FOR HER admirers, Margot Honecker was the real leader of East Germany: the steel-willed, lilac-rinse Stalinist who steered her husband, Erich.
For millions who lived through the second German dictatorship, however, Mrs Honecker will forever be the Wicked Witch of the East.
Both sides could feel justified in their view last night. After 22 years’ exile in Chile, Mrs Honecker (84) broke her silence to insist in a television documentary that East Germany’s socialist end justified its controversial means.
“Mistakes were made in history, which one has to regret,” she told ARD public television. But she said she saw no need to apologise for the hundreds of escape attempts from East Germany that ended fatally on the Berlin Wall devised and installed by her husband. “There was no need for them to climb over the wall,” she said. “That this stupidity was paid for with their lives was terrible for their mothers.”
After the wall fell Erich Honecker went on trial, charged with ultimate responsibility for the border killings. When he was diagnosed with terminal cancer the charges were dropped and he followed his wife to Chile, where he died in 1994.
His widow denied yesterday there was an official shoot-to-kill policy on the inner-German border, describing it as a Waffengebrauchsbestimmung – a “provision for the use of a weapon”. For many viewers, this kind of technocratic language was a blast from the past.
Mrs Honecker insisted she was ready to accept criticisms of the GDR from former “comrades”.
“What doesn’t touch me is the critique of bandits” and “enemies of the GDR” who, she said, had brought about the 1989 “counter-revolution”. “I have a tough shell against that criticism.”
Journalist Eric Friedler, who interviewed Mrs Honecker, said she kept up to date with current affairs in Germany.
“She is very well connected to a whole guard of old comrades,” he said. “She spends hours on the internet.” His documentary The Fall, which looks at Honecker’s removal from power, is the latest part in a media offensive by the once reclusive Mrs Honecker.
In February she allowed the publication of a diary kept by her husband during his 1992 imprisonment in Berlin. In it he complained that the united Germany was a “primitive society” and that former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev had “no concept”. Mrs Honecker continued that critique last night, describing Mr Gorbachev’s “perestroika” reforms as “twaddle”.
She brushed off accusations levelled at her decades at East Germany’s education ministry, primarily her overseeing of forced adoption of regime critics’ children. Though confronted with victim testimony, Mrs Honecker denied the practice existed. In a book published last month, however, she defended the practice. Children were “put in good hands” of socialist families out of the reach of parents “incapable of giving them the correct civic upbringing”.
The book was slated by most reviewers, with the conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine noting: “Margot Honecker is armed for the coming class struggle.”
