Gerhard Riege

Gerhard Riege (23 May 1930 - 15 February 1992) was a respected East German law professor.

On 18 March 1990 East Germany held the first truly free election in that part of Germany since 1932. Riege had accepted nomination as a list candidate for the electoral district of Thuringia, and was elected to the East German Volkskammer (national parliament). On 3 October 1990 he was one of 144 nominated Volkskammer members who moved across to the enlarged German Bundestag (national parliament) following reunification. He was then elected to the Bundestag in the December general election later that year.

The media soul-searching, which found a focus deep inside the political class, and which followed Gerhard Riege's suicide, reflected many enduring dilemmas and discomfitures that have followed in the wake of reunification.

Life Provenance and early years Gerhard Riege was born into a working-class family at Gräfenroda, a small town known throughout Germany for the production of garden gnomes, located along the Wilde Gera valley in the hills south of Erfurt. His father worked as an artisanal glass blower.

Friedrich-Schiller University of Jena After passing the state law exams in 1953, he stayed on at the university faculty of Jurisprudence, employed as an assistant. His doctorate followed in 1957 in return for a dissertation on the representative system [of government] in Europe's people's democracies. He had already, in 1954, taken up a tutorial position, having thereby becoming the youngest don at the university giving tutorials in constitutional law. The next year he accepted the Jena university professorship in Public Law. Between 1974 and 1983 he also served as dean of the Social Sciences faculty. Sources are divided in their evaluation of the incident. that had blocked his election.

Politics With the collapse of the Hitler government the ban on non-Nazi political parties lapsed and was lifted. The Socialist Unity Party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands / SED) was formed in April 1946 through the contentious merger of the former Communist Party and Social Democratic Party. Although there are indications that the engineers of the merger intended that it should be implemented in all four occupied zones, it was only effected in the Soviet occupation zone. Driven by passionate anti-fascism and a determination that divisions on the political left should never again permit the emergence of a nationalist-populist government, Gerhard Riege was one of hundreds of thousands of Communists and others who promptly enrolled in the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, which over the next few years emerged as the ruling party in the National Front of the German Democratic Republic's single-party dictatorship, closely modelled on the Leninist model which the Ulbricht leadership team had studied in depth during their political exile in Moscow before 1945. Although a committed anti-fascist socialist, and therefore part of the political mainstream, there is no reason to believe that Gerhard Riege was a political activist during his student years, nor indeed during his time as a university teacher during the four decades following the founding of the state in October 1949. Sources indicate that at least by the standards of those times he was apolitical. For supporters and sympathisers, it is simply preposterous to believe that his academic success was in any way connected with Riege's party membership. Within academia, he was respected on account of his personal ability and integrity. He was able to present objectively based arguments through the power of his intellect. Those who agreed and those who disagreed with his point of view could join in admiring the consistency of his intellectual positions, which were always philosophically aligned with the party's intellectual underpinnings, but which could never have been perceived as partisan or (even) intolerant. No former academic colleagues or students have come forward since Riege's suicide claiming that they suffered state-sponsored injury "Zersetzung" on account of potentially sensitive information on them shared by Riege with Stasi handlers. As far as the availability of evidence allows, it is accordingly reasonable to endorse the conclusions of the Gauck commission that Riege's activity and impact as a registered Stasi informer were insubstantial (unerheblich) and insignificance (eher bedeutungslos).

The politician By the time, in November 1989, that the wall was breached by street protestors and it became clear that watching Soviet troops had received no instructions to preserve or restore the old political status quo, the German Democratic Republic faced more than mere financial bankruptcy. In the context of the dismal personal chemistry between Mikhail Gorbachev and Erich Honecker, and confronted by the winds of Glasnost blowing from, of all places, Moscow, the East German leadership experienced a rapid collapse in self-confidence which was reflected in the dissolution from within of the repressive apparatus that had been constructed over forty years by the Ministry for State Security. The ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED) hastily rebranded itself for a more democratic future as the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS). (Re-engineering the party's inner soul would take a little longer.) SED loyalists, including Gerhard Riege, unhesitatingly signed their party membership over to the PDS. A general election was arranged for 18 March 1990. It would be the first (and last) East German general election in which the outcome had not been predetermined by the leaders of the ruling SED long before a single vote had been cast. For the "new" party there was an urgent need to field candidates who were competent and politically reliable, but who would not turn out to have been implicated in inhuman forms of political repression since 1949. The academic world was an obvious place to search for candidates, but most of the politically reliable were plainly unfamiliar with notions of multi-party democracy and had little credibility internationally. Gerhard Riege already had political experience as a former member of the Gera district Council He accepted nomination as a PDS candidate for the general election. Under the western-style proportional representation system introduced for the election, his name was included on the party list for an electoral district corresponding approximately with the former (and after 1990 re-established) state of Thuringia. To the surprise of commentators, when the votes were counted, it became apparent that his name had been high enough up on the party list to secure his election as a member of the Volkskammer, East Germany's national parliament (which had hitherto been widely viewed by "voters" as a "rubber stamp" for decisions already taken elsewhere, within the Party Central Committee).

In the Bundestag Gerhard Riege tried to contribute to the creation of a new constitution for a newly united Germany. As a leading professor of constitutional law from the eastern half of the new state he was well qualified for the task. There had certainly been positive reactions from western constitutional experts in response to early drafts drawn up under his direction during 1989/90. Surviving sources focus less on Riege's contribution to the German constitutional settlement after 1990, and more on the circumstances under which his Bundestag career came to an end in 1992.

Karin Keschuba, the regional party chairwoman and leader of the Erfurt meeting, later agreed that participants had "discussed between themselves", as they had at so many meetings before the rebranding and relaunch of the old SED. Neither Keschuba nor her fellow participants were keen to discuss the Erfurt meeting in much detail partly, according to one of them, out of respect for Riege's widow. But Keschuba did accept that, perhaps, the "human dimension of the problem" had, with the benefit of hindsight, been to some extent overlooked. Professor [Riege] had three times stressed that he had simply forgotten "the matter" [of his Stasi contacts]. Dieter Strützel, the regional party deputy chair, who was also present, later shared his impression that "Riege sometimes seemed not to know what else to do. He seemed to me helpless .... completely changed". Several sources indicate that by the end of the meeting, rightly or wrongly, Riege had simply concluded that, after backing and belonging to the party for more than forty years, he was now being "dumped" by party comrades.

Afterwards Riege left behind a lengthy suicide letter addressed to his wife and three grown-up children.

The suicide triggered consternation across the political spectrum. There was a widespread consensus that "Lessons must be learned" and not a little bitterness, especially from (former) East Germans, that Riege had been hounded to his death by (formerly West German) political opponents.

Personal Gerhard Riege was married with three children.

Awards and prizes (selection) 1988 National Prize of the German Democratic Republic Class III for Academic Achievement, Science and Technology

Publications (selection)