THE GERMAN church historian and politician Wolfgang Ullmann was one of the powerful voices of conscience in his sustained resistance to the communist East German regime. He also articulated the anxieties, and occasional anger, of the Eastern Germans about the unification of Germany and how it has done little to better their economic and social prospects.
Once democratic politics became possible in East Germany, Ullmann was concerned especially with issues such as human rights, a proper reckoning with the past, and economic justice. He was a member of the German Bundestag and then represented the Green Party for several years in the European Parliament. He was also a prolific journalist.
All the time his theological training informed and coloured his views of what he saw as the new moral imperatives in such a momentous period of German history, as he and his fellow East Germans sought to banish dictatorship finally while preserving a social stability that gave hope for the future.
Ullmann began his experience of the evils of dictatorship as a child under Nazism. He was born in 1929 as the son of a civil servant in Bad Gottleuba, near Dresden. And as a teenager he was living in Dresden itself during the catastrophic “firestorm” RAF air raid early in 1945.
He studied theology in Berlin and then in Göttingen in western Germany. His early political activity included opposition to moves by the West German Chancellor, Konrad Adenaeur, towards the integration of his country with western Europe, as Ullmann believed that would leave his homeland in eastern Germany permanently under Soviet control.
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When the Evangelical Church called on Ullmann to return to East Germany to a parish there, he was initially reluctant, but he eventually accepted his vocation in 1956, returning to Saxony and then moving in the 1970s to Berlin. Alongside his pastoral work he developed an academic career with characteristically wideranging interests, including the early Church Fathers and Thomas Müntzer, the Reformation revolutionary from Saxony.
Politically, Ullmann had some sympathy with the East German communist regime’s social provision. However, he became more and more critical of the Communist Party’s monopoly of power, buttressed by sham elections. Church leaders like Ullmann offered a kind of shelter for more and more open political debate as the Communist grip on power weakened in the late 1980s. He took part in the “round table” discussions which tried to mediate between Communist leaders and opposition at a time when, Ullmann recalled, “our country had become ungovernable and we were heading for dangerous chaos”. And he was minister without portfolio in the transitional government headed by Hans Modrow in 1990 after which East Germany headed rapidly towards absorption in the reunified German state.
Ullmann was alarmed at the pace and nature of this absorption, articulating the view shared by many around him that this was more of a crude and unjust takeover by West Germany. Ullmann argued unsuccessfully for a new allGerman constitution to embody clearer rights for all, and more public participation through referendums, rejecting the widely-held view that the use of plebiscites in interwar Germany had been one of the greatest weaknesses of the Weimar Republic, paving the way for Hitler.
He was also fiercely critical of the way in which former East German state assets were sold off to the highest bidder through privatisation, advocating instead a system whereby citizens would be given a stake in those assets as basis for a new eastern German economy. The state, he believed, had a responsibility to resist “speculation with people’s jobs”, rather than allowing what he saw as a return to a kind of 19th-century “robber-baron” capitalism. There may have been some naivety in the framing of such ideas. But the initial collapse — and very limited recovery — of the eastern Germany economy since the early 1990s gave this critique added retrospective force.
However, Ullmann did not share the rose-tinted view of the communist past which some easterners held. He worked as minister and as campaigner to open up access to the archives of the old East German regime, as part of a proper confrontation with its crimes against human rights.
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Articulating such views with indefatigable enthusiasm in parliament, popular demonstrations and through his journalism, Ullmann maintained a fearsome intellectual pace. Friends recall his flat crowded with books on everything from church history to mathematics and music, his impatience with small talk, his hugely disciplined schedule combining so many activities with care for his blind wife, who died shortly before he did.
Ullmann and others who emerged into German politics from the church-led opposition to communism often struggled for influence in the new world of ruthless democratic competition, consumerism and global economics. Yet their voices, so important in the hazardous transition from communist rule, were still heard, reminding that 1989 had not made life miraculously better for everyone in Germany, insisting that political debate was still about moral choices as well as economic imperatives.
He married Christa Kohsa in 1956. She died in 2003. They had one son and two daughters.
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Wolfgang Ullmann, pastor and politician, was born on August 18, 1929. He died on July 30, 2004, aged 74.