Resumen de Entretien avec Wolfgang Thierse, ancien président du Bundestag

Sébastien Vannier, Boris Grésillon

• Wolfgang Thierse, who comes from ex-RDA, is one of the main political stakeholders of the 1990s and 2000s. He joined the SPD in Jnauary 1990 to soon become its vice-president, holding this position for 15 years. Elected at the Bundestag as soon as 1990, reelected multiple times, he took part in the debates over the reunification and in the legislative decisions aiming at tying up the Eastern Landers to West Germany. He reached the top of his political career when he became the Bundestag’s president in 1998. He will remain so until the fall of Gerard Schröder’s government in 2005.

  Wolfgant Thierse is one of the main witnesses of the Wall’s fall, its beginnings, 1989-aftermath and the three following decades. East-German having done his entire political career after the fall and inside a mostly Western political party (the SPD), his analysis of the transformations of Germany and Berlin is more complex, less binary, and maybe even clearer than most of his contempory fellows, whether they come form Est or West Germany.