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When Wolfgang Thierse speaks, consideration spreads like a fine fragrance. He is not a man of roaring speeches, but his vocal restraint should not be confused with softness. Saskia Esken and Kevin Kühnert took on Thierse and Gesine Schwan and were publicly ashamed of views as radical as a cookbook. One could disagree. But are you ashamed of Thierse?
Thierse, 77, was deeply affected. Esken, trying to shape itself as a left-wing party, wanted to stand out as “deeply disturbed” compassionate members of the diverse gender community at the expense of the two traditional social democrats. Thierse defended himself by putting an attack on paper in a tone of agitated concern: Esken should tell him publicly “if my permanence in the common party is still desirable or rather harmful.” In any case, I would have “doubts if two members of the party leadership distance themselves from me.”
Project with Steinbach
Two phrases that immediately put Esken on the defensive and panicked him. All day she should have been trying to reach him and Schwan on the phone. What sounded like Thierse was afraid of being kicked out was nothing short of a declaration of war. Thierse no longer wants to become nothing, but he also does not intend for his reputation to be killed.
The SPD politician has belonged to the center of the party for decades. Unlike many in the SPD leadership, he risked something for his attitude. In order for someone like him, a typographer, a German scholar and an employee of the Central Institute of Literary History of the GDR, a devout Catholic, to obtain a membership card for the Social Democratic Party, a state first had to waver and die.
21 years ago: Wolfgang Thierse was vice president of the Bundestag in February 2000, Angela Merkel, general secretary of the CDU.
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Image: Picture-Alliance
Thierse was not a front-line peaceful revolutionary in 1989, but since June 1990 he was president of the SPD in the GDR. From the unit until 2013, Thierse, who was born in Breslau, was a member of the Bundestag in Berlin. He was always a committed speaker against extremism on the right, but also on the left. In search of a passionate engagement, Thierse argued for years with former conservative Christian Democrat Erika Steinbach about the memory of the flight and expulsion after 1945. In the end, there was a joint project.
From 1998 to 2005 he was president of the German Bundestag. As vice president, he represented the dignity of the house and democratic dispute resolution until 2013. Much of his political stature no longer exists in the SPD. The attempt to savor it, to leave it out of the question, has revealed to some Social Democrats something surprising about the state of the current party leadership.
