Evelyn Zupke, the Federal Commissioner for Victims of the SED Dictatorship, has sharply criticized the singing of the GDR national anthem at an AfD event. Speaking to the “Rheinische Post” (Friday edition), Zupke consistently advocates against any trivialization of the GDR. She stated that the singing of the anthem falls under this category.
In her view, the anthem holds immense symbolic power for a state that was a dictatorship-an unlawful regime that monitored, bullied, and imprisoned its citizens. She described it as a government where fundamental human rights were violated on a daily basis.
“For the people who became victims of that system, such historical forgetting is intolerable, not satire,” Zupke remarked.
