As millions of Ukrainians flee their homeland, finding shelter in spare rooms across Europe, German television has dramatised the true tale of two unlikely lodgers.
In January 1989, East German leader Erich Honecker predicted that the Berlin Wall, which he had planned and built in 1961, would “stand for another 100 years”. Just one year later, the wall was no more and Honecker faced ruin.
Already toppled from power, he was discharged from hospital after an emergency kidney operation to find himself homeless.
He and his wife, Margot, for 26 years East Germany’s feared education minister, had been evicted from their home in a gated community north of Berlin. With their bank accounts frozen and legal action looming, they sought asylum with the local Lutheran church.
Pastor Uwe Holmer in Lobetal, 30km north of Berlin, was asked if he would take in the former first couple. He was an unlikely choice as host: East Germany’s anti-religious stance, combined with Margot Honecker’s education policy, ensured that none of the pastor’s 10 children were allowed go to university.
Sharing their home with the Honeckers, the Holmers were living history as a kitchen sink drama with a realpolitik kick
Despite the misgivings of his wife, Sigrid, Holmer told his second-youngest son to clear his bedroom for the new arrivals. They showed up on January 30th, 1990 with a three-piece suite and little else. Today Holmer (93) still believes he did the right thing.
“On Sundays we pray to ‘forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who have sinned against us’,” he said. “Did we really want to pray that and not live it?”
Angry neighbours
Not all of his Brandenburg neighbours agreed. The film dramatises the growing protests of East Germans outside, chanting “No mercy for the Honeckers” alongside a growing army of journalists, all anxious to interview the disgraced couple.
With a nervous energy, the film uses the odd-couple setup to explore the unresolved tensions of early 1990. In those months the future of East Germany and its leadership still hung in the balance. Sharing their home with the Honeckers, the Holmers were living history as a kitchen sink drama with a realpolitik kick.
“Gorbachev? That’s no friend of ours,” fumes the film’s Margot Honecker about Russia’s then leader as she washes dishes alongside her wide-eyed hostess. “He is a western agent who triggered the counter-revolution.”
The former first lady remains unrepentant, even when challenged on East Germany’s shoot-to-kill policy on its borders: “The GDR was like a family, whoever lived by the rules lived well.”
On walks around a local lake, Holmer tries and fails to elicit critical self-reflection from the ailing Erich, who defends the Stasi secret police with an old Lenin maxim: “Trust is good; control is better.”
Taboo figure
Actor Edgar Selge was attracted to the role of Erich Honecker because he remains a taboo figure in modern Germany, whose final act is a modern-day Shakespearian tragedy.
“Here you have the fall, from a height and from one day to the next, of a powerful person courted by the whole world,” said Selge, “while in the population a brutal need for revenge.”
The co-habitation only lasted 10 weeks. The protest grew too great, Erich Honecker’s health continued to deteriorate and, after moving with Margot to Chile, he died in exile there in 1994. Today Uwe Holmer remembers his former lodgers as “two helpless people”.
“Honecker was a sick man and Martin Luther once said, ‘When my enemy is ill, he is no longer my enemy,’” said the retired pastor. Though he never won over his guests to Christianity, every year until Margot’s death in 2016, he received a Christmas card from Chile, signed “yours, thankfully, Margot Honecker”.
