Encounters with Margot Honecker: She loved the GDR – until the end

In 2012 and 2013, during my time as British Ambassador to Chile , I met three times for extensive discussions with one of the last prominent representatives of the defunct Eastern Bloc: Margot Honecker , the third wife of the long-time GDR head of state and party leader Erich Honecker, and herself Minister of Education of the German Democratic Republic from 1963 to 1989. Her central task was to form an ideologically compliant, communist generation. Margot Honecker, née Feist, was in her mid-80s when I met her. She lived a secluded life in Santiago de Chile and died in 2016 at the age of 89.

As a student in the early 1980s, I had the opportunity to spend some time in East Germany on a rare British university exchange. Even long after the collapse of this joyless, gloomy Marxist experiment, I remained fascinated by the country and its system. By 2017, the Berlin Wall had disappeared for as long as it had existed—and by 2030, the GDR itself will have been history for more years than it existed.

But a look at the map of the most recent federal election, on which the AfD's highest share of the vote is almost identical to the territory of former East Germany, shows that the division of Germany is still noticeable in some respects - albeit in a way that the former communist rulers could hardly have imagined.

The GDR was a failed experiment, an attempt to replace National Socialism with another tyranny, Soviet Marxism. Both German forms of totalitarianism eventually ceased to exist altogether: the first because it lost an aggressive, genocidal war it had unleashed; the second because it was overthrown by its own people, who were fed up with the fear, oppression, and daily domination.

Flight and exile: Life in Chile after the fall of communism

Margot Honecker was one of the most deeply committed believers in the socialist ideal. Shaped by her youth in the emerging GDR, she remained true to her convictions – long after the once feared Stasi prisons had long since become macabre tourist attractions.

In 1992, she landed in Chile, and a year later her husband followed, where he spent the last full year of his life. Thus, both evaded prosecution for the crimes of the dismal dictatorship they had led unchallenged for 18 years.

The then left-leaning Chilean government expressed its gratitude that the GDR had taken in approximately 2,000 supporters of the Marxist President Salvador Allende (1970-1973) as refugees – many of whom became bitter opponents of his military successor, Augusto Pinochet. Among the refugees was Michelle Bachelet, who later became president of Chile twice and has already ruled out running again in this year's elections.

Honecker's daughter Sonja married one of those Chilean exiles – thus also establishing a direct family connection to Chile. They were no longer politically welcome in Moscow, unwanted in reunified Berlin, and found no acceptance in the rest of Europe, which saw itself as “united and free” after the end of the Cold War.

Twenty years later, it wasn't easy to track down Margot Honecker. At that time, she lived almost like a recluse in the eastern district of La Reina in Santiago, on the edge of the Andes – and still spoke very little Spanish. Only after about a year of cautious discussions through contacts in the Chilean Communist Party was she willing to meet. She remained extremely suspicious of outsiders and trusted only a small circle of people close to her political affiliation.

Justification of the Stasi as “sword and shield”

When we finally met for the first time at the British Embassy residence, she repeatedly asked—in German only—why the British government was interested in her views. I tried to diplomatically explain to her that this was not the case and that it was merely a request based on personal interest, an opportunity to discuss a chapter of history I had directly experienced with an important living witness. I don't think she believed me.

During our hours-long conversations, including a rare dinner with guests at her home, she never wavered from her convictions. The political ideology she espoused throughout her adult life was, she told me, "objectively correct" and relentlessly reflected the true human condition. Karl Marx had exposed the deterministic path humanity was bound to take. Capitalism would one day collapse under the "weight of its inherent contradictions"—a phrase she recited like a fixed mantra. She saw no excuse for her actions.

She described the GDR experiment as honorable and successful, even though it was continually undermined by its Western adversaries. As inevitable as the ultimate victory of communism seemed, imperialism and capitalism remained powerful well into the late 20th century. Nevertheless, she said, "the seed survives and will one day blossom again." Until then, however, the demise of the GDR was a "tremendous tragedy": Germany had lost its "better half"—more precisely, a third—and millions of its former citizens were in a significantly worse situation today.

This was one of Margot Honecker's many surprising distortions of reality. The Stasi—the "sword and shield of our republic"—was necessary to ward off the alleged "internal class enemies" who wanted to overthrow the system and enrich themselves at the expense of their fellow citizens in a new free market economy. The construction of socialism took a long time, as it also required a profound change in the human mentality, which had been shaped by capitalism for centuries. Ultimately, however, the comrades did not have enough time to complete this task.

The Wall as a “protective barrier” – enemies, betrayal and propaganda

Of course, there were numerous enemies outside the GDR, especially in West Germany, which is why, in their view, the construction of the Wall was inevitable: “You don’t leave a tender plant to the voracious birds.”

