doing this here to posthumously award the Great Revolutionary Merit Medal to the VL. The question is whether and how the observation of this VL story can become productive for others, and we want to offer material for this.
Sebastian Gerhardt: And we would like to refer to the current context: Some of our comrades-in-arms from back then have spoken up over the past year, also with new positions: Thomas Klein in telegraph no. 135/136, Bernd Gehrke in SoZ no. 1/2020. Perhaps this increased interest is no coincidence...
Erhard: ...because now important protagonists can just give information. First we want to give you some ideas about the character of this VL, then we'll look at how the VL behaved in two important phases in 1989/90, in order to make the difficult and problematic aspects of its work clear, and finally we'll summarize it. The basic aim of this TL was to achieve a liberal, democratic, grassroots socialism, and that here in the GDR. And this is exactly what we wanted, but even with such an attitude it was not so easy to discover this TL. How did that go for you?
Sebastian: At that time I was in the army in Dabel near Sternberg in Mecklenburg, Unterfeldwebel, reconnaissance group leader. In the summer of '89 I was a candidate for the SED. That was not a matter of course in my family. At that time I said: If you can no longer join the party in this country that refers to Marx, then it's over anyway. In Sternberg I knew the pastor and then in October I went to church meetings - in uniformwhere the new groups were introduced. There was talk of socialism, at the Democratic Awakening, for example, and of grassroots democracy. But the fact that socialism means that it is also quite clearly against capitalism was not so clear. Such an "enemy image" was considered by many as SED propaganda. That a capitalist restoration was possible was something only the VL talked about, although you could already see in Hungary in the summer: The danger was real. About the VL I had heard something on DT 64 (youth program of the GDR-Radio, E.W.).
Erhard: As you can see, the access also depended on the age: I was forty then, DT 64 wasn't my station anymore.
Sebastian: And I only heard about the VL on the radio there. Otherwise, it was not to be found not only in the GDR media, but also in Western reporting.
What the VL represented was very specific. Those who were interested in it and then took part in it had a lot in common. Not the same educational background, but there was a cultural, political and social connection. That's how we found each other. I had personal contact at the first working meeting of the VL, 25/26 November, I arrived in Berlin late on Saturday afternoon and was also present at the follow-up meeting in Leipzig a fortnight later. But at that time a lot had already happened.
Erhard: For a long time it was not foreseeable how fast things would get going, whether you would have to hurry yourself. I had always thought: This people here, until they take to the streets...
Sebastian: But you could clearly see that something had started. To give you an example: In September an official party information was read out in the party organization of my unit - as probably everywhere in the SED - that hostile negative forces were gathering under the roof of the church. And then I thought to myself: If they have to admit something like that, then it must really be of importance to them.
Erhard: Because that was the line: Don't talk about it. I suppressed the development in Hungary at the time, although I knew that the great masses in Hungary were also oriented towards Western consumption. I said to myself: Now we'll try socialism again. An organization that becomes active and immediately plans its own defeat won't even get back on its feet. Even if this prospect is quite realistic. And that's why we had to compete in the spring 1990 Volkskammer elections with a socialist programme for an independent GDR. There was no other way.
Sebastian: I agree. Otherwise one could have left it.
Erhard: It wasn't easy for me to get in touch with VL, although I met Thomas Klein and Bernd Gehrke (the two main authors of the Böhlen Platform, the founding call for VL, E.W.) back in 1977, here in Berlin at the Academy of Sciences. Bernd was soon kicked out, conspiratorial circle work, I worked with Thomas in the FDJ until his arrest in 1979, especially at our seminars on Soviet economic history. In the late 80s, when I had already graduated from the academy, I dealt a lot with economic issues. It was clear to me at the time that all this plan-market-reform fiddling around with plans was useless and that we needed new forms of economic control beyond bureaucratic planning and the market. This is also reflected in the VL election program. And it was also clear to me that this theorem about the leading role of the party was the main political evil and that it must be abandoned.
Sebastian: That was the VL inscribed in the genetic code, so to speak.
Erhard: I read about the Böhlen Platform for the first time in October '89 in the weekly newspaper Die Kirche, and I spontaneously liked these platform points.
