The Honecker Era

Abstract

Ulbricht was born a Saxon and Honecker a Saarlander. The first SED First Secretary was at home in the East but the first SED Secretary-General was an outsider whose contact with the East before 1945 was practically non-existent. His formative years were spent in the Saar, an area which was the object of Franco-German rivalry after 1918 and which was only incorporated into the Reich in 1935. It was again severed from Germany in 1945. Honecker, sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment in 1937, absconded from a Berlin prison in March 1945. He laid low until he made contact with the Ulbricht Group in early May. Not surprisingly the ambitious thirty-two-year-old, a roofer and member of the KPD since 1929, decided to stay in Berlin and not to return to the Saar. Visits home confirmed his conviction that a successful political career could only be built up in the Soviet zone of Germany; the French were in no mood to countenance autonomous political activity among the German population. On his last visit in 1948 a French official tore up his papers on entry, thus underlining the fact that Honecker had no future in the Saar as long as the French were there.