GERMANY:THE PARLIAMENTARY leader of Germany's Left Party, Gregor Gysi, faced resignation calls in the Bundestag yesterday as a long-running drama about his alleged Stasi past came to a head.
Over the last two decades, Mr Gysi has been the leading light of the post-communist left, heading the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), now the Left Party.
But his impressive political career has been dogged by rumours that, as a lawyer in East Germany, he passed on client information to the secret police.
Last week he lost a 10-year legal battle against the news magazine Der Spiegel, which promptly published protocols it says Dr Gysi delivered to the Stasi in 1979.
At the time Dr Gysi was the lawyer of Robert Havemann, a leading anti-Nazi and later a critic of the East Berlin regime who spent the years before his death in 1982 under house arrest and constant Stasi surveillance.
Alongside details of an informer's discussions with Mr Havemann is a protocol of a conversation with the dissident author Thomas Klingenstein in July 1979, during which the author complained about the East Berlin regime.
Shortly after the conversation, Mr Klingenstein was imprisoned for six months on the basis of the protocol submitted, Der Spiegel says, by Dr Gysi.
Yesterday morning, the Stasi file custodian Marianne Birthler stated that Dr Gysi was a "knowing and willing" unofficial informer.
That triggered a heated round in the Bundestag yesterday, when all parties except Dr Gysi's own called on him to resign.
Dr Gysi, a gifted orator from a prominent East German functionary family, dismissed yesterday's Bundestag session as a "sad spectacle".
He denied ever working for the Stasi and says he only ever had contact with the central committee of the Socialist Unity Party (SED) during his representation of Robert Havemann.
"That would have ended if I had tried to have parallel contact with the Stasi," he said. "I didn't need Stasi contacts, that represented neither my style nor my dignity."
Nearly two decades on, the Gysi case has highlighted once more the differing perceptions east and west of the East German past and the poisonous legacy of the Stasi files. "In a dictatorship, everyone implicates themselves eventually, consciously or unconsciously," wrote the Tageszeitung in an editorial. "Gysi remains popular (in the east) because he, like few others, epitomises this sad truth."