Ex-Communists of E. Germany Repudiate ‘Stalinist’ Past : Politics: Vote underscores renamed party’s desire to be taken seriously within opposition. Few westerners back it.

Responding to longstanding calls that it address the sins of its past, the former Communist Party of East Germany voted to distance itself from the “Stalinist model of socialism” during a widely watched three-day congress here.

It was the first time the party, now doing business as the Party of Democratic Socialism, or PDS, has taken a clear position on its members’ suitability for political life in today’s united, democratic Germany. The weekend’s voting underscored the party’s desire, five years after it nearly vanished, to become a full-fledged player within the German political opposition.

In western Germany, the resurgent PDS is still deeply suspect because nearly 90% of its members once belonged to the Communist Party and because some members--including ranking party officials--are known or suspected to have collaborated with the hated East German secret police, the Stasi. About 70% of all PDS members are over 55, which means they spent their adult lifetimes under communism and have scant firsthand knowledge of any other system of civic life.

These demographics make the PDS a complete non-starter to western Germans. In Bonn, lawmakers from the country’s established parties refuse to let PDS representatives sit on any of the discussion committees where the real work of governance goes on, and those voters in the former West Germany with a mind to vote left tend to opt for the Greens or the Social Democrats.

Of the 125,000 members of the PDS, only 2,000 are in western Germany.

PDS leaders argue that western Germany’s cold shoulder is wholly unwarranted, insisting that they have reformed their party and made it a palatable left-wing alternative. But their explanations of how they have reconciled the continued presence of onetime Communist activists with modern socialist thinking have been opaque, and their treatment of members with dubious backgrounds has been unpredictable.

One longtime Stasi collaborator, for instance--former PDS Deputy Chairman Andre Brie--was allowed to manage the party’s federal election campaign last year, but at the same time another Stasi informant, Kerstin Kaiser-Nicht, was pressured to give up her seat in the Bundestag after word leaked out that she had spied on German schoolmates while studying in Leningrad in the 1970s.

Party supporters hoped that the weekend’s congress would produce a coherent policy for addressing such cases in the future.

In resolving after a long debate “to reject ideals of socialism with a dictatorial, anti-freedom, anti-democratic, illiberal and centralized character,” the party explicitly turned its back on former policies. But it didn’t go so far as to expel the old-style Communists who remain in the ranks, stating that they are welcome to stay as long as they understand there is no longer any hope for their ideas to flourish.

“For the past 40 years, I heard about nothing except the heroic feats (of the Communist Party), and I grew sick of it,” said the party’s charismatic unofficial leader, Gregor Gysi, trying to explain why senior Communists need to be forgiven. “And now I don’t want to spend the next 40 years hearing about nothing but the (party’s) crimes. Both are reality. That makes things very complicated.”

In the broader landscape of German politics, the PDS is a minor player, with just 30 seats in the 672-seat Bundestag. In contrast to the influence of its counterparts in such former Communist states as Poland or Hungary, it doesn’t have a prayer of ever governing Germany.

But the PDS is a significant force in eastern Germany, governing at the local level in several towns and villages and participating in informal coalitions at the state level. In parts of the former East Germany, more than one-third of the voters cast ballots for PDS candidates in the last federal election--not necessarily because they liked anti-capitalist doctrines but because they were eager to send easterners to the Bundestag, the lower house of the Parliament.

Although the PDS was already recovering from its near-death experience as early as 1992, winning respectable returns in municipal elections in the former East Berlin, it wasn’t until after last October’s federal election that the party felt ready to sit down and face the touchy business of defining itself.

The party leadership spent the last two months drawing up five main principles meant to answer questions about dealing with Stasi collaborators and young hard-line Communists in the ranks. In the weekend’s debate and voting, the party recommitted itself to socialism and resolved that practically anyone can fit into the PDS except nationalists, racists, anti-Semites and Stalinists.

But the party failed to make any progress on the sensitive question of what to do with onetime Stasi collaborators, deciding merely that the issue should be addressed over the long term.

“The argument within our party over this history will go on, and I’m glad about that,” said Gysi, looking for the bright side. “The mainstream parties have no clear awareness of history.”

Researcher Christian Retzlaff of The Times’ Berlin Bureau contributed to this report.