GDR history
Hans Modrow died – Last SED head of government in the GDR
Hans Modrow, former SED politician and delegate of the Left Party, died on the night of February 11, 2023 at the age of 95, according to the Left Party parliamentary group in the Bundestag. photo
©Oliver Berg/dpa
Hans Modrow is dead. Shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, he was elected chairman of the GDR Council of Ministers in 1989 – after the first free elections he had to resign just five months later.
The last GDR Prime Minister of the state party SED, Hans Modrow, is dead. He died on Saturday night at the age of 95, as the Left Party in the Bundestag announced. “Our party is losing an important personality with this,” said parliamentary group leader Dietmar Bartsch and former parliamentary group leader Gregor Gysi. From November 1989 to April 1990, Modrow controlled the fortunes of the GDR. After the fall of the Wall, he negotiated the first steps toward rapprochement with the federal government.
The longtime SED functionary and later PDS and Left Party politician was considered a convinced socialist who had kept a small piece of critical distance to the all-powerful SED during the GDR era. In the 1970s, Modrow was therefore sent away from the power center in Berlin to become the first district secretary in the provinces of Dresden. After the fall of the Wall, this qualified him for managerial positions in the renewing SED. Just four days later, on November 13, 1989, Modrow was elected Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the GDR, succeeding Willi Stoph – for around 150 days.
In the first free People’s Chamber elections on March 18, 1990, the SED-PDS lost power and Modrow lost his office a month later. He was succeeded as the last Prime Minister of the GDR until reunification by the CDU politician Lothar de Maizière.
Modrow wanted to save a piece of East Germany
During his five-month term in office, Modrow tried to save a piece of the GDR with his three-stage plan. As a price for German unity, he demanded military neutrality for the new state. In March 1990, his government founded the Treuhandanstalt to organize the transition from a planned to a market economy. With the so-called Modrow Law, the Prime Minister of the GDR made it possible for numerous house and farm owners to buy the plots of land on which their houses stood, which had often been expropriated after the war, very cheaply.
“The entire peaceful process of establishing German unity was a special achievement of his. That will remain his political legacy,” wrote Bartsch and Gysi in their obituary.
After reunification, Modrow sat for the PDS in the German Bundestag from 1990 to 1994 and represented it in the European Parliament from 1999 to 2004. The socialist was quite critical of the new state. German unity was achieved too quickly, the GDR collapsed too unconditionally and it was too one-sidedly condemned as an “unjust state,” Modrow complained in many interviews. As a man of the old guard, he mourned the former communist ideals of the GDR.
Until old age he advised the left as chairman of their council of elders. He made it clear that as a former prime minister he saw himself “continued to have a responsibility towards the former GDR citizens”.