Sebastian: The platform actually had little to do with practical political questions, but it was, let's say, a point of identification. It also enabled us to distance ourselves from the non-socialists and from the SED, which had completely blocked itself at the time. In the end, the borderline was the question of German unity. But what could we do together based on this common ground?
Erhard: The difficulties are already apparent when you see that the VL was the only organization of this kind in the whole of the Far East.
Sebastian: Well, there was still the left wing of Solidarnosc, they had similar practical goals, but they renounced socialism. Communism meant totalitarianism for them. In Hungary the group around Tamas Krausz, more like an intellectual circle around the magazine eszmelet (https://www.eszmelet.hu/en/about-us/the-journal-2/), in terms of content not far away from us, they have held out until today, and in the CPSU parts of the Marxist Platform, where some also wanted to renounce the leading role.
Erhard: Perhaps one could say: that was kinship, but it was not enough for a political network. And we also had great difficulties in finding partners in the West. The ak in Hamburg and the VSP ... and that was it. I had thought, for example, that the Socialist Office was close to us, I knew their paper on the left, it was in the State Library in the reading room, and I wrote a long letter to them in the summer of 1990 as the VL work secretariat, telling them who we were and what we were doing etc. The reaction was zero.
Sebastian: There were really surprises: Western leftists, where I thought they'd fit in with us, concentrated more on the SED reformers, for others we were too anarchic, but for real anarchists we were not enough.
Erhard: The Böhlen platform, our social goals in general, were already of practical importance, namely for us in the VL itself, the way we dealt with each other. But we didn't have it as difficult as the Bolsheviks in 1917 to behave in a civilized way, we didn't have to fight for power like they did. On the other hand, it must be said that there were leftist movements for which the question of power never arose and where they nevertheless suppressed each other. So that speaks for the VL.
Sebastian: There were also role models, popular, even if distant ones, for me, but not only for me, the liberation movements in Latin America, Chile, Nicaragua, see Gerhard Schönes Lied "With the face to the people". In addition there was the demarcation from Stalinism, which became even broader with Perestroika. In other words, peaceful, objective, democratic conflict resolution was part of the self-image, which cannot be changed so easily. But that applied to all citizens' movements, and there was consensus even in parts of the SED.
Erhard: I would like to introduce two terms from the moth box and ask to what extent they could characterize us: New Left and Third Way. Perhaps the latter did not fit in with a radical left ...?
Sebastian: Third way, that was the SED reformers. These were partly interesting texts, but clearly technocratic, thought from above: Not lose control. New Left was something different, that was also a concept of the West. In our country it was rather called 68er, and 68 was in principle always positively occupied: commune, free love etc. But also Prague 68.
Erhard: There was an impulse in 68 in the direction of 89, but this can only have been of direct relevance, if at all, in the VL Berlin for the few who were in their forties in 1989. But they did have some influence on the fate of the team: Bernd Gehrke, Thomas Klein, Judith Brabant, Marion Seelig, Eva Kratz (together with Bernd Gehrke, she represented the team in the GDR Speakers' Council, E.W.).
And now a big question: How do we deal with this VL story? Thomas Klein once said that the socialist left cannot be outdone by anyone in self-criticism. A nice motto, but one that has hardly been realized so far. I find rather statements like: Everyone else betrayed their original goals, we were the only ones who stayed true, had the right line, etc. This is not completely out of the air, the VL was the only major new organization that held on to socialist ideas, and we have good reasons to continue to stand by it - nevertheless, it seems a bit ridiculous to judge a bunch that got just 0.2% of the votes in March 1990 in this way.
Sebastian: I can't remember that we appeared with such sentences in 1989/90 ...
Erhard: If you want to form an electoral alliance with someone, you can hardly call him a turncoat.
Sebastian: Characteristic for the VL were contradiction, resistance in more than one direction and, precisely for this reason, cooperation in different directions - depending on what was at stake. It was precisely this that made us suspicious to many in the SED-PDS as well as in other citizens' movements.
Erhard: Perhaps this ability to cooperate with different forces was also the rational element in the hope that we find among the VL founders that the VL would become the large left-wing organization. This is also behind Bernd Gehrke's statement in SoZ 1/2020 that he felt the founding of the New Forum as a blow to the pit of his stomach. But the opposition, not to speak of the people at all, did not, or no longer, I don't know, let itself be united in the sense of a different socialism.
