Hans Modrow, the last communist prime minister of the GDR, died in the night from Friday to Saturday at the age of 95. Modrow, who was slightly more critical of the GDR administration than his fellow SED party members, became GDR Prime Minister a few days after the fall of the wall in November 1989. In those first months after the Wende, he played an important role in the negotiations with the then Federal Republic about German unification.
After just five months, after the first free elections in March 1990, Modrow was relieved by CDU member Lothar de Maizière, the last GDR Prime Minister. Berlin mayor Franziska Giffey (SPD) called Modrow a significant contributor to the “peaceful revolution, the German unification, that huge upheaval.”
German history
Many chapters from modern German history are discussed in Hans Modrow’s life. Modrow was born in 1928 in Police in present-day Poland. Towards the end of the war he was drafted into the Volkssturm, a militia for which women were also called up to fill the shortage of manpower. After the war, he ended up in Russian captivity, where, as he said in a 2018 interview, he entered an “anti-fascist school” that changed his views significantly.
Back in Berlin, he quickly made his career as an SED official. Because his views were not always in line with those of the party leaders in Berlin, he was demoted to Dresden in the 1970s. Because of this slightly more critical attitude, he became prime minister in November 1989. Among other things, his government created the Treuhand, the body that had to transform the planned economy into a market economy. The so-called ‘Modrow law’ made it possible for expropriated landowners to buy back land in East Germany at a good price.
It was also Modrow’s wish that the united Germany should remain militarily neutral. That is a point of view that many of Modrow’s party members – the SED of the time now calls itself Die Linke – still adhere to. Also in the interview in the South German Zeitung in 2018, Modrow is upset about the “suspicion, distrust, sometimes even hatred of the Russians” in Germany.
More recognition
After his short term as prime minister, Modrow was a member of the Bundestag for a few years and later, until 2004, an MEP. In addition to more recognition for Russia, Modrow also wanted more recognition for the GDR and for East Germans. The GDR did not want to call Modrow a dictatorship. In a 2001 book, he called the wall separating East and West Berlin another “elegant solution.”
As a pensioner, he went to court with a demand for a higher pension: because he had been a director in the GDR, his statutory pension was cut by 40 percent. For Modrow, his abbreviated pension was one of many signs that East and West Germany had not been reunited equally. After unification, Modrow felt, East Germany’s sovereignty was quickly lost.