12 - “You can best change the world by changing yourself …”

Summary

At the latest, it should have been clear after the military suppression of the Prague Spring, if not before, that socialism as a societal model had failed. And after the exile of Wolf Biermann from the GDR, we should have said out loud: This system is not based upon any claim to truth. It will not reform itself, but will solidify more and more. The centralistic structures do not allow for any checks and balances or separation of powers.

I had achieved this clarity of insight a long time ago. But it had been suppressed over and over again by my emotions: Socialism was a good thing. Many West German left-wingers strengthened us in this, and we built up — as we have to put it today in the spirit of critique — an ideology of justification: There were good aspects to life in the GDR, we would say; there was a different social climate, a slower rhythm of life, not the hard competitiveness found in the West; we still had time to read books, we would say, even if we had to pass them on in secret and couldn't really check them out of the library.

This justification was even given philosophical validation: Even a restriction on freedom can have its good side. For a long time we — I — completely romanticized the situation.

We should have organized much earlier. Not only to reform the system, but also with the aim of bringing a system like that to its knees.

Nevertheless, along with this romanticization, we were still very sensitive to the social reality around us. I always saw it as my task to keep alive the consciousness of certain ethical values and to call for their implementation: human rights, separation of powers … But I saw this action as being more on a philosophical rather than a concrete political level, and addressed it as such.

I find it difficult to describe what made my family tick. Our mother loved us; our father was more concerned with himself and his work. He had been an enthusiastic officer in the Second World War and had had a lot of power as a young man.