Sebastian: "Pit in the stomach"? Thomas Kupfer from Halle saw it the other way round in 1991: That the VL was an alternative to the other, politically not very defined citizen movements. But one is amazed at the cooperation that still took place on certain
occasions, for example on 19 December 89 at the anti-Kohl demonstration: VL, Democracy Now! and the Peace and Human Rights Initiative stood side by side as callers. That also depended very much on local circumstances. New forum in Rostock, that was Gauck. And there was nothing going on with the VL, but also with IFM and DJ.
Erhard: While here at the III GDR delegates' conference of the VL, in January 1990, Reinhard Schult of the Neues Forum asked what socialism means today. But that led to some arguments in the Forum.
Sebastian: Whereby of course also before within the opposition the attitude to the GDR and to socialism was disputed and afterwards likewise. What strikes me is a contrast: 25 years ago there was a joint conference of people from the VL and the Independent Women's Association and parts of the New Forum in Berlin on the fifth anniversary of "the great non-socialist October Revolution". Twenty years ago, the basis for an exhibition, The Short Autumn of Utopia, which was not quite as broad, but where people discussed with each other. Ten years ago, a connection between activists and the express and the SoZ, which enabled a joint publication of the different points of view (http://express-afp.info/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Ränkeschmiede_DDR_2.Auflage.pd f). It was not about a common practice, but about interrelated discussions. In the meantime - my impression - the political isolation of the old-oppositional milieu has dissolved even the last meeting points. In 2002-2006/07 the protests against Hartz IV etc. still had common political points of reference, but that is over. Some of them came together only once last year to defend the legitimacy of left-wing opposition in the GDR, in this brochure "... hostile-negative elements... - Repression against left-wing and emancipatory movements in the GDR", published by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation.
Erhard: There has been a real desolidarization...
Sebastian: ...especially in 2007 in the conflict over Horch und Guck, where the Havemann Society suddenly kept out of the way (Horch und Guck was a journal that dealt with the history of opposition and repression in the GDR, but also reacted critically to developments in the Federal Republic in the spirit of the 89 autumn, and was therefore withdrawn from the Foundation for Rethinking; the Havemann Society acted as a reappraisal initiative in a similar direction, E.W.). The activities of the Stiftung Aufarbeitung have stabilized many archives and groups since 1998, but political independence was over.
2. the strategy
Erhard: The VL did not only take office with a certain goal in autumn 1989, namely liberal and democratic socialism, but also with a certain strategy. Perhaps we should now talk about them, about the problems that arose in the autumn of 1989 and then again in the summer of 1990. In the New Germany, the motto then was: Faithful to the ideals of the autumn, but did we understand how to translate this faithfulness sufficiently into political action? Big question mark.
Sebastian: Why is this a focus for you?
Erhard: As far as I know, we have never dealt with it, but it could show to a certain extent what we had to struggle with internally and why the VL was not active for so long. The late autumn of 89 was the first decisive change of course.
Sebastian: You just didn't notice it right away. In November 89 we were maybe a thousand people, and then the VL as a subject grew strongly again and again until the beginning of February 1990. But the challenges also became greater and greater - and only became conscious step by step. At the beginning of 1990, many cross-connections between the groups were not established until then. At that time, in its best times, I guess, VL Berlin had about four hundred members, although the question remains: Who was a member?
Erhard: But that was a growth still under the guiding idea of a better socialism here in the country.
Sebastian: When the election campaign started, this optimism had, it seems to me, already evaporated.
Erhard: There was little talk about it, so it's difficult to say when it was lost. But back to the autumn of 89, so it was a tiny pile. And there were other things needed. To ask Brecht: But who was the VL? Was she sitting in a house with telephones?
Sebastian (laughs): Unfortunately not. The VL in Berlin was available from October onward via contact addresses, but only by post. Kathrin Schmidt for example (born 1958, poetry and prose author, E.W.).
Erhard: Which initially required some courage. As far as I know, the VL has never thanked them. But the VL had to see how they themselves became known, and that was just as difficult. There were notes hung here, there and there in the church portals - but often a dozen were already hanging there. And there were occasional information events in churches where the Böhlen Platform was also represented. This means that calls such as "We must take our affairs into our own hands" from October 5, 1989, had only a limited reach. One must always bear this in mind when talking about the work of the VL at that time.
