The sad news was reported by the government of Chile: the first lady of "real-existing socialism" on German soil - Margot Honecker - has died. From the New York Times obituary:
Margot Honecker, the widow of Erich Honecker, the longtime ruler of Communist East Germany, and a powerful hard-liner in her own right as the minister of education for 26 years until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, died on Friday in exile in Chile. She was 89.[...]Known as the “purple witch” for her violet hair dye and her fervor for repressive policies, Mrs. Honecker was 26 and the youngest member of the national legislature in 1953 when Mr. Honecker, 15 years older and a rising star of the East German Communist Party, obtained party permission to divorce his first wife and marry her....She acknowledged that “mistakes were made in history, which one has to regret,” and that “the G.D.R. also had its foes — that’s why we had the Stasi,” the country’s secret police agency. But she called the regime’s opponents “criminals who today make out that they were political victims,” and said that she had never understood why people fled to the West. “There was no need for them to climb over the wall, to pay for this stupidity with their lives,” she said.[...]Klaus Korn, an author of studies on East German education and development, who was also an aide to Mrs. Honecker, said in an interview that her ideologies were based on “unconditional love for the Soviet Union.” Joseph Stalin had been dead since 1953, but, Mr. Korn said: “She still saw Stalin as her magnetic pole. For her, his mistakes could hardly have been avoided and were of less significance than his merits.”
In 2001, to mark the 40th anniversary of the construction of the Berlin Wall, the PDS Party - precursor to DIE LINKE (The Left Party) - issued a statement condemning the Wall and everything it stood for: Es gibt keine Rechtfertigung für die Toten an der Mauer ("There can be no justification for the deaths at the Wall")
Am 40. Jahrestag des 13. August 1961 gilt deshalb unser Gedenken den an der deutsch-deutschen Grenze zu Tode Gekommenen, den Verletzten, den Inhaftierten und von Repressalien Betroffenen sowie ihren Angehörigen. Wir bedauern das von der SED als der dafür verantwortlichen politischen Kraft ausgegangene Unrecht. Das Schicksal der Opfer und die Einschränkungen der Würde und der Lebenswege vieler Menschen berühren uns tief. (...)
The PDS Party leadership gave approval to this statement, which represented a final departure from the Stalinist roots of the former East German party. There was only one dissenting vote: Sahra Wagenknecht opposed the statement.
Now the icon of Sahra's socialist youth - "the purple witch" - has died. But Sahra Wagenknecht and her husband Oskar can rejoice at the words Frau Honecker spoke during her last interview, when she was ambushed on the street in Santiago by a German reporter.
"Der Sozialismus kommt wieder in Deutschland." Socialism shall one day rise again on German soil. The dream shall never die.
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