German Bundestag, Plenarprotokoll 20/21, p.
1548.
Frau President. Valued members. Right honorable members of
the inquest commission.
“There is never a document of culture without there being at
the same time one of barbarism.” This sentence of Walter Benjamin came to me in
the sense of preparing for today’s debate on the reappraisal [Aufarbeitung] of the SED dictatorship. The
barbarians commit crimes, be it by national socialists or later the red
socialists, and following generations found inquest commissions, institutes,
build memorials, organize a most highly scrupulous remembrance culture around
the past crimes and evil – necessary, yet oppressive.
One of the central conclusions of the first SED inquest
commission in the 90s stated – I cite:
The SED state was a dictatorship. It was one not as a result of maldevelopment or individual abuse of power – which occurred in particular instances – but of its historical and ideological fundamentals.
An enormously important statement, in regards to which we
are not allowed to forget one thing: The party by the name of Die Linke, which
since 1990 sits in the Bundestag, which was earlier called the PDS, was before
that called the SED. This Linke is legally identical with the SED; even today,
they live on the assets which they robbed from the citizens of the DDR and they
still stand on the same ideological fundamentals. This is a disgrace for this
sovereign house and for this country, ladies and gentlemen.
DDR spelled out is: German Democratic Republic. You should
please always think of that – primarily you of the CDU – when you here call
yourselves in common with all others as far as the Linke “the democratic
delegations”. To be democratic, that does not mean to have the allegedly only
correct opinion and a hyper-moral conscious. To be democratic means to accept
the competition of political ideas, to allow for authentic alternatives, ladies
and gentlemen.
Otherwise, in regards the bloc parties of the DDR which pretended
a variety, we are still where it is only ever the same in red, yellow or black.
The irony of history wills that old grievances with spite again insidiously
creep into all remembrance and admonition, often it even happens impudently
clothed in remembrance and admonition. The concluding report of the second
inquest commission retains the following which is of much importance:
The anti-totalitarian consensus as part of a democratic remembrance culture is one of the best sureties that what is not allowed to repeat is not repeated.
The former Family Minister Schwesig, SPD, and the former
Interior Minister de Mazière, CDU, who abolished the extremism clause, have
forsaken this anti-totalitarian consensus so that leftist radical associations
could again be promoted, vehemently cheered on by Anetta Kahane, a former Stasi
informant, who today again manages censorship at public expense. It cannot be
imagined.
This anti-totalitarian consensus has Interior Minister
Faeser also forsaken, who writes in Antifa approved publications and is totally
blind in the leftist extremism eye. Under the banner of anti-fascism – now finally
become a state doctrine – free opinion is again today cut off and sanctioned, those
thinking otherwise cancelled and punished.
The Wall, as is known, was called in DDR jargon an “anti-fascist
defense wall”. Well, for their own defense some inmates of the DDR, those who
sought the way to freedom, were bled to death at the Wall. “Yet I love all
people” – the famous words of Stasi chief Mielke.
Seven years ago, in rhetorical overdrive, Stern wrote: “Germany is completely
DDR-ized…accommodation pays, opposition today is best practiced silently.” Why
today is such like no longer to be read in the state-fed media? Because
everything of this kind has improved? Or because the climate of opinion
meantime has become still more repressive? Please ponder over this. And please,
Frau Roth: Let us look at Russia, yes; yet let us also mind our own business.
Many thanks.
[trans: tem]