Sebastian: Although the call was probably misdated, it seems to me, when I look at the content, more likely to be from November 5. The VL became more or less perceptible only when the radio reported occasionally, the television broadcasted discussions, where the VL was also involved.
Erhard: Unfortunately not the West German television, but the GDR media were used more at that time. Then the television broadcasts of the Round Table from December 7th became important, our main access to the public. At that time, however, now we come to the actual topic, the strategy of the VL, which was pursued at least verbally throughout
the autumn, lost its sense: the building of a counter power from below in a very demanding sense. This meant, it must be said, something other than the Round Tables, which were also a countervailing power.
Sebastian: At the Round Tables the diplomatic aspect was in the foreground, negotiating with the old power. And the access was exclusive, certain organizations had that. Whereas the model of countervailing power from below was about first orienting oneself.
Erhard: For the organizations there was also not planned such a leading role, that had more of a council character. But it was hardly implemented, maybe in a few companies, but not locally, in the territories.
Sebastian: I wouldn't say that, there was a broad movement, spontaneously from below, in the communities, in the schools, I would also add the dissolution of the Stasi, the first commissioners for foreigners in East Germany GDR.
Erhard: All right, I have to be more specific: Countervailing power from below ultimately meant that the People's Democratic Committees open to all parties ... took all matters in their area into their own hands, as stated in the People's Congress Appeal of 9 December 1989.
Sebastian: Building a dual rule, if there is one at all, the development has not gone that far, that's right. By the way, the addressees of this strategy were the working people, to use such a term GDR, actually the whole people. Everyone should participate in building a new community.
Erhard: see the People's Congress Appeal: Delegates from all companies and institutions should come together and convey the will of the people to the parties etc.
Sebastian: The project was already senseless because from below such centralizations were not even aimed at. And it was based on the idea of the will of the people not being contaminated by the parties.
Erhard: A will of the people, so to speak. In fact, however, the popular will was fundamentally divided on the question of German unity, even at that time, and the development continued in this direction despite fierce opposition from the left.
Sebastian: Resistance, for example, was the call For Our Country, at the end of November. But what could be done for our country was no longer said - because the first signatories were already in disagreement about it. By how much less then "the people" as a whole.
Erhard: And then there was this human chain at the beginning of December, also a very big action.
Sebastian: Did it really have such a concrete goal? It seems to me that it was more directed towards democratic renewal in general.
Erhard: Yes, in my opinion it was clearly about the rescue of the GDR, a human chain from east to west and one from north to south, from border to border, that was like a symbolic embrace of the country ... So, and now came the problem for the VL: the counter-power strategy was taken away from the ground by the western-orientation of the people, at least from the maximum strategy in the way the VL represented it: People's Committees, People's Congress.
Sebastian: The People's Congress idea could not work because the masses were not willing to take over a bankrupt shop, not in accounting terms, but economically, morally and politically bankrupt. The resistance of the political bureaucracy was not decisive. But the question: What next?
Erhard: This was also the last VL call of this kind.
Sebastian: In May 90 there was something else from Herbert Misslitz and Bernd Gappa, called Initiative Volkskongress, and it was about shaping German unity from below, certain basic values should be taken into account ...
Erhard: In terms of content, Herbert took up the idea of the People's Congress in his appeal For Unity and Clarity, Summer 90, where he criticized, among other things, that we had not oriented ourselves to the popular majority.
Sebastian: That could also come from Leipzig from the SAG, the Socialist Workers Group - they also demanded that we follow the people and now stand up for German unity. Absurd ... that only works with cadre organizations, where they then turn around on their heels. But even with this idea of the People's Congress, you could say: that was a flight to the front instead of honesty.
Erhard: Yes, it had no more ground to stand on, so we should have debated what we are doing now, but then we would have had to admit the failure of the initial strategy, even now, and, as we have already discussed, it was difficult to continue. So we let Herbert work his ass off in his office at the People's Congress and concentrated on other things, round tables, since December 89, and soon on the election campaign. Anyway, that suited our membership more, the right movers and shakers were rare in our country.
