The Party of Democratic Socialism was a democratic socialist political party in Germany active between 1989 and 2007. It was the legal successor to the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED), which ruled the German Democratic Republic as a state party until 1990. From 1990 through to 2005, the PDS had been seen as the left-wing "party of the East". While it achieved minimal support in western Germany, it regularly won 15% to 25% of the vote in the eastern new states of Germany, entering coalition governments with the Social Democratic Party of Germany in the federal states of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Berlin.
The Ministry for State Security, commonly known as the Stasi, an abbreviation of Staatssicherheit, was the state security service of East Germany from 1950 to 1990.
Lothar Bisky was a German politician. He was the chairman of the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), the successor of East Germany's Socialist Unity Party (SED). In June 2007 he became co-chairman of The Left party, formed by a merger of the PDS and the much smaller Labour and Social Justice – The Electoral Alternative. From 2007 until 2010 he was the President of the Party of the European Left. Also, he was the Publisher of the socialist newspaper Neues Deutschland.
Gesine Lötzsch is a German politician of the left-wing party Die Linke. In 2010, with Klaus Ernst, she was elected president of the party.
Manfred Stolpe was a German canonist, theologian and politician who served as Federal Minister of Transport, Building and Urban Affairs of Germany from 2002 until 2005. Before, he was Ministerpräsident of the state Brandenburg from 1990 until 2002. Stolpe was, after the state elections following German reunification, the only Social Democratic Minister-President of a state of former East Germany. Stolpe is considered to be the architect of modern Brandenburg and left office with a 74% approval rating. He is credited with forging a new identity for the state, among other things, popularizing the Brandenburglied, though controversy surrounding several failed projects and his work for the Stasi came up during his tenure. To date, Brandenburg has only had Social Democratic Minister-Presidents.
Arnold Angelus Schölzel is a German editor and former defector, currently the editor-in-chief of the far-left newspaper Junge Welt. Prior to 1989, Schölzel worked at Humboldt University in East Berlin, and also was an informant for the East German domestic intelligence agency, the Stasi.
Marianne Birthler is a German human rights advocate and politician of the Alliance '90/The Greens. From 2000 to 2011, she served as the Federal Commissioner for the Stasi Records, responsible for investigating the past crimes of the Stasi, the former communist secret police of East Germany. In 2016 she was offered the nomination of the CDU/CSU and her own party for President of Germany, but after some time decided not to run; the parties would have had a majority in the Federal Convention, securing her the election.
Thomas Nord is a German politician and Member of the German Federal Parliament.
Renate Adolph is a former politician for the Die Linke and its predecessors, the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) and the PDS. She became a member of the party in 1976, and a local councillor in 2003.
Helmut Müller-Enbergs is a German political scientist who has written extensively on the Stasi and related aspects of the German Democratic Republic's history.
Ehrhart Neubert is a retired German Evangelical minister and theologian.
Katja Havemann is a German civil rights activist and author.
Angelika Barbe is a German biologist who became a politician.
Dagmar Enkelmann is a German politician of Die Linke party.
Jutta Braband is a former German politician. In the German Democratic Republic she was a civil rights activist who after 1990 became a PDS member of the Germany parliament (Bundestag). Her parliamentary career ended in May 1992 after it had become known that fifteen years earlier she had worked for the Ministry for State Security (Stasi) as a registered informant .
Else Ackermann was a German physician and pharmacologist who became an East German politician. The report on the power relationships between the citizen and the state which she drafted, and in 1988 presented, known as the "Neuenhagen Letter", was a significant precursor to the changes of 1989 which led to the ending, in the early summer of 1990, of the one-party system, followed by German reunification later that same year.
Christa Luft is a German economist and politician of the SED/PDS. Luft joined the SED in 1958. From 18 November 1989 to 18 March 1990, she was the Minister of Economics in the Modrow government. From 1994 to 2002 she was member of the Bundestag for the PDS.
Dietmar Keller was an East German politician (SED/PDS) who served as Minister for Culture in the Modrow government. After reunification he sat as a member of the German parliament ("Bundestag") between 1990 and 1994.
Linda Teuteberg is a German lawyer and politician of the Free Democratic Party (FDP). Serving as a member of the Bundestag since 2017, she was elected as General Secretary of the FDP on 26 April 2019 and thereby became part of the party's leadership around chairman Christian Lindner. Lindner asked for and received her resignation effective 19 September 2020.
Gerhard Riege was a respected East German law professor.
