Profile : Coming to the Aid of His Party : Gregor Gysi has rebuilt the former East Germany’s Communist faction into a new political force.

It was Nov. 8, 1989, and the Berlin Wall was but a day away from its appointment with the sledgehammer. In East Berlin, the governing class was running for cover. The Politburo of the East German Communist Party had just resigned en bloc; the government, in a hapless, too-little too-late attempt to contain the uncontainable, had announced that it would ease the regime’s detested travel restrictions.

On the steps of the Zentralkomitee building, tens of thousands of protesters gathered to tell the party that such half-hearted measures were not quite what they had in mind.

Out of the crowd stepped a small man, his hair thinning at the top, a lawyer and single father whose round glasses and intense brown eyes suggested a life of reading and contemplation. Few outside the nascent East German reform movement even knew Gregor Gysi--much less what he stood for.

No one, not even Gysi himself, supposed that just one month later he would be elected chairman of what was left of the Communist Party and given one of the great Missions Impossible of the socialist world: to reform the decrepit, wholly discredited, Soviet-installed entity, and to persuade Germans that they should not only forgive and tolerate it, but to vote for it of their own accord.

“I just wanted to go to the rally, make a speech and go back home,” Gysi said recently in an interview in the eastern German town of Potsdam, where he stopped for lunch during a day of electioneering.

It has taken five years, but Gysi has done the undoable: He has rebuilt the Communist Party--doing business now as the Party of Democratic Socialism--and made it such a force in today’s united Germany that the country’s established politicians have resorted to a campaign of old-time red-baiting to try to put it in its place.

“The Democratic Socialist cadres will lead the people over the precipice,” German Chancellor Helmut Kohl warned a jeering crowd recently in this far-eastern German town. “As long as we (Christian Democrats) are here, we will never let the fascist, Communist rabble tyrannize the people.”

Politicians of Kohl’s cut worry not that the former Communists could ever govern again--this is not Hungary or Poland--but that they are gaining strength in the east at a time when Germany’s electoral dispensation is at a watershed. Ever since the Federal Republic of Germany was founded in 1949, parliamentary power here has been divided among three established, centrist parties: the conservative Christian Democrats, the center-left Social Democrats and the independent Free Democrats, who have moved back and forth into coalitions with two big entities.

Now, though, with federal elections looming on Oct. 16, the Free Democrats are faring so poorly that they may not even be represented in the next Parliament. That would leave Kohl’s governing Christian Democrats without a suitable junior coalition partner, should they fail to achieve a clear majority by themselves.

With the former Communists flourishing in the old East, Germany’s mainstream politicians thus face the unappetizing prospect of having to parley with their lifelong enemies come the morning of Oct. 17, just to be able to form a workable government. This is precisely what happened in June, in elections in the state of Saxony-Anhalt: The Social Democrats were able to form a viable coalition government only with tacit cooperation from the former Communists, a party with which, they had sworn long and loud, they would never to do business.

Kohl called the move “a scandal on an enormous scale” and “a treasonous act.”

If anyone is to blame--or to thank, depending on one’s point of view--for this remarkable comeback, it is Gysi, who says all of it is as much of an astonishment to him as to any German.

“I have a good fantasy life, but not that good,” he says, laughing at the way things have been turning out.

That’s typical Gysi: jocular, personable--his remarks, in short, are nothing like the one-sided discourse East Germans were for so long accustomed to hearing from their political leaders. In a part of Germany where people spent 40 years listening to stolid comrades yammer on and on about sociopolitical abstractions, Gysi is something new: a politician who can speak well off the top of his head, who can articulate the dreams and disappointments of his constituency, and best of all, who can make people laugh.

His style has been so arresting in eastern Germany that he has become something more than a leading politician here; he is also seen, these days as a charmeur . German newspapers have taken to printing regular updates on his personal entanglements, and otherwise serious interviewers seem unable to resist asking him about his “effect on women.”

They might better ask Gysi, formerly a general-practice lawyer and low-level member of the Communist Party, what made him choose to stand by the party after the East German regime collapsed. It wasn’t as if he had had no options, after all. He could have left for the West, as tens of thousands of other East Germans did in 1989, or he could have stayed put and gone to work with one of the new reform groups that were coming together that summer and fall. Gysi himself did the legal work for the first and most prominent such group, the New Forum.

