A German life. An exemplary communist career. A steadfast to the last breath belief in a historical aberration. Not a hint of remorse or even self-doubt. Erich Honecker was what was called a dinosaur. Equally adamant against the Nazis, who put him in prison, as the doubters and dissenters in the ranks. And he represents even today - almost ten years after his death and more than a decade after the demise - "his" state, the GDR. Born in 1912, the East German state Saarland reigned for nearly two decades and led him here in the collapse. He locked himself after he had plunged to as "modernizers" Integrating the hated, even more than this, any reform, cemented the dictatorship and had a stage personality cult around him, reminiscent of Stalinist times. With him is associated with the construction of the wall and the firing order on the German-German border as well as trying to reclaim the Prussian-German history to be selective for the GDR and the upgrade sent internationally. Apparatchik had visions of a few, most likely the one that the wall would stand still in a hundred years. Under his aegis, the Stasi was an all-embracing octopus that even spied on himself. His legacy is still felt - in the continuing effects of mismanagement of the former GDR as well as in its self-pity Transfiguration as "connection victim."
This documentation is to the life of the party soldiers Honecker, scion of a family Neunkirchen Bergmann, who began as a decade of his political career, be traced on the basis of moving image documents and interviews with witnesses. Family members, friends and former enemies such as Heinz Kessler, Günter Schabowski, Wolf Biermann and Others give in this document to provide information on a principled opportunist who ruthlessly cleared friends and enemies aside, if they were his rise through. Even the affair of a married FDJ leaders with the attractive Margot Feist was in the GDR uprising of his carefully planned career and secured party does not harm the long term. Honecker completed to the "dirty work" for Ulbricht, blackened doubters knew the camera like no one rid themselves of all successful adversary until he Ulbricht in 1971 with the help of the Soviets deported to retire. But in 1989 he verlächelte - his biggest mistake, but also because he saw no other chance for themselves - the reforms of Gorbachev as a temporary aberration and broke out only by the peaceful revolution in the streets of East Germany, which made him a symbol of the failure of real socialism the chair throwing. His sad end in the Chilean exile in 1994 was an incorrigible, who had lost touch with reality much sooner.