GDR citizens knew the rules perfectly—including the consequences that awaited them if they attempted to climb over the Wall. Most who dared were either deliberately instigated by West German agents or were among the few deviants and criminals found in any society. The Western press, however, never reported on the numerous cases in which West Germans allegedly fled in the opposite direction, to the GDR, to find peace of mind in a socialist paradise—a claim I found absurd. Perhaps they had never reported on it because such cases simply hadn't occurred, I thought to myself—a brief, stony silence.

Margot became particularly animated when it came to Mikhail Gorbachev, whose name she mentioned dozens of times, almost snorting with rage. For her, he was the ungrateful heir to the greatest achievements of Soviet socialism, who not only undermined and destroyed them, but deliberately sacrificed the GDR to curry favor with Helmut Kohl.

She vividly compared Gorbachev's rise to power to the election of a pope who ordered the Catholic Church to allow abortion and accept homosexuality—thus destroying its entire raison d'être and its internal structures. For her, Gorbachev was simply an intolerable traitor to the cause that had once made him great, while simultaneously seeking to enrich himself.

I rejected most of her views, but the atmosphere still didn't become too frosty. I explained to Margot how formative it had been for me to lie in an East Berlin bed and hear gunshots, which I later learned had been someone shot while fleeing to the West. She just shrugged.

I also mentioned that the film "The Lives of Others" very accurately reflected the attitude to life and everyday life in the GDR, as I experienced it myself. No, she countered, it was nothing more than targeted, imperialist propaganda against the GDR—possibly even financed by the CIA.

Finally, I asked her whether it wasn't clear everywhere in Chile that free markets, democracy, and an open society had brought people more prosperity than the Marxist experiment under Salvador Allende?

No, she replied. Chile, like all capitalist countries, especially the USA, suffers from extreme social inequality, economic crime, corruption, unemployment, homelessness, mental illness, and violence. She knew all this from reports from the East German embassy, ​​which had gathered intelligence behind the lines of the class enemy. Western governments, she claimed, merely ensured that a conformist press did not publicize such grievances. Ironically, one of Chile's leading dailies was lying right next to us on the table that day—with several articles addressing precisely these issues.

Margot Honecker never showed any doubt or self-criticism – with the exception of a brief admission: the SED, she admitted, had had to concretize parts of its Marxist course over time and had inevitably made some mistakes in the process – but only in implementation, not in theory.

Otherwise, she was unyielding and self-confident. Her vocabulary and diction sounded exactly like those of the highest-ranking East German apparatchiks in the late 1970s. Although she never belonged to the highest body, the Politburo, she was an extremely powerful First Lady—the Lady McBeth of the GDR.

Margot, who in her own communist utopia was secretly nicknamed the "Purple Witch" (because of her Mrs. Slocombe-like dyed hair); Margot, who allegedly ordered the forced adoption of the children of imprisoned dissidents; Margot, who oversaw a network of some 150 strict, prison-like children's homes where "politically difficult" youths were harshly re-educated into good socialist citizens.

The Banality of Evil: “That Nice Old Lady”

In person, however, she was more than endearing: so much so that my Chilean wife had trouble connecting “that nice old lady” with the crimes and desolation of the GDR as portrayed in the film “The Lives of Others,” which we immediately watched again after our last long conversation.

There was a remarkable postscript: At my farewell party as ambassador in January 2014, many guests were visibly surprised to see among them a frail Margot Honecker.

Perhaps she was equally shocked when, shortly afterward, she met Pinochet's daughter, who had also been invited and was a municipal councilor in the Santiago district where the embassy was located. I don't know what happened between them, but I assume they didn't get along. That day, Margot gave me a small book of Goethe's poems, printed in the early years of the GDR by the "People's Own Publishing House" in almost illegible old German cursive. I still treasure it.

My lasting impression after more than a decade is of having met a living embodiment of Hannah Arendt's "banality of evil," who died without the slightest doubt about her lifelong ideological convictions or remorse about the consequences of their repressive application in the system of "actually existing socialism" of the GDR.

She was herself guilty and a close accomplice in serious violations of the most basic human rights of millions of people, but sitting on our living room sofa she seemed like a humble person who it is hard to imagine would ever have harmed a fly.

Looking back, my encounter with Margot Honecker is one of the strangest experiences of my 38-year diplomatic career—and, the more I reflect on it, also one of the most disturbing. Even today, there are many people in Chile who steadfastly either defend the same rigid political dogmas she believed in—as embodied by the Allende government—or, conversely, justify the crimes and injustices of his bitter adversary: ​​the military regime under Augusto Pinochet. He, too, led an ideologically motivated dictatorship—only with the opposite effect. Ironically, his regime left the political stage in 1990—the same year that the GDR collapsed.

Jon Benjamin is CEO of Free Speech International (fsu.world) and has served as British Ambassador to Chile, Ghana, and Mexico. He is @jonbenjamin19 on X and can also be reached at [email protected].

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