Here in this large Berlin group, there was a lack of places and time for thorough debate. This round table was actually, according to Bernd, not even our furniture. But one did not want to isolate oneself, I have now heard from him and Thomas.
Sebastian: In the Berlin core of the VL, I didn't see it that way at the time, the ties to the old oppositional milieu were much stronger than the connections to the outside world. Not to isolate oneself meant: to work together with the left wing of the New Forum,
which one could, perhaps until the end of January, still consider to be the whole of the New Forum.
Erhard: In connection with the autumn of 89, I want to come back to something you said earlier: The masses were not ready to take over this store. Jörg Roesler once said that the GDR economy, with the support of the rich uncle in Bonn, could have reached the level of the Federal Republic within a few years - but in my opinion, there was no social carrier in the GDR for this, and without one, it wouldn't work.
And as far as this western-orientation of the masses is concerned: Bernd Gehrke explained the masses' orientation towards the West in the mentioned SoZ, among other things, by saying that the opposition had not relied on the grassroots democratic selforganization of the people and had therefore not offered them any political perspective. But what is self-organization, which one must first be called upon to do? Or was this orientation towards the West a product of the Honecker era, its economic policy?
Sebastian: I think that the GDR was a "moral economy", with certain ideas of justice and rather firm mutual role expectations of leadership and obedient people. The disappointment about the failure of this division of labor, "abuse of office! Corruption!", was real - and presupposes a great deal of self-deception, especially among the outraged population.
Erhard: That those up there were materially privileged had been known for a long time. But it was not accepted. For example, when the Politburo switched to Volvo. There was also a rumor of a huge store with western goods, underground, where the functionaries would all shop. Without needing Western money. One would have liked to have that for oneself, that would have been fair. Honecker's politics certainly promoted such ideas, but above all it was probably a reaction to them. Ultimately, it is what Lenin once called the trade unionist consciousness. It is passed on from one generation to the next and at the same time is created, handed down and reproduced again and again.
Sebastian: Reproduced again and again? The idea of trade union organization is anything but a spontaneous product of capitalism. "Trade unionist" is such a fighting term of the professional revolutionaries, I have actually given up on it.
Erhard: It's clear that trade unions are an achievement, I'm a member of them myself. They are not the same today as in Lenin's time. It seems to be difficult to find a term for the mass consciousness of the Honecker era that is useful all around. All in all, consumerist would be too narrow - or should one speak of a trade unionist consciousness ... I won't puzzle any further.
3. under the spell of the elections
Erhard: The second decision for the continuation of the VL's work, which I think was not very reflective, was made in the summer of '90. At that time, the VL was still very much visible as an organization...
Sebastian: I don't want to guess right now. But I think 2000 active people are realistic.
Erhard: Although I never knew exactly where there were working groups in the work secretariat, which working groups of the VL Berlin, for example, were still functioning in the summer, what they did. In this context I want to put a view on the wall: That the VL would have been in a better position if the SED had disbanded at the end of 89, it would have been its duty before history, so to speak, to clear the way for us.
Sebastian: History is not a wish list. As a real factor, the SED was much more stable in the upheaval and in the new Germany due to the foreseeable exclusion of its activists than the CPSU in 1991 or the PZPR in Poland in 1990. And even there, the dissolution of these parties did not lead to an upswing of the independent Left. There, too, the independent left has only rarely managed to get its comrades out of their state fixation, out of their strictly cross-class orientation towards the common good.
Erhard: Apart from that: This way of thinking, where you deny others, whether it's the SED or the New Forum, the right to exist, because there is a Left Party, doesn't fit for me into our image of socialism.
Sebastian: This organization centricity, there is something Leninist about it...
Erhard: Cryptoleninistically I called it for me at that time. In any case, I think it has something avant-garde about it ... there is also a non-Leninist avant-garde.
But now let's talk about what was necessary this summer and what we actually did. The VL has strictly rejected the restoration of capitalism here in the country, the capitalist conditions were also not yet there ...
Sebastian: ...but it became apparent that the VL would have difficulties to deal with it, the political thinking of the VL stopped at the border to the GDR, in relation to the West we had such an observer position.
Erhard: And then it was a real shock when AEG suddenly appeared again on a factory facade in Schöneweide.
