Erich Honecker

Erich Honecker (25 August 1912 – 29 May 1994) was a German politician who, as the General Secretary of the Socialist Unity Party, led the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) from 1971 until the weeks preceding the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. From 1976 onward he was also the country's official head of state as chairman of the State Council following Willi Stoph's relinquishment of the post.

Honecker's political career began in the 1930s when he became an official of the Communist Party of Germany, a position for which he was imprisoned during the Nazi era. Following World War II, he was freed and soon relaunched his political activities, founding the youth organisation the Free German Youth in 1946 and serving as the group's chairman until 1955. As the Security Secretary of the Party’s Central Committee in the new East Germany, he was the prime organiser of the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961 and, in this function, bore responsibility for the "order to fire" along the Inner German border.

In 1970, he initiated a political power struggle that led, with Leonid Brezhnev's support, to his replacing Walter Ulbricht as First Secretary of the Central Committee and as chairman of the state's National Defense Council. Under his command, the country adopted a programme of "consumer socialism" and moved toward the international community by normalising relations with West Germany and also becoming a full member of the UN, in what is considered one of his greatest political successes.

As Cold War tensions eased in the late 1980s under perestroika and glasnost, the liberal reforms of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, Honecker refused all but cosmetic changes to the East German political system, citing the continual hardliner attitudes of Kim Il-sung and Fidel Castro, whose respective regimes of North Korea and Cuba had been critical of reforms. As anticommunist protests grew, Honecker begged the USSR to intervene and suppress the protests to maintain communist rule in East Germany like the Prague Spring of 1968 and the Hungarian Revolution of 1956; Gorbachev refused. Honecker was forced to resign by his party in October 1989 in a bid to improve the government's image before the public. Honecker's eighteen years at the helm of the soon-to-collapse German Democratic Republic came to an end.

Following German reunification, he sought asylum in the Chilean embassy in Moscow in 1991 but was extradited back to Germany a year later to stand trial for his role in the human rights abuses committed by the East German government. However, the proceedings were abandoned due to illness and he was freed from custody to travel to join his family in exile in Chile, where he died in May 1994 from liver cancer.

Childhood and youth
Honecker was born in Neunkirchen, in what is now Saarland, as the son of Wilhelm Honecker (1881–1969), a coal miner and political activist, who had married Caroline Catharina Weidenhof (1883–1963) in 1905. The couple had six children together: Katharina (Käthe, 1906–1925), Wilhelm (Willi, 1907–1944), Frieda (1909–1974), Erich, Gertrud (1917–2010) and Karl-Robert (1923–1947). Erich, their fourth child, was born on 25 August 1912 during the period in which the family resided on Max-Braun-Straße, before later moving to Kuchenbergstraße 88 in the present-day Neunkirchen city district of Wiebelskirchen. After World War I, the Territory of the Saar Basin was occupied by France. This change from the strict rule of Baron von Stumm to French military occupation provided the backdrop for what Wilhelm Honecker understood as proletarian exploitation, and introduced young Erich to communism. After his tenth birthday in 1922, Erich Honecker became a member of the Spartacus League's children's group in Wiebelskirchen. Aged 14 he entered the KJVD, the Young Communist League of Germany, for whom he later served the organisation's leader of Saarland from 1931.

Honecker did not find an apprenticeship immediately after leaving school, but instead worked for a farmer in Pomerania for almost two years. In 1928 he returned to Wiebelskirchen and began a traineeship as a roofer with his uncle, but quit to attend the International Lenin School in Moscow and Magnitogorsk after the KJVD hand-picked him for a course of study there. There, sharing a room with Anton Ackermann, he studied under the cover name "Fritz Malter".

Legacy
Like his predecessor Walter Ulbricht, Honecker ruled with neither charisma nor oratory power. His speeches at party conferences and at diplomatic events showed his awkward and wooden style of delivery, which was parodied by satirists outside East Germany. In his time as General Secretary his stance was described as an “almost sinister, unstudied immovability”.

The 1983 Udo Lindenberg song “Sonderzug nach Pankow”, aimed at the then-State Council and their lack of looseness, also achieved great popularity in East Germany. In 1987 Honecker sent Lindenberg a shawm—an instrument he had played in his youth as a member of the Roter Frontkämpferbund—in response to the gift of a leather jacket from him.

Dmitri Vrubel's 1990 mural on the Berlin Wall "My God, Help Me to Survive This Deadly Love", depicting a socialist "fraternal kiss" between Honecker and Leonid Brezhnev, became known around the world.