Merkel Faces Scrutiny Over Communist Past: Freie Deutsche Jugend

[HOLLYWOOD]

Always informed everyone of her, she was a Communist/Marxist 'agitator and propagandist' and Stalin/Honnecker Youth member

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/49513...eab7de.htmlMay 13, 2013 9:43 pm


Merkel faces scrutiny over Communist past
By Peter Ehrlich in Berlin
Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor, is facing fresh scrutiny over her political activities in the former East Germany, with a book alleging she took part in the Communist regime’s propaganda activities.
Ms Merkel is the first chancellor to come from the German Democratic Republic. As a physicist in the 1980s she was a member of the communist youth organisation “Freie Deutsche Jugend” at the Academy of Sciences in Eastern Berlin and was in charge of “agitation and propaganda”, the journalists Ralf Georg Reuth and Günther Lachmann claim in their book, The First Life of Angela M.

• Merkel slips in polls after tax scandal
• Merkel faces snub over women board quotas
• Merkel popularity at a record high
• Angela Merkel a woman of power

“She was responsible for brainwashing in the favour of Marxism”, Günther Krause, a former minister and ally from the chancellor’s Christian Democrats, says in the book.

Ms Merkel, who remains by far the most popular politician in Germany, has reacted calmly to the claims.
“I never concealed anything”, she said at a Berlin cinema on Sunday night where she was introducing her favourite film The Legend of Paul and Paula, a GDR production from 1973 that was also a hit in West Germany.


Ms Merkel admitted that she was not only a member of the FDJ but also of the workers’ union and the German-Soviet friendship society, both organisations with strong ties to the ruling Communist party.

“Nobody ever asked that question before,” she said.
As in former discussions about her past, Ms Merkel explained that she joined the socialist organisations for “social reasons” rather than for a political purpose. “I only can rely on my personal memory, but if other things are being discovered I can live with them.”
The chancellor, whose political career began immediately after the fall of the old East German regime in the autumn of 1989, never pretended to have been a dissident or opposition activist. Like millions of other East Germans she went along with the system.
But, unlike some colleagues, whose national political fortunes soared after the fall of the Berlin wall but later were forced to resign because they were revealed to have worked with the secret service (Stasi), Ms Merkel has never been accused of being an informer or a member of the ruling SED party.
Senior Christian Democrats rallied to Ms Merkel’s defence on Monday. “Angela Merkel was a young person”, Julia Klöckner, head of the CDU in Rhineland-Palatinate, told reporters.
Volker Bouffier, deputy party head and a leading figure of the rightwing within the CDU, said.“I have found nothing sensational in the reports.”
Only Ms Merkel can say whether she had sympathy for the concept of socialism before 1989 or whether she kept her criticism to herself.
The First Life of Angela M runs into the same problem as the many other Merkel biographies seeking publicity in the run-up to the general election on September 22: what the chancellor really wants and thinks remains an enigma to almost everyone in Germany.
“Only a tiny group of people working very closely with her know what she really thinks at heart”, said Judy Dempsey in her book, The Merkel Phenomenon.
In another book, The Chancellor and Her World, Stefan Kornelius, foreign editor of the daily Süddeutsche Zeitung, writes: “Merkel is the same Merkel, the cautious tactician, who takes risk only when they are risks no more.”
It is, it seems, exactly how she behaved in her first life as a young physicist in East Germany.

[Brian4Liberty]

“She was responsible for brainwashing in the favour of Marxism”, Günther Krause, a former minister and ally from the chancellor’s Christian Democrats, says in the book.

So basically, she is the same as the average American politician or media pundit...