Sebastian: One exception was the "Husemannstrasse Circle", people from the New Forum were represented, Bärbel Bohley, other citizens' movements, also the VL, and also the West Greens, there it was about possibilities of cooperation. But after it was clear that there would be two electoral areas on December 2nd, so you didn't have to come under the same roof as the Greens, the pressure was already pretty much gone. Then an opposition conference was planned for '91, but that didn't work out, it remained with one of these yellow books by Christoph Links.
Erhard: That was no opposition. Nowhere? The question is now, what could, should, must have been done this summer.
Sebastian: Concrete fields of work were or could have been occupied houses, the founding of communes, the development of discussion links in the antifa area, company and trade union work, Berlin and Halle were active in that, there was the alliance of critical trade unionists East-West, VLer were also involved in that.
Erhard: But that was hardly anchored in the companies here in the East. And in the summer of 1990, everything in the VL area was outshone by the preparations for the federal elections on December 2.
Sebastian: There were three proposals: not to run at all, or with the PDS or, that was the option that was first discussed, with the citizens' movements. We came to the classic Condorcet paradox: there was no rational solution, because the constellation was not simply pro/contra. Hence the compromise: everyone was allowed to pursue their project, they were all supposed to be practically compatible with each other, but that was an illusion. The special illusion of the VLer, who were more involved with the Left List/ PDS: They wanted to form a new left wing with western leftists including the Left Greens from the Bundestag. The special illusion of the electoral alliance "Bürgerbewegungen": Actually something similar, only with less PDS and more old friends from the opposition. Both options, however, were clearly not grass-roots oriented, but rather rather backroom oriented - up to the failed opposition conference in 1991.
Option 3, non-election, was illusory, because the necessary resources for independent self-organisation (rooms, money, etc.) were romantically underestimated. Participation in the election contributed in no small measure to the financial stabilization of the rest of the VL: reimbursement of election campaign costs, a few mandates, etc.
Erhard: That's right, there was no optimal solution. And yet I still think today that this election participation was the biggest mistake the VL made: We should have been very much involved in concrete project work at the time, as part of a VL work programme. That would have been the main task, probably it was the last chance for us. But I wasn't really aware of that at the time. The elections took a lot out of us, but did not move us forward in terms of content. Moreover, this split has considerably worsened the climate in the VL.
Sebastian: But that was also due to the fact that both sides brought forward the big club. We were not prepared to make at least pragmatic decisions within limits.
Erhard: An important sentence, I'll come back to that later. In any case, the VL and its social importance went downhill from 1991 onwards.
Sebastian: But there was a whole series of follow-up projects, the Bunte Republik Neustadt, the Houses of Democracy in Rostock, Leipzig and Berlin - perhaps even more, the memory of the VL is strongly Berlin-centered.
Erhard: The Rosa Luxemburg Foundation is now preparing a booklet of materials, which will mainly deal with the VL in the North.
Sebastian: So there is hope for change.
4th attempt of a résumé
Erhard: Last point: What was this VL, what have we lost with it?
Sebastian: The VL was, I would say, the verbal-revolutionary wing of the citizens' movements of autumn 1989, i.e. a broad movement for the transformation of the GDR.
Erhard: Maybe a little more. First of all: It wasn't an avant-garde organization in the classical sense, we have already seen ourselves as a model, but not as such a vanguard, and yet one shouldn't measure the importance of the VL only or especially by the election results of March 18th, this 0.18%.
And the other one: I would like to take up what you just said, that the VL was not prepared to make certain pragmatic decisions. I would like to expand on that: it seems to me that the TL was fundamentally not prepared to make policy in the narrower sense; under the given circumstances, it was not even the task of the TL to make policy. It lacked the means to do so. And it lacked the capabilities to do extensive groundwork, to set up people's committees, etc., which would have been its task, all in all. I think the importance of the VL lay in the organizational model that was really lived, and in the programmatic, see the Volkskammer election program. At least it was once clearly stated what kind of socialism we wanted. In this respect, it was also good that we did not stay in Alliance '90. But that had little to do with our daily tasks, although the basic orientation was of course the same.
Sebastian: And it was also significant because of its continued involvement in other projects, see above.
