Free German Youth
December 28, 2006
The meeting takes place in a dark and slightly musty antique shop in the East Berlin neighborhood of Pankow. Their uniforms and hymns about German-Russian friendship are a throwback to another time. A time that no longer exists.
The Central Council of the Free German Youth (FDJ) organization no longer have the prestigious address they possess during communist times. The group continues to exist, but in the background.
Ringo, 28, and Johannes, 22, do not try to hide their dislike of journalists. They've had negative experiences with the media in the past, as the FDJ is routinely derided in the press.
"East Germany is better"
The majority of today's FDJ members are in their early to middle 20s. They lived in the communist German Democratic Republic (DDR) only as young children or grade schoolers.
Ringo has been a member of the group for four years and can't exactly say why he chose the FDJ. But its antifascism and nostalgia for the DDR certainly drew him to the youth organization.
Ringo comes from the north eastern state of Mecklenberg-Western Pommerania and picked up on a little bit of antifascism from his parents. While they found fault with plenty of things about the DDR, they always felt it was the better Germany for them.
"I noticed this and at some point I wanted to organize against Nazis and I looked what there was," he said.
The popularity of far-right radicalism in East Germany which often leads to resignation and fear, could help boost the FDJ's, Ringo says. Today, he said, the organization focuses on three themes: "First is antimilitarism, then is definitely the fight against fascism and naturally also the clarification for youth about what happened in '89."
Reunification declared laughable
Add to these noble goals others expressed on the group's Web site including actions against the armed forces, the German government and imperialism. The declarations are often hard to pin down. For example, when Johannes says that since 1995 the FDJ has become an anti-fascist-democratic party. For him "antifascist democracy is a requirement, something like a battle goal."
Their conception of the world is still very much shaped by the past. They find the idea of reunification to be laughable. In their view, the DDR was simply annexed to West Germany in 1989. And they talk about East and West as if they remain separated.
When asked what his group hopes to achieve in a country that has been united and yet still in some respects remains divided, Ringo talks about democracy.
"The FDJ's task is to rescue that small bit of democracy still exists in this country," Ringo said.
Reinventing the FDJ
In 1989 the FDJ had over 2 million members. Today only a few dozen remain. The Hamburg political scientist Dorothee Wierling has spent years studying DDR history. For her, the FDJ is an astounding phenomenon. At the end of the DDR the FDJ was a mass organization which had been extensively politicized and offered no meaningful choice for young people.
"But in the moment that the DDR collapsed, a youth organization like the FDJ can naturally reinvent itself," Wierling said.