The hysteria is being fanned by some media outlets. For weeks, journalists for [the tabloid] Super Illu (Headline: “The East is on Fire”) have been reporting on the fate of individuals like Manja Kling of Neubrandenburg, who doesn’t know how she’ll manage to go on. But, in fact, the single mother of two is among the winners of the reform. Starting next year, she’ll have more money in her pocket than she does today. Likewise, the Central German Broadcasting Company (MDR) isn’t sticking to actual facts in its “Exact” television news-magazine. With a mournful-sounding cemetery bell ringing in the background, the TV station reported on the case of Hans-Jürgen Tengler and his “last bit of property”: his garden hut. But the regulations governing a case like his weren’t changed at all. The Bild [tabloid] has declared a Hartz witch hunt and published a fictitious “supplemental form for children” (“Do your Playmobil figures weigh more than a kilogram?”). This – as Bild wryly comments – “must never happen.” The winner of this summer-time mishmash of legitimate concerns, vague fears, and demagogic polemics has already been determined: the PDS. During the upcoming elections in Saxony and Brandenburg, the party will be campaigning with the catchy slogan: “Hartz IV – poverty by law.” And because the protest party would also like to present itself as a kind of post-socialist self-help group, it is offering a helping hand in addition to a clenched fist.
In the PDS office in Jüterbog, in southern Brandenburg, the party is promising the same thing that it’s currently promising everywhere in the East: “Come here for help filling out the Hartz questionnaire.” On the very first day, they drew more than sixty people, who showed up with Federal Employment Agency forms, insurance policies, and savings-account passbooks in hand. “The people were utterly helpless,” said Maritta Böttcher. In the GDR, she had worked her way up the SED ladder to First Secretary of the Regional Directorate, and she represented the PDS in the Bundestag until 2002. Now she directs the PDS federal office in Berlin. From there, the resistance is being strengthened throughout the East.
The Federal Employment Agency had barely sent out their questionnaires to hundreds of thousands of jobless when all PDS regional associations received an email reminder from their comrade in the federal office: the important thing right now is to be an “everyday party” and “to offer help one or more times a week at all locations.” This help is also self-help for a party that had already been declared dead. With a pitiful four percent of the vote in the 2002 elections, the PDS failed to cross the five percent threshold needed to secure a place in the Bundestag, and its top functionaries were mired in serious trench warfare. Now they are mounting an astounding comeback. For the post-communists, “Hartz IV” is a last-minute rescue; it’s what the [Oder River] flood [in the East] was for Chancellor Schröder during the 2002 campaign. The Eastern comrades make no bones about that. PDS secretary general Rolf Kutzmutz polemicized against the “most brutal cuts in social services.” Petra Pau of the Berlin PDS called economics minister Wolfgang Clement a “robber of social benefits.” These comrades are all too familiar with the insecure East German soul. Justified fears, the federal government’s chaotic information policy, false information, and a jumble of new reform proposals – all of this is coming together in a vague mixture that is causing problems for Easterners. The average unemployment rate between Rügen and the Thuringian Forest is almost nineteen percent at the moment. People there have long stopped believing in political promises to finally create jobs.
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