Erhard: I want to point out once again an important attempt to explain the failure of the VL: Thomas Klein wrote in the ND of November 3-4, 2014 that the VL "was not able to formulate a convincing alternative to the 'turn necks' in the SED/PDS and the new political associations." In my opinion this is problematic: unable to say when someone has failed, for subjective reasons, the possible has not become real. But what the VL could offer, it offered. I doubt that at that time there was any alternative that was convincing at all.
Sebastian: What Thomas writes sounds as if the VL failed due to the lack of the "right" programmatic text. This is no coincidence or linguistic slip-up, but rather a precise expression of a political avant-garde concept that is not very realistic. But political selforganization needs more than just an idea of "society", "the balance of power" and the right program of action. A map is only helpful for orientation in the terrain if one can determine one's own position with it. In 1989/90, the VL was not a prevented avantgarde, but much more: a living political context that practiced and supported resistance.
The interview was conducted in late April and early May 2020, by telephone because of the Corona pandemic.
Sebastian Gerhardt, born 1968 in Rostock, 1990/91 representative of the Neustrelitz VL in the GDR Council of Spokespersons or one of the spokespersons of the VL Berlin, later board member of the Foundation House of Democracy and Human Rights, author (https://planwirtschaft.works), freelance education consultant and trade unionist (https://geschichte-wird-gemacht.org), main focus of work: housing policy. Lives in Berlin.
Erhard Weinholz, born 1949 in Brandenburg a. d. H., university economist, Dr. phil., 1990 research assistant to Thomas Klein, member of the VL Volkskammer, employee in the work secretariat of the GDR Speakers' Council of the VL, VL representative in the panel editorial department of the Berliner Zeitung, 2001 to 2007 member of the editorial team of Horch und Guck, works in journalism and literature, last book publication: Lokaltermin. Berliner Ansichten (2018). Lives in Berlin.
Conspiracy legends and opponents of vaccination
The abhorrence of the uncertain
by Paul B. Kleiser[This article published in August 2020 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://www.sozonline.de/2020/07/verschwoerungslegenden-und-impfgegner/.]
The so-called "corona crisis" has led to a revival and mass spread of conspiracy theories, especially on the Internet. Even the crudest nonsense is "licked" there, partly because it is all about emotions and critical debate is hardly possible on the net. Much of it is old familiar and only appears in ever new guises.
Although the COVID-19 virus is similar to other types of viruses that have spread from animals to humans, much is still unknown and unexplained; even experts often disagree. This is where conspiracy theorists come in. In the classic political form, the opposing power is blamed for the epidemic: While Donald Trump speaks of the "Chinese virus" and insinuates that it was deliberately created to harm the USA, the opposite "theory" is also being put forward, namely that the virus was created by the US secret service. The singer Xavier Naidoo from Mannheim (who is currently conducting a trial on whether or not he can be called an anti-Semite), for example, believes that the corona pandemic is a pure invention, just like the climate crisis. In his opinion, who is behind Corona and the "Fridays for Future" movement? The Antichrist! Why? Because the F is the sixth letter of the alphabet, FFF = 666 = Antichrist (Revelation of John in the New Testament).
Indirectly a "knowledge" is pronounced here: That religious views of the world have collapsed, but relics of them continue to work. A true believer would have said earlier:
Corona is a) either a divine test, which is supposed to show who reacts to it in a godly way (according to the preface of Boccaccio's Decamerone, written against the background of the plague epidemic of 1348); or else b) an attack of Satan, who wants to drag his followers down to hell. (The top-down symbolism has great power even today! Pope Francis, referring to the abuse scandals in the Catholic Church, spoke of the "work of Satan").
"Satanists" play an important role in many conspiracy theories. In them the (ultimately religious) theme of "salvation versus evil" or of "purity versus impurity" is rolled out, which is also the basis of all racism (Jews are "stinking Jews", certain whites are "pure Aryans" etc.).
In view of the randomness of the events, the conspiracy ideologists are concerned with constructing a world view that gives a clear meaning to an event that is uncanny for many people. The classical European conspiracy theories since the spread of the plague are almost always based on anti-Semitism! The arrival of the plague in Europe and early Jewish expulsions or pogroms took place at the same time!
