Gerhard Riege (23 May 1930 - 15 February 1992) was a respected East German law professor.
On 18 March 1990 East Germany held the first truly free election in that part of Germany since 1932. Riege had accepted nomination as a list candidate for the electoral district of Thuringia, and was elected to the East German Volkskammer (national parliament). On 3 October 1990 he was one of 144 nominated Volkskammer members who moved across to the enlarged German Bundestag (national parliament) following reunification. He was then elected to the Bundestag in the December general election later that year.
The media soul-searching, which found a focus deep inside the political class, and which followed Gerhard Riege's suicide, reflected many enduring dilemmas and discomfitures that have followed in the wake of reunification.
Life Provenance and early years Gerhard Riege was born into a working-class family at Gräfenroda, a small town known throughout Germany for the production of garden gnomes, located along the Wilde Gera valley in the hills south of Erfurt. His father worked as an artisanal glass blower. As he matured, he showed a particular interest in Philosophy, History and Art history. He left school at fourteen and trained for work as a postman. Shortly after this, the telephone connections were cut and the trainee postman was given a telegram to take through to the forest. His orders were to deliver it by hand to a satellite concentration camp of the Buchenwald complex. While visiting the camp, he met a group of half-starved camp detainees, closely guarded by armed, smartly uniformed officers. He would later recall the encounter as a formative element of his later life. He became the "most-determined anti-fascist imaginable".
Roughly one year after his recruitment into the postal service, the war ended. After May 1945, the entire central portion of Germany was administered as the Soviet occupation zone (to be relaunched in October 1949 as the Soviet-sponsored German Democratic Republic (East Germany). Under the egalitarian precepts of the military administrators he was chosen to return to school in order to complete the Abitur, the schools' final exam leading to university-level education. He graduated from his "Aufbaugymnasium" (secondary school) at nearby Neudietendorf in 1949 and moved to the University of Jena, where he studied for a degree not in Philosophy or History, but in Jurisprudence.
Friedrich-Schiller University of Jena After passing the state law exams in 1953, he stayed on at the university faculty of Jurisprudence, employed as an assistant. His doctorate followed in 1957 in return for a dissertation on the representative system [of government] in Europe's people's democracies. He had already, in 1954, taken up a tutorial position, having thereby becoming the youngest don at the university giving tutorials in constitutional law. It was again at Jena that he received his habilitation in 1964, which opened the way to a life-long career in the universities sector. This time his dissertation concerned "East German citizenship". The next year he accepted the Jena university professorship in Public Law.Kürschners Volkshandbuch Deutscher Bundestag 12. Wahlperiode, 63. Auflage, Rheinbreitbach 1991, p. 203 Between 1974 and 1983 he also served as dean of the Social Sciences faculty.
On 23 January 1990 Riege was elected to the university rectorship. However, due to "procedural errors" the election was re-run, and this time Riege, deeply upset by the whole business, did not resubmit himself for election. The period was one of intensified political turmoil, and it would appear that the objections from those who had complained related to their identification of Riege as a "party official" of the country's ruling Socialist Unity Party. Sources are divided in their evaluation of the incident. Ironically, the previous time he had sought election as Jena's university rector it had been party pressure that had blocked his election.
Politics With the collapse of the Hitler government the ban on non-Nazi political parties lapsed and was lifted. The Socialist Unity Party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands / SED) was formed in April 1946 through the contentious merger of the former Communist Party and Social Democratic Party. Although there are indications that the engineers of the merger intended that it should be implemented in all four occupied zones, it was only effected in the Soviet occupation zone. Driven by passionate anti-fascism and a determination that divisions on the political left should never again permit the emergence of a nationalist-populist government, Gerhard Riege was one of hundreds of thousands of Communists and others who promptly enrolled in the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, which over the next few years emerged as the ruling party in the National Front of the German Democratic Republic's single-party dictatorship, closely modelled on the Leninist model which the Ulbricht leadership team had studied in depth during their political exile in Moscow before 1945. Although a committed anti-fascist socialist, and therefore part of the political mainstream, there is no reason to believe that Gerhard Riege was a political activist during his student years, nor indeed during his time as a university teacher during the four decades following the founding of the state in October 1949. Sources indicate that at least by the standards of those times he was apolitical. For supporters and sympathisers, it is simply preposterous to believe that his academic success was in any way connected with Riege's party membership. Within academia, he was respected on account of his personal ability and integrity. He was able to present objectively based arguments through the power of his intellect. Those who agreed and those who disagreed with his point of view could join in admiring the consistency of his intellectual positions, which were always philosophically aligned with the party's intellectual underpinnings, but which could never have been perceived as partisan or (even) intolerant. Admirers would recall not just his integrity and openness, but also his scrupulous politeness. Guido Henke, a former law student of Riege's who subsequently worked for him in a political capacity during the early 1990s, described him as "a fine person, one of those who would apologise three times to an interlocutor before lifting the receiver if the telephone rang [during a one-on-one meeting]".
Ministry for State Security Documents that surfaced after 1990 disclosed that in 1954 Gerhard Riege signed the a "declaration of obligation" statement in favour of the Ministry for State Security (Stasi). This triggered the (already increasingly standardised) process whereby East German citizens enrolled as "Informeller Mitarbeiter" ("IM" / Stasi informers). Riege's senior position in a prestigious university gave him an unusual level of access to university teachers and other people of influence over current and future generations of opinion formers. For the security services, with their traditional mistrust of "intellectuals", he would have been a prime target, and his unswerving support of anti-fascist Socialism would have encouraged handlers to think him "reliable", even if there is no indication that he was much of a party activist - at least before 1990. The Ministry for State Security were meticulous and complete in their record keeping. In October 1990, directly after reunification, the government set up the Stasi Records Agency to organise and administer the surviving Stasi archives. The agency is generally identified in archives from the period as the Gauck Commission: Joachim Gauck was the Federal Commissioner who headed it up between 1991 and 2000. It is unsurprising that Gerhard Riege was among the first of those on whom Stasi records were identified, sorted and consulted.
Gerhard Riege was an active "IM" between 1954 and 1960. When invited to comment more than thirty years later, Riege pleaded forgetfulness. Given that professorial absent-mindedness was an aspect of Riege's personality that colleagues would have completely recognised, this was not a totally implausible explanation. However, when presented with more evidence, he recalled that he had agreed to help the Ministry officials as requested in 1954 because he had been trying to obtain an exit visa in order to undertake a research visit to the west: it had been explained to him that without helping the security services as requested, the privilege of foreign travel would never be his. After the Gauck commission had reviewed the relevant Stasi files, they concluded that the reports Riege furnished on colleagues were few in number and insubstantial in content. From the six years that he was an active "IM", there were only four surviving reports. Given that some Stasi files were hastily burned when East Germany collapsed, it is impossible to be sure that he only submitted four reports on "persons of interest to the authorities" over the six years between 1954 and 1960, but there is no evidence of Stasi efforts to retain his service or re-recruit him after 1960. According to at least one source, subsequently researched Stasi files disclosed that it was indeed on 3 March 1960 that Riege "refused further [Stasi] contact". No former academic colleagues or students have come forward since Riege's suicide claiming that they suffered state-sponsored injury "Zersetzung" on account of potentially sensitive information on them shared by Riege with Stasi handlers. As far as the availability of evidence allows, it is accordingly reasonable to endorse the conclusions of the Gauck commission that Riege's activity and impact as a registered Stasi informer were insubstantial (unerheblich) and insignificance (eher bedeutungslos)..
The politician