Erich Ernst Paul Honecker was a German communist politician who led the German Democratic Republic from 1971 until shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. He held the posts of General Secretary of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) and Chairman of the National Defence Council; in 1976, he replaced Willi Stoph as Chairman of the State Council, the official head of state. As the leader of East Germany, Honecker was viewed as a dictator. During his leadership, the country had close ties to the Soviet Union, which maintained a large army in the country.
Hans Modrow was a German politician best known as the last communist premier of East Germany.
Articles related to East Germany include:
The Peaceful Revolution – also, in German called Die Wende – was one of the peaceful revolutions of 1989 at the peak of the collapse of the Eastern Bloc in the late 1980s. A process of sociopolitical change that led to, among other openings, the opening of their borders to the Western world.
Christian was a Protestant pastor and one of the leading figures and organisers of the 1989 Monday demonstrations in East Germany which finally led to German reunification and the end of the GDR in 1990.
Vera Lengsfeld is a German politician. She was a prominent civil rights activist in East Germany and after the German reunification she first represented the Alliance 90/The Greens and then the German Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in the Bundestag.
Friedrich Schorlemmer was a German Protestant theologian. He was a prominent member of the civil rights movement in the German Democratic Republic, leading to the Peaceful Revolution. Remaining active in politics and society after German reunification in 1990, he was engaged in the Wittenberg town council and several organisations as an activist for peace and nature preservation, and as a critical voice.
Thomas Welz grew up in the suburbs of Berlin. As head of the information department, he was editor and author of several illegal samizdat publications with Rainer Eppelmann of the peace circle of the East Berlin Samariterkirche in Berlin-Friedrichshain. Many of them became the mouthpiece of the East German civil rights movement, including publications like "Shalom", "Wegzehrung" and "Wendezeit", one of the first publications, in where term "Wende" was used. During his military service in the NVA, Thomas Welz was detained for five months from October 1978 in the infamous military prison in Schwedt.
The Monday demonstrations were a series of peaceful political protests against the government of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). The demonstrations began in Leipzig on 4 September 1989, starting the Peaceful Revolution in the GDR: the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the government, and German reunification.
Ulrich Woronowicz was an East German Protestant theologian and writer.
Zersetzung was a psychological warfare technique used by the Ministry for State Security (Stasi) to repress political opponents in East Germany during the 1970s and 1980s. Zersetzung served to combat alleged and actual dissidents through covert means, using secret methods of abusive control and psychological manipulation to prevent anti-government activities. People were commonly targeted on a pre-emptive and preventive basis, to limit or stop activities of dissent that they may have gone on to perform, and not on the basis of crimes they had actually committed. Zersetzung methods were designed to break down, undermine, and paralyze people behind "a facade of social normality" in a form of "silent repression".
Manfred Feist was a German politician and party functionary. He served as Director of the Foreign Information Department of the Central Committee of the ruling SED (party).
Bernd Eisenfeld, also known by the pseudonym Fred Werner, was an opponent of the East German dictatorship who became a writer and an historian.
Ehrhart Neubert was a German evangelical minister and theologian.
Katrin Hattenhauer is a German painter and civil rights activist. In the late 1980s she was a member of the GDR-opposition movement. On 4 September 1989 she demonstrated "For an Open Country with Free People", marking the beginning of the Monday demonstrations in Leipzig. Her paintings and social sculptures have been exhibited in Europe.
Katja Havemann is a German civil rights activist and author.
Martin Böttger was a prominent civil rights activist in East Germany. He was a member of the Landtag of the Free State of Saxony from 1990 to 1994 and led the faction of Alliance '90/The Greens.
Freya Klier is a German author and film director. Before 1989/90, she was an East German civil rights activist.
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 .
Hildigund Neubert is the daughter of an East German Pastor-Theologian who became a professional musician. As the pressures for change in the one-party dictatorship intensified, thanks both to the bankruptcy of the state and to the winds of Glasnost blowing across from, of all places, Moscow, she found herself drawn by circumstances into politics. At the time of East Germany's "peaceful revolution" she was in East Berlin, a permanent presence at the control centre of Demokratischer Aufbruch . A feature of those months was the dispersed character of the uprisings that destroyed the dictatorship: it is misleading to think in terms of any sort of central "guiding hand" controlling developments. Nevertheless, DA was one of a number of movements and organisations that became key to focusing the energies of hundreds of thousands of pro-democracy campaigners and demonstrators, in ways that led, in March 1990, to the only free and fair parliamentary election in the history of the "German Democratic Republic" and thereafter, more indirectly, to reunification in October 1990.
