They promised change and we got it all right, because the 1970s Red Commie fossils are back out of the museum cabinet (1)

1970s East Berlin Commie fossil Mario Vella – now heading Malta Enterprise

Malta Enterprise chairman Mario Vella, who has now declared that that there is no need for a Malta Enterprise CEO because he can do that job himself too, read economics in East Berlin in the early to mid-1970s.

He was at the Humboldt, which was called something else at the time because the Communist rulers had changed its name in 1949. Until the wall went down at the end of 1989, that university remained under the clawlike ideological control of the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (Socialist Unity Party of Germany).

This was the Communist dictatorship and despite the name, which suggests that there were other political parties and elections, it was the only party and there were no elections. East Germany was a totalitarian state. I feel slightly idiotic explaining this but have to bear in mind that what might be taken for granted as universal knowledge is often not so.

The ruling Communists selected students for the East Berlin university according to their conformity to ideals of communist totalitarianism. Background checks were carried out by the Ministry of National Security, commonly known as the ‘Stasi’.

This was to ensure, after the experience of student rebellion in the early years, that there would be no risk of the university becoming a hotbed (or even seedbed) of democratic opposition. By selecting only students who were rigorously scrutinised for their support of Communist totalitarian ideals, they ensured that there would have no riots or protests to suppress and that there would be no plots against them by students entertaining dangerous notions of freedom and human rights.

You will have gathered that this was not a situation into which random foreign students were welcomed for the joys and inspiration of cultural exchange. Mario Vella, a student from Dom Mintoff’s socialist and Gaddafi-friendly Malta, would have been specifically selected and he would have gone through an even more rigorous ‘Communist credentials’ check before being given a place in East Berlin in the mid-1970s.

To fully grasp the significance of a foreigner being OFFERED a place as a student in 1970s East Berlin you would have to know that East Germany was one of the world’s most paranoid and oppressive totalitarian states. Outsiders carried the risk of danger. To be allowed in for a long stay at the university, you would have to be an insider.

You couldn’t just wander in for a visit on a tourist visa, and if you lived there and tried to escape to the freedom of the west, you were shot at the border. People risked death to escape over the Berlin wall, and so many were shot by the guards that the space they patrolled came to be known as the death-strip.

If you wish to know some of the scale of it, I suggest you read a factual piece in Der Spiegel, to which I have uploaded a link below.

Documents which surfaced in 2007 include the order, dated 1 October, 1973, to shoot even women trying to escape with their children across the border to freedom:

“Don’t hesitate to use your weapon even when border breaches happen with women and children, which traitors have often exploited in the past.”

In other words, those who made a bid for freedom were “traitors” and if women thought they and their children wouldn’t be shot, shoot them regardless to prove the contrary.

This was the regime which selected Mario Vella, now resurrected as Malta Enterprise chief, and the regime under which he elected to receive part of his tertiary education.

And lest you dismiss this as ancient history, it most definitely is not. This was contemporary reality for my generation: it made for the daily news. The last person to be shot and killed while trying to escape from East Berlin was Chris Gueffroy, aged 20, who literally went down in a hail of bullets, 10 of which punctured his body. This was in February 1989, just 10 months before the wall went down. Had he survived, he would have been just 45 today, not 95.

Communist totalitarian control over the university which selected Mario Vella was so complete that when the East German civil rights movement began to take fire in 1989, its students and academics, who should have been at the forefront of it, instead barely participated at all, and even after the wall went down, they elected Stasi spy Heinrich Fink as rector.