I know you are, you said you are, but what am I?

Mr. Lafontaine, is Germany embroiled in a class struggle?

With a first question like that, an interview is going to be either combative ('you silly old leftist with your outdated class ideas') or flattering (a doozy Green Left Weekly question, setting the tone for mutual reinforcement of mutually-held opinions).

As it happens, this Der Spiegel interview with Oskar Lafontaine (chairman of Die Linke), is more combative than deferential. There's a strong note of disbelief from the interviewers -- a sense that Die Linke is wasting its time, that they have little support, that their slogans are too strong, their election platform "sounding like Marx and Engels." Still, it makes for entertaining reading.

I was, of course, interested in the following volley of Q&A:

SPIEGEL ONLINE: German Chancellor Angela Merkel wants to continue to measure the Left Party by its attitude toward East Germany's past.

Lafontaine: An interesting psychological case. People tend to accuse other people of their own mistakes. Ms. Merkel needs to deal with her own past in East Germany and that of her own party. She was an FDJ functionary for agitation and propaganda (ed's note: The FDJ was an official youth movement in communist East Germany). As such she belonged to the fighting reserve of the party (ed's note: the Communist Socialist Unity Party (SED)).

SPIEGEL ONLINE: What's at issue here is how one sees East Germany, 20 years after the fall of the Wall. One has the impression that this issue has not been definitively resolved within your party.

Lafontaine: The PDS has, as one of the Left Party's predecessor parties, dealt with the question of its relationship to East Germany at many party conferences and in the papers (ed's note: For an explanation of the PDS and the parties that united to form the Left Party, please click here ). Only the CDU has not done so. It swallowed the assets of two of the SED's satellite parties, and otherwise covers up its past with a cloak of silence.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Was East Germany a dictatorship in which the rule of law did not apply?

Lafontaine: The GDR was not a state based on the rule of law -- that is a much more precise answer.