BERLIN – Nearly two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, East Germany’s unrepentant last Communist leader, Egon Krenz, said yesterday that the financial crisis showed that capitalism would not prevail in the long run.
Mr Krenz said time had shown capitalism was not all it was cracked up to be, and many East Germans missed aspects of life in the failed Communist state.
“The defeat of East Germany was my own personal defeat,” the grey-haired 72-year-old, who succeeded his ailing mentor Erich Honecker as East German leader for just a few weeks in the autumn of 1989, told reporters in Berlin.
“But I am optimistic that today’s society, this capitalism that we have come to know better through the financial crisis and others, is not the final stage of historical development.”
Mr Krenz, the only top East German leader to serve several years in jail, said life in East Germany was not all that bad, and had achieved jobs for everyone and education for everyone from school to university. “Freedom without a job is not freedom.”
About 10 per cent of easterners want the Berlin Wall back, according to a survey. – (Reuters)