Gregor Gysi

Origins and early life

Gregor Gysi was born in East Berlin on 16 January 1948, the son of Klaus Gysi, who became the German Democratic Republic's minister of culture and its ambassador to Italy, and of Irene Lessing; his paternal grandmother, Erna Potolowsky, a bookkeeper from Weilburg, was Jewish, and relatives of hers were murdered at Auschwitz — the one grandparent on which this fiche rests, in a family that was communist rather than religious, and which raised him in neither faith.

Work and career

He trained as a lawyer and was, in the 1970s and 1980s, one of the very few East German attorneys willing to defend the state's dissidents — Rudolf Bahro, Robert Havemann, the activists of the peace movement — a role that later drew accusations, examined by Bundestag committees and never proved to his conviction, of having informed for the Stasi, which he has always denied. In December 1989, weeks after the fall of the Wall, the collapsing Socialist Unity Party elected him its last chairman; he turned it into the Party of Democratic Socialism, led it into the first all-German elections, and for three decades was the most eloquent voice of the eastern left in the Bundestag, where he has sat almost continuously since 1990 and led the parliamentary group of Die Linke from 2005 to 2015.

He also presided over the Party of the European Left from 2016 to 2019. This fiche is factual and dated: a politician still active in the Bundestag, where in 2025 he opened the new parliament as its oldest member.