The Practice of Ideals: Erich Honecker, Rudolf Bahro, and East Germany's Socialist Imaginary

Abstract

In July 1992, nearly two years after the demise of the German Democratic Republic (GDR/East Germany), Erich Honecker, former general secretary of the ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED) was arrested in Berlin for his complicity in the murder of citizens fleeing his country. Yet his subsequent imprisonment brought forth unexpected help: former SED member Rudolf Bahro, who had been imprisoned by Honecker's regime a decade earlier for publishing a party-critical text, Die Alternative. Bahro wrote to his former jailer on August 17, ironically to offer support for his legal defense. Now, Bahro also expressed hope for a “human understanding … about the substance of our undoubtedly still existing difference of opinion about the path of the GDR” and enclosed his recently published article connecting his support for Honecker with the GDR's founding ideals. In the article, Bahro rejected reducing East German history to the SED's abuses, arguing that “our impulse was conceived with the heart, and no such impulse is ever entirely lost.” That impulse, for Bahro, ultimately emanated from antifascism, its entwined relationship with socialism on German soil, and those who fought for both. Though he acknowledged that “a German revolutionary continuity did not exist en masse” after the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, it did survive among the few socialists, like Honecker, who struggled against fascism and “rightly wanted a new German state” after 1945. For his role in building this alternative to capitalism, Bahro argued that Honecker should be allowed to retire in peace.