We are very grateful The Chronicle’s extensive coverage of the Freedom Without Walls speaker event last Monday, featuring distinguished activist and politician Vera Lengsfeld.
I am sorry to see, however, that a number of key facts were misrepresented in the Nov. 3 article “Activist reflects on fall of Berlin Wall [1].” Let me address just two that I think are crucial.
The reporter seemed to assume that the former Communist Party of East Germany (SED) and the Social Democratic Party (SPD, rather than “SDP”) of the former West are the same. That is not the case. The SED exercised totalitarian rule; the SPD governed, for many years, the liberal democracy that is the Federal Republic of Germany. Former chairmen of the SPD include Nobel Peace Prize winner Chancellor Willy Brandt and, more recently, Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. The problem Lengsfeld addressed was that the ex-SED (now simply called The Left Party) is increasingly seen by the SPD as a potential political ally.
The reporter gave the impression that Lengsfeld chose to study in Cambridge. This is incorrect. The East German government expelled Lengsfeld from East Germany after she was arrested in 1988 at the demonstration mentioned in the article. That is why she went to study in England. She returned to East Germany in the morning of Nov. 9, 1989, hours before the wall that divided Berlin, Germany, and the world for 28 years was opened.
The Freedom Without Walls organizers, as well as many Germans, were sorry to see that Lengsfeld’s attempt at a political comeback in recent elections was unsuccessful. We hope, however, that she will continue to be the outspoken public intellectual in the way the article, thankfully, presents her.
Christophe Fricker
Faculty adviser, Freedom Without Walls at Duke
Visting assistant professor, Department of Germanic languages and literature
Links:
[1] http://dukechronicle.com/article/activist-reflects-fall-berlin-wall