So why didn’t he join, say, the New Forum, instead of pressing on with the Communists?

The answer lies, in part, with Gysi’s family history, and the loyalty he felt to an organization which, in the 1930s, fought the Nazis head-on and suffered terribly for doing so. Gysi’s father, a Communist Party member and a Jew, spent the war years dodging concentration camps and doing underground work for what there was of a German resistance. Gysi grew up in a household where this past was a living, shaping force; his parents’ social milieu included Communists from all over Europe.

“I inherited a certain family history,” he says. “The Gysi family lost a total of 18 members in concentration camps. Although there were certainly things (about the East German Communist Party) to criticize, overall, I believed when I became a member that I was joining the biggest anti-fascist force in Germany.”

And then, when the party Old Guard stumbled in 1989, Gysi says, “I didn’t want the socialist ideals just to drown, even though those ideals have been damaged and spoiled. I thought that I had responsibility for this country, and for a process that was under way.”

Not the least of his fears at the time, he says, was the possibility that hard-liners might seize control of the party and order goons into the streets to crush dissent, as happened in Nicolae Ceausescu’s Romania.

“It was crucial that people come to the top of the party who could guarantee that peaceful changes take place,” he says.

But it’s one thing to want to keep a party nonviolent and something else again to want to make it into a modern, relevant institution. Gysi says his reforms got an initial boost from the simple fact that so many former Communists abandoned the party.

“A party that loses 90% of its members simply has to be a different party,” he says. When the party lost all power, he points out, the opportunists and careerists departed, leaving the field wide open for reformers like him.

Which is not to say it was easy to turn around the party’s reputation.

“I felt a lot of hatred,” Gysi says of the early months and years after the Berlin Wall fell, when the Communist Party was written off as stake-through-the-heart dead, and western Germans were accusing remaining leaders like him of siphoning its resources out of the country. In 1992, the newsmagazine Der Spiegel even published reports that he had cooperated with the East German secret police.

“It was really difficult for me,” he says. “If I had known the personal consequences (of assuming the party leadership), I never would have done it.”

Gysi sued Der Spiegel for libel and the court decided in his favor. But in January, 1993, overextended and exhausted, he chose not to run for another term as party chairman. He remains today the party’s top representative in Parliament--the Democratic Socialists now hold 16 seats in the 662-seat Bundestag--and is the Communists’ unquestioned conscience and locomotive.

To be sure, many of those who follow Gysi these days do so not because they embrace his socialist vision, but just because they are shocked by the changes that German unification has brought. Unemployment in eastern Germany is at double-digit levels, prices have soared compared to East German times and the social safety net--while downright cushy compared to America’s--is peanuts compared to the cradle-to-grave security that the old German Democratic Republic used to offer.

Against this unhappy backdrop, the Democratic Socialists have helped found various citizens’ rights groups--a tenants’ union, for instance and an unemployed people’s society--and maintained close, grass-roots ties with the sick, the elderly and the unemployed. Over the last few weeks, as the former Communists have come under increasingly strident attacks from centrist politicians, these disadvantaged eastern Germans have proven some of Gysi’s most militant supporters.

But one recent poll found that 44% of the party’s supporters claim satisfaction with their economic lot. These well-off supporters have turned to the Democratic Socialists, in many cases, because they live in the former East and have grown convinced over the last five years that they will never be adequately represented by a western politician or party.

Still more support comes from idealistic young eastern Germans who, despite everything that has happened, still believe in socialism. To them, the fall of the Eastern Bloc was not a sign that socialism is a doomed ideology; rather, it was simply evidence that socialism won’t work without democracy.

Biography

Gregor Gysi

Born: Jan. 16, 1948, in Berlin

Education: Studied law at East Berlin’s Humboldt University and received his doctorate in 1976; he is also a certified cattle breeder, thanks to the former East German requirement that all university students learn a manual trade.

Marital status: Gysi has been divorced since 1974. He has two sons, ages 22 and 30.

Quote: “At the moment, we’re the most honest, upstanding party in Bonn. There is not one scandal involving Democratic Socialist delegates. And the reasons for this are clear to see: First, we are morally superior, and second, we haven’t had the chance to become immoral because no one will make deals with us.”