GDR and post-GDR | Dieter Klein has an experience ahead of the West

A steadfast fighter in situations that seem hopeless to others: Dieter Klein. Photo: Archive A sawn-off tree from which a flowering branch sprouts - that is the cover photo of the now published memoirs by Dieter Klein, who turned 95 in October. He called them “strange occurrences in three systems.” He tells them in a harmonious way that in music one would call potpourri.

Klein can be seen here in many roles, as a marginalized, "non-Aryan" child in German fascism, as a learner, scientist and upwardly mobile person in the non-democratic republic of small people, as a steadfast fighter in situations that seem hopeless to others, as a suspicious survivor of a dismantling festival after 1990. And yet the focus here is always on social issues. Anyone interested in the collapsed state of the GDR will find food for thought here. But neither apologies nor criticisms, but hitherto mostly overlooked traces of a failed but nevertheless memorable attempt to find a way out of the rubble of the German "1000-year" catastrophe into a better and, above all, friendlier society.

In 1964 Klein became professor of economics at Berlin's Humboldt University, in 1978 professor of social sciences and in 1990 professor at the Chair of Economic Foundations of Politics.

In many places in the text you can see the thieving pleasure it must have given the author to write down these small and large stories. But this is not observation from high above and from a distance. The reader can look over his shoulder and often see him shaking his head at what has happened to him, especially because he has thrown himself with great commitment into tasks that often turn out to be insoluble. But sometimes they also show that it was not in vain to use scope for action that was not even intended. Such as the successful attempt by the Humboldt University to demand the construction of a new Charité building, even though the state plan for the healthcare system had not included this at all. And this quality has proven useful even after October 3, 1990, in order to avoid just stupidly watching others treat you badly.

Particularly interesting are the stories about his encounters with GDR politicians, most of which occurred during his time as Vice Rector for Social Sciences. The section “The Working Group” about participation in the preparation of the Eighth Party Congress of the SED in 1971 at the invitation of Walter Ulbricht could also be read as a report about a lost year of life. But it is also an insight into the action strategies of those who tried to use reason to gain something productive from the irrationality of decisions made by the SED leadership.

"I suffer from post-reunification syndrome: the urge to prove to our Western brothers and sisters that we are a historical experience ahead of them."

You can also find out interesting facts about Klein's work at the Humboldt University - although not in chronological order. So about the way appointments to senior positions were made: Scientists had little opportunity to avoid the honors associated with such appointments. Then there is a report on the productive initiative of a joint lecture series with the Institute for Peace Research in Hamburg, in which the SPD politician Egon Bahr came to the Humboldt University to give a lecture - despite the objection of three members of the Politburo against this initiative. This later gave rise to a separate group for peace research at the university. The history of the creation of the Marx-Engels Monument in Berlin contains another beautiful example of the not always successful dialogue between “leadership and people,” which Klein is able to describe with humor.

The author reports on everyday life in a different period of time, the first years of German unification and its consequences for university staff, in an unusually long 32-page section. Here we warn at the beginning that the following memoirs were written at a time of immediate concern due to the "elite exchange" and that this sometimes explains "a certain bitterness and at times a lack of distance from the events." It reports on the liquidation of an interdisciplinary research institute founded in 1990, which became part of the new social sciences institute group at the Humboldt University, but which had the major defect that there was no equivalent in the West, and which was therefore immediately closed down with this argument - but we don't have anything like that here - after the arrival of the Western evaluators.

I have to admit that, even after a long time, I was once gripped by an indignation just as great as that evident in this text by Dieter Klein, namely when I came to the university for the 25th anniversary of the Institute for Social Sciences and discovered that there was no mention of the actual founders of that institute in 1990 at the planned celebrations. The institute was founded by Dieter Klein, Michael Brie and other Humboldtians at the time. In this institute, at that time we called it the Department of Social Sciences, I held the elective position of Vice Dean for Research. But as I said – we didn’t appear in the anniversary story. Only those who had been appointed from the West to the newly created professorships were mentioned. This reminded me strongly of the way in which the history of the workers' movement was falsified by the SED. And to Stefan Heyms “The King David Report”.

In the following section about the reform of the SED in December 1989, the narrative flows more easily again. Due to pressure from the membership, a special party conference was called at which a new program was to be decided and a new leadership was to be elected. In preparation for this, the SED Politburo and the Central Committee resigned on December 3rd and on the same day a working committee was convened by the party's newly elected district secretaries, which led the SED in the days leading up to the new party leadership election. Klein, who was appointed to this working committee, reports on the stressful events of those days in which he wrote together with other reformers from the program department of the party conference in a study on the Politburo floor of the Central Committee building and was also personally confronted with the anger of the demonstrators against the SED.

Klein writes about politics on a small scale using the example of his experiences in Prieros, a village near Berlin, where he was lucky enough to rent a weekend property in the GDR on which he built a little house. Keeping it after the Unification Treaty came into force required a lot of patience, new knowledge of laws, court rulings and clever dealings with the representatives of the administrations, which Klein tells here with reference to Max Weber's views on the functioning of bureaucracy.

In between there is a report of an invitation to a villa on Hamburg's elegant Elbchause. There, everyone invited should report on their experiences and then find a moment of tragedy in them. Klein thought for a long time and then described his sympathy for the West Germans present, who could only take part in the formation break that was taking place further east as observers, as spectators, without the experience of their own inner emotion. He regretted from the bottom of his heart those present that they would have to wait a while before the experience of historic major disruptions in the Western world. That is very tragic. Not everyone found this speech amusing, some had little use for it and instead concentrated on the delicious dessert in front of them. “I suffer from post-reunification syndrome: the urge to prove to our Western brothers and sisters that we are a historical experience ahead of them” can be read here under a photo that shows the author as a speaker.

It wouldn't be Dieter Klein if he didn't end his memoirs with a touch of optimism, namely with a description of eight ways to a better society, or also: "Eight elements of an emancipation strategy." You can rightly be curious about this.

This article cost you nothing. Us: research, production and technology. We saved on office rent as well as on printing and distribution. And we gave up salary. Nevertheless, the calculation doesn't work without you. We need 300,000 euros by the end of the year. You pay what you can, in return we keep writing.

No paywall, no small print, just one goal: that nd stays.