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Federal Environment Minister Steffi Lemke
Photo: Ann-Marie Utz/dpa
Pat Benatar revealed to the world in 1983 that love is a battlefield. Elon Musk revealed to the world that communication is a battlefield by taking over Twitter in 2022 at the latest. The platform became, it is sufficiently described, a uniquely aberrant conduit for communication. 365 days a year. This inevitably raises the question of whether political Ash Wednesday is still needed in Germany, which is characterized by the fact that political opponents are slaughtered below the belt. Like X, which used to be called Twitter. And with beer. And with Markus Söder, who is not at all suspicious, we are approaching the question of the necessity of political Ash Wednesday.
The Bavarian Prime Minister in Passau continued to ponder in 2024, accusing the Greens of doing so much crap that "they should actually fall under the fertilizer regulations themselves." In order to then compare the Environment Minister Steffi Lemke, who comes from East Germany and is also with the Greens, with the late Margot Honecker. You know, the wife of the former State Council Chairman of the GDR, so hard-line SED that she was viewed critically even in the SED leadership, which was full of hardliners.
Margot Honecker was responsible for serious human rights violations and hated in the GDR. After the collapse, she fled to Moscow and then to Chile and died there in 2016. Steffi Lemke, and that may be the only thing they have in common, comes from the GDR. During the times of collapse, she was one of the founders of the Eastern Greens. Söder, for his part, said in his beer tent speech that this Steffi Lemke was a prime example of the Greens' attempt to restrict the freedom of the hardworking through ever new requirements, as the "Green Margot Honecker".
So far, so usual, one might think, and there is certainly no connection between the “green” enemy image that Söder uses there and the cancellation of the Greens' political Ash Wednesday in Biberach, Baten-Württemberg, where radical farmers blew up the event. After all, Söder is not the only Green basher; the AfD can do that at least as well. But she's not a Bavarian Prime Minister. Federal Environment Minister Lemke was later quoted as saying: “Mr Söder knows exactly what he is doing. It wasn't because he was drunk on beer, but rather a very conscious attack." And further: You have to be careful in political disputes.
This prime example of battlefield-like communication would probably have quickly disappeared into obscurity if Lemke hadn't appeared at Markus Lanz, which brought the topic further attention. Lemke described there that in the real socialism of the GDR she had been denied access to the Abitur and the university entrance qualification - but that, according to critics, was not entirely true, after all, on Lemke's homepage it says: "From 1986 to 1988, evening school and Abitur are due the Dessau District Adult Education Center; 1988 to 1993 studied agricultural sciences at the Humboldt University, Berlin.«
So far, so possibly questionable, definitely in the world and reason enough for Steffi Lemke to publish a personal statement on her homepage. The title: “My biography shaped by the GDR”. In it, Lemke traces her path in the GDR's education system. She was denied access to the regular Abitur because "the GDR education system under Margot Honecker was a system that, in many places, even at very young ages, paid attention to who might be unwelcome from the perspective of the SED dictatorship."
She then wrote in the statement, which was first reported by the Editorial Network Germany (RND), that she tried to catch up on her high school diploma. She worked as a postman during the day and attended the district adult education center in the evenings, "it was only possible for her to do that there with great persistence." And she studied agricultural sciences because possible fields of study for her were limited due to her background. Her CV was nothing special, because “many people in the GDR ended up like me: arbitrary decisions, subordination of the individual to a supposed collective, negative effects on entire CVs if one actually or even supposedly did not conform to the system. «
She's like us, lateral thinkers, Reich citizens and various AfD representatives might now whisper, we don't conform to the system either. On the one hand, the question would have to be asked what a system is. And on the other hand, reference should be made to the last sentences of Lemke's statement: "We must not forget the reprisals, persecution, defamation, imprisonment, expatriation and also the murder of people that the GDR regime led to. We should protect freedom and democracy. They are infinitely valuable.”
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