Lernresistenz und Kommunikationsverweigerung: Die Politbüros von SED und Kommunistischer Partei der Tschechoslowakei als retardierende Elemente im „1989er-Prozess“
Unwillingness to learn and refusal to communicate: the Politburos of the GDR and Czechoslovakian Communist Parties as restraining factors in the “1989 process”

Summary/Abstract: There is no dispute that in the events of 1989 many of the impulses came from the media, from the developing civil society and from the grass roots in general. There were, however, areas and institutions in late socialist society which were largely sealed off from the influence of the developing critical popular movement. They were resistant to change and largely incapable of learning from experience. The most prominent examples of “burying their heads in the sand” were the top party leaderships in Czechoslovakia and in the GDR (Hungary and Poland in some respects presented a different picture). It was not only “biological” reasons, that is to say the increasing paralysis of an ageing top leadership, but also the social composition of the ranks of the party, with its internalised tramline patterns of thinking, its clearly identified enemies, and its permanent requirement to toe the party line, which resulted in the fact that in 1989 there was a total absence among the leadership of any will, readiness, experience, qualification or imagination, which went beyond the confines of bureaucratic socialism. This structural sclerosis points to inherent barriers to learning existing within Soviet-type systems; this was responsible for the fact that, in the wake of the revolution, the top leadership of the Party was unable to transform itself, but simply and finally left the political stage unmourned and almost unremarked.

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