The party of academics, white-collar employees, and the unemployed is changing only very slowly. As little as three years ago, the Institute for the Analysis of Social Data [Institut für Sozialdatenanalyse], which is close to the party, concluded that it was above all the losers of German unity who had fled to the PDS.
Now, however, one can find also new faces in the Berlin PDS: above all, very young people, rebels, colorful characters from the anti-Fascist scene. Most recently, and this is a surprise, small and medium-scale entrepreneurs, retailers, and small tradesmen have also started joining the party. These are East Germans who’ve just made their economic start in the new era; sometimes with a little start-up help from the party.
Many newcomers have been drawn in by the charisma of Gregor Gysi. The PDS would be weaker without him, that high-gloss Ossi: “A gifted intellectual and speaker, but of course also an opportunist and a rascal. But always with a lot of charm, never rough.” This is how Gregor Gysi describes his father. The same words could be applied to the son.
Whether he’s running the meeting of the PDS group in the Bundestag in a laid-back but sensible manner, whether he’s explaining himself and his politics in a funny but intelligent way in a car between Cologne and Siegen, one soon understands why the talk-shows are fighting over him. Gysi’s criticism of the West is brilliantly presented and to the point, and the same is true of the way in which he defends the East. Gysi reminds those who accuse GDR citizens of timid conformity just how many Wessis “with shaking knees knuckled under to GDR customs officials when crossing the border.”
[ . . . ]
In Bonn, by contrast, the established parties, themselves rather forgetful of the past, are using the PDS’s Stasi burden to isolate the party. Gregor Gysi was already insulted in the Bundestag as “the speck of fat on top of socialist gravy.” Michael Glos, chairman of the state groups of the CDU, calls the PDS deputies “unpalatable characters of the SED successor party.” When Gysi and his colleagues speak in committees, nobody listens. Their motions go nowhere. The climate is frosty.
The PDS deputy Gerhard Riege, who committed suicide in February 1992, wrote in his suicide note: “I am afraid of the hatred that is coming at me in the Bundestag, from mouths and eyes and postures.”
Jürgen Reents, press spokesman of the Bundestag group, has “a job with a lot of free time.” The media largely ignore the work of the PDS representatives. For example, the cameras are usually turned off when a PDS parliamentarian speaks to the full house of the Bundestag. When Gregor Gysi wanted to speak to delegates of the DGB [Confederation of German Trade Unions] last week, some of the unionists walked out.
But the calculations don’t add up. Anyone who isolates the PDS because of its past excludes voters who also have a GDR past. “Without the narrow-minded victor’s mentality that has been used to exclude us,” says Rolf Funda, PDS deputy in the Landtag of Saxony-Anhalt, “we wouldn’t be where we are now.” As a student, Funda had been a candidate for the Stasi. A serious illness ended his career before he saw any action. His unflagging hard work makes citizens forget this flaw: he was elected mayor of the community of Löderburg with sixty percent of the vote.
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