The opponents of the vaccination
According to surveys, up to 20 percent of the population believe in a "vaccination conspiracy". Especially the journalist Ken Jebsen, who was fired by RBB because of antiSemitism and who has a rather large "follower community", is one of their followers.
He runs the enemy image Bill Gates. Firstly, he is quite rich (his fortune is estimated at 110 billion dollars); secondly, he has supported the WHO to a considerable extent - the WHO is a sub-organization of the UN, whose activities are thwarted by the US government under Trump, among others; but the Gates Foundation's share of this is less than 10 and not the claimed 80 percent! Thirdly, he belongs to the "left-alternatively filthy" 68ers and fourthly, he is considered a Jew by some people (probably because his father worked with Jews in a law firm) - so that's where everything fits together!
Jebsen even goes so far as to claim that Bill Gates and his wife Melinda had "more power than Roosevelt, Churchill, Hitler and Stalin together at the time", as he called out to the demonstrators in Stuttgart on 16 May. This comparison alone speaks volumes! "Bill Gates" (or his foundation) "controls the Corona measures in Germany." Others add (the Jews) George Soros, because his "Chinese laboratory WuXi Pharma Tech Inc." in Wuhan is located directly next to the Chinese research laboratory. According to Jebsen, Gates plans a "worldwide enforcement of mandatory vaccination". Others add: "A chip is to be placed in everyone's body to control them."
Of course there would be good reasons to criticize the monopolistic Microsoft system and its impact on global data traffic, but real capitalism does not interest conspiracy theorists. Otherwise, they might as well stick to Dietmar Hopp of SAP in Germania, who is investing in a Tübingen company that is developing a vaccine against corona!
conspiracy stories in connection with epidemics are nothing new: as early as the 1980s, narratives were circulating (even among the leftists!) that AIDS was a CIA invention to decimate the African population. The head of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, recently said that the world was not only dealing with a "pandemic" but also with an "infodemic".
A long tradition
The anti-vaccination campaign as a relatively widespread phenomenon in Germany goes back to the circle of the anti-Semite Eugen Dühring in connection with the debate at the time about the smallpox vaccination. Dühring had published a pamphlet against vaccination in 1881. He had great influence not only in the bourgeois camp but also in the workers' movement; this finally led to Friedrich Engel's publication of his AntiDühring (MEW 20) at many requests. There he speaks of the "ridiculously exaggerated hatred of Jews, which Mr. Dühring displays at every opportunity", but without taking this hatred particularly seriously. For Dühring the vaccinations were simply "verjudet" (among other things because there were many Jews among the most important German medical doctors at that time).
Here, envy, resentment and a crude ideology were combined, which was later adopted by the Nazis, who wanted to give the German "people's body" a "holistic folk medicine". The "Heilpraktikergesetz" (law for alternative practitioners) still valid today dates from 1939! It requires only marginal training and should not be confused with naturopathy. According to Dühring the "Jewish" (or "Jewish-like") orthodox medicine allegedly wanted to poison this German "folk body", just to "dominate" the Aryans. If one scratches the surface with the conspiracy narratives, a classical legend almost always comes to light: Either the "Freemasons" or the Jews wanted to seize world domination. The historically most powerful conspiracy legends were and are the "Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion" (1903), which claim that the Jews conspired to achieve "world domination". (They were a forgery of the Ochrana, the tsarist secret police.) This legend was a powerful weapon in the fight against the "Ideas of 1789", i.e. the Enlightenment, with which Joseph Goebbels, as is well known, wanted to "put an end".
Print | article link by mail | PDF version
Keywords: corona, coronavirus, COVID-19, Eugen Dühring, sore, vaccination opponent, Ken Jebsen, conspiracy theories, Xavier Naidoo
1 comment
14.07.2020 at 22:20, Rainer Schmidt says:
What should this writing tell me now? It fits seamlessly into the multitude of other conspiracy theory explanations of even the smallest local newspapers.
But above all: as a critic of the - in my opinion exaggerated - control measures in our country, I once again find myself in the same corner with supporters of absurd fantasy stories. And there are plenty of serious critics.
This article is a cheap rehash of well-known prejudices and defamations. And so it contributes wonderfully to the further division of our society. If that was the author's intention: Bravo! Well done!