The last premier of the Council of Ministers of the German Democratic Republic (GDR, also known as East Germany), Hans Modrow, has died at the age of 95, The Left party announced Saturday.
Modrow was a longtime leader of the Socialist Unity Party (SED) and was elevated to leader of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in November 1989, amid preparations for reunification with the Federal Republic of Germany, the western part.
East Germany finally held free and democratic general elections in March 1990. A month later, Modrow officially handed over to Lothar de Maizière, who served as the transmission belt during reunification until handing over his mandate to German Chancellor Helmut Kohl.
«With this, our party loses an important personality,» said Dietmar Bartsch, leader of The Left in the German Bundestag, and Gregor Gysi, former leader of the parliamentary group. «The entire peaceful course to establish German unity was precisely a special achievement of his. That will remain his political legacy,» the two wrote in his memory.
Modrow kept a small but critical distance from the all-powerful SED during the times of the GDR. As a result, he was sent in the 1970s away from the East Berlin power center to Dresden, something that worked in his favor after the fall of the Wall on November 9, 1989. Only four days later, Modrow became premier after being elected chairman of the GDR Council of Ministers and held office for about 150 days.
In March 1990, his government founded the Treuhandanstalt, an agency charged with organizing the transition in the east from a planned to a market economy. With the so-called Modrow Law, the GDR prime minister made it possible for numerous house and farm owners to buy the land on which their properties stood, many of which had been expropriated after the war at very low prices.
Modrow criticized the unified German state because, in his view, it was erected too quickly, and with too few concessions from West Germany. As a man of the old guard, he deplored the former communist ideals of the GDR. In many interviews he condemned what he called the one-sided «unjust state».
Source: (EUROPA PRESS)
