He was at the center of events when the GDR collapsed: some valued the last socialist head of government as a mediator who was willing to reform, while critics saw him as the representative of an unjust state. Who was Hans Modrow?
obituary from
Jens Schneider
There was a time when many people saw hope in the German socialist Hans Modrow. Maybe it was a few years, maybe just a few months in the fall of 1989, at the end of the GDR, more than three decades ago. In those years before the fall of the Iron Curtain, when the stubborn leadership of the socialist GDR ignored the mood and the situation in their ailing country, some of its citizens looked to Dresden for the first secretary of the SED district leadership. He knows about the situation and also wants to know about it in order to make the country better. Observers and politicians from the West also relied on Hans Modrow at the time and were looking for access. He was described with honorable nicknames: as the good Hans, the honest, the modest.