I am encouraged to see how extremely difficult it is to translate German into English.
>In respect to the apologies owed by the PDS to the West a joke is
>circulating here:
>
>All those apologies are worthless unless the PDS does not apologize for the
>goal sored by Jürgen Sparwasser for the GDR in the 1974 soccer
>world-championship against the FRG.
>
>Johannes
The joke suggests there is something historically ridiculous about the apology.
I do not doubt Johannes's overall analysis of the political significance of this statement. However there are one or two nuances that make it a little more balanced.
>The common history is a strain on the present. Still not forgotten are the
>responsibility of Gustav Noske for the murder of KPD founders Rosa
>Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, the thousands of Communist men and women
>incarcerated as political prisoners in the Weimar Republic under Social
>Democratic governments, and the "Blood May" of 1929.
This at least suggests the apologies should not go only one way, even though the leaders of the PDS pointedly do not ask for apologies from the SPD.
It may also be useful for the future that the statement points out that Social Democrats of the left may also have been suspicious of the way the SED was set up:
>historians point out that it was not just the "right-wing" Social
>Democrats that were sceptical at the time; "left-wing" Social Democrats in
>particular, and among them many former supporters of the KPD, were
>suspicious. They had seen how democratic controversy within the KPD had
>been neutralised in the twenties and a line of loyalty to Stalin had been
>imposed on the party. They now feared that behind the unification lay a
>process of standardisation according to Stalinist principles as was taking
>place in other eastern European countries.
This positions the PDS better for having dialogue with left social democrats now.
While the timing of the welcome by Muenterfering may well have been prearranged, the conclusion of the statement by the PDS leadership suggests that dialogue need not be a process of surrender.
If the SPD finds it convenient to have another minor party with which it could negotiate possible coalitions, a corollary is that some of its own members could contemplate joining a minor allied party, without necessarily handing government to the CDU. Presumably the strategy of the PDS must remain to have a credible base in the former Western Germany, as well as to be able to share government in some of the Laender of the former East.
>The PDS deliberately shouldered its share in 1989/90 so as to embark on a
>new, a better beginning. It is a heavy burden to bear. At the same time we
>regard it as simply unhistorical for competing parties to assign the past
>to us and the future to themselves. Particularly since the core issue of
>the 21st century, the realisation of freedom of the individual and social
>justice, is still waiting to be resolved, all over the world.
>
>That is another reason why it is important to us to draw a fundamental
>lesson: The left are plural, and that is the only way they can succeed in
>changing an open society. The misfortune of the left is not that they act
>within different parties. The calamity of the left is their lack of
>communication among themselves.
But no doubt I am being too optimistic.
Chris Burford
London