In the pop-culture black hole of diminishing returns that is Star Wars (my 12-year-old self would be astonished if I tried to tell him that I’d one day be thoroughly sick of Star Wars), occasional gems still manage to shine. One such is the series Andor. Set some five years before the events of Star Wars, Andor relates the adventures of a petty criminal who becomes caught up in the fledgling Rebellion.
Its virtue is its gritty ‘groundedness’: unlike the grandiose space opera of Star Wars, Andor is a realistic look at life under an authoritarian regime. Not just the precarious existence of, and often amoral day-to-day choices resistance figures realistically live and make, but the ambitious petty functionaries and zealous ideologues who make a brutal, totalitarian, regime work.
People like, in real life, Margot Honecker.
Honecker was the third wife of longtime East German leader, Erich Honecker, and minister of education of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) from 1963 to 1989. Margot Honecker’s job was to turn out a generation of suitably indoctrinated communists in the ‘joyless, sinister Marxist experiment’. She took to the job with zeal.
The GDR was a failed experiment in replacing one tyranny, Nazism, with another, Soviet Marxism. Both these German forms of totalitarianism eventually ceased to exist entirely, the former by losing an aggressive, genocidal war it sought and started, the latter overthrown by its own people, fed up with the fear, repression and drudgery of their daily existence. The horseshoe theory of politics on German soil.
Margot Honecker was amongst the true believers, all-in in her youth at the start of the East German experiment and a die-hard for its ideology long after emptied Stasi prisons became macabre tourist attractions.
As failed German totalitarians are wont to do, the Honeckers fled to South America – in this case, Chile, run at the time by fellow Marxists, many of them die-hard supporters of former communist leader Salvador Allende.
In 2012–13, British Ambassador to Chile, Jon Benjamin had three meetings with the ‘still living dinosaur’. What he found was an absolute believer whose Marxism refused to be shaken by historical fact.
During many hours of debate, including throughout a rare dinner with outsiders at her house, she didn’t give an inch. The political ideology of her whole adult life was, she told me, “objectively correct” […] she had nothing to apologise for.
The GDR experiment had been honourable and successful, but its Western enemies constantly undermined it. However much communism was inevitably bound to win in the end, imperialism and capitalism had still been strong enough in the late 20th century to fight back successfully. But “the seed survives and will blossom again one day”.
The Stasi secret police – which eventually made one in six East Germans a collaborator or informer – was the necessary ‘sword and shield of our Republic’. The wall was necessary, too, and everyone knew what would happen to them if they tried to climb out – and they were mostly foreign agents or deviants and criminals. In any case, the capitalist Western press never reported those who tried to climb in, ‘to find peace of mind in a socialist paradise’.
Where Margot became truly animated was about Mikhail Gorbachev whose name she mentioned dozens of times with something approaching spitting rage. He was the ungrateful recipient of the greatest benefits of Soviet socialism only then to undermine and destroy them, deliberately sacrificing the GDR in the process, just to ingratiate himself with Helmut Kohl.
Gorby’s coming to power was, she colourfully put it, the equivalent of a Pope being elected who then told the Catholic Church that it had to allow abortion and accept homosexuality, thereby destroying its whole raison d’etre and internal structures. Gorbachev was simply a monstrous traitor to the cause that had raised him, as he sought to turn himself into a millionaire.
Honecker remained thoroughly averse to pesky facts for the rest of her life. East Germany really had been a worker’s paradise. All capitalist countries were hell-holes of oppression.
Most notably, she remained absolutely unrepentant about her own role. She was the overseer of about 150 prison-like ‘children’s homes’ where ‘politically difficult’ juveniles were subjected to harsh communist re-education. She was also allegedly the architect of forced adoption for the children of jailed dissidents. The ‘Purple Witch’ as she was nicknamed (behind her back), referring to her dyed hair, like Are You Being Served?’s Mrs Slocombe.
No regrets, no apologies, not for any of it.
It took a long time to build socialism, as it included having to change a human mind-set which had evolved through centuries of capitalist conditioning.
What was it like, then, meeting such a monster?
On a personal basis, she was somehow far from charmless: so much so that my Chilean wife struggled to associate “that sweet old lady” with the crimes and joylessness of the GDR portrayed in ‘The Lives of Others’ which we immediately re-watched after our last long conversation with her […]
My abiding impression well over a decade on is of having met a living embodiment of Hannah Arendt’s ‘the banality of evil’ who died without the merest hint of doubt about her lifelong ideological beliefs or remorse for the consequences of applying them so repressively in the GDR’s system of ‘real existing socialism’.
Most of us are fortunate to have never met a Margot Honecker, let alone a Hitler or Stalin. Unfortunately, though, we all got to meet their petty, spiteful little shadows over the last five years.
