On July 13, 2015, Jerzy Sobotta spoke with Stefan Bollinger, member of the Historical Commission of Die LINKE (the Left Party) and former political scientist and historian at Humboldt University, Berlin. Their discussion concerned the end of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the transformation of its formerly governing party, the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, or SED) into a new political entity, Die LINKE.
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From the financial crisis and the bank bail-outs to the question of “sovereign debt”; from the Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street; from the struggle for a unified European-wide policy to the elections in Greece and Egypt that seem to have threatened so much and promised so little—the need to go beyond mere “protest” has asserted itself: political revolution is in the air, again.
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