Irene Ellenberger

Provenance and early years

Ellenberger was born at Wernigerode in the aftermath of the Second World War which had ended a year earlier, with Wernigerode on the western edge of the Soviet occupation zone. Her father was a civil engineer by profession. She grew up in the nearby village of Blankenberg.

She successfully completed her school leaving exam in 1964. By this time the Soviet occupation zone had been relaunched, formally in October 1949, as the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), a Soviet sponsored separate German state with economic and political institutions consciously modeled on those created in the Soviet Union during the 1920s and 1930s. On leaving school she undertook an apprenticeship as a building worker. This was less unusual in East Germany than in some parts of Europe, since the slaughter of war in the 1940s and massive migration to the west during the 1950s had left the country with acute labour shortages in several key sectors. Nevertheless, asked about it in an interview many years later, Ellenberger confirmed that women in the construction industry were "frowned upon", but having completed her schooling at the relatively young age of 17, her options had been limited. Her father's connections in the construction sector had provided her with a training opportunity which in the event went well, and provided a good practical preparation for her subsequent career. She also confirmed that she had been aware, when embarking on an apprenticeship as a building worker, that this did not necessarily mean she would do this work throughout her career. In 1965 she moved on to the Technical Academy for Architecture and Construction at Weimar, emerging in 1971 with an engineering degree (Dipl.-Ing) which constituted the basis for her subsequent architectural career in construction.

Between 1974 and 1990 Irene Ellenberger was employed as a Project engineer.

Politics

1989 was a year of increasingly public political and social tension in East Germany. Back in 1953 the government had responded to street protests with violent suppression, reinforced by Soviet troops: Communist governments across central Europe had been backed by the implicit threat of Soviet tanks on the city streets ever since. But by the 1980s East Germany and the Soviet Union were increasingly finding themselves operating as rivals in the industrial and economic spheres, while the political solidarity between East Berlin and Moscow was being undermined by the emerging Glasnost revolution in Moscow, which the party leadership in East Berlin neither understood nor trusted. The East German ruling party's loss of confidence in its power to dictate the future was mirrored elsewhere. In East Germany the moderately left-wing Social Democratic Party had been brilliantly if brutally suppressed during the later 1940s through a contentious merger into a renamed communist party and the subsequent elimination from positions of influence in the new party of all the former Social Democrats. But with the seeping away of self-confidence in the dominant political party, a new Social Democratic Party surfaced in East Germany during 1989. Ellenberger joined the New Forum movement during 1989, but then, as she later recalled, nothing happened. By this time she was finding her architectural work, which under the East German system she has described as a somewhat industrial process, monotonous. Towards the end of 1989, hesitantly, turned to party politics, joining the Social Democratic local branch in Weimar. Her choice of the SDP reflected both the long-standing political tradition of her family, dating back to the years before dictatorship, and her huge admiration for Willy Brandt, whose Ostpolitik policies had opened the way to a slightly less mutually antagonistic relationship between the two German states during the 1970s. She later said that her move into politics reflected an urge to take care of the people of Weimar, her home town.

Election to the national parliament

The Berlin Wall was penetrated from the east in November 1989, and thousands of bemused street protesters streamed through into the west. Most of them went back home a few hours later, but as it became clear during the days that followed that Soviet troops had no orders to intervene, the realisation dawned that the future for East Germany would be different. A fresh General Election was called for March 1990. For the first time since the foundation of the state in October 1949, voters would be offered more than one list of candidates. The SDP (which by now had renamed itself SPD) in Thuringia invited Ellenberger to place her name on the party's list for the national election in order to help ensure the party met a quota requirement for female candidates that had been decreed by the national party executive ("Vorstand"). Initially reluctant to stand for parliament simply to fulfill a gender quota, Ellenberger was persuaded by family members to allow her name to appear on the provisional party's candidate list for the Erfurt electoral district. At the start of the meeting convened to discuss the district's candidates for the forthcoming national election her name was listed in the thirteenth position, but towards the end of the discussions votes were taken, and Ellenberger ended up in second place on the Erfurt district SPD candidate list. On 18 March 1990 Irene Ellenberger was elected a member East Germany's first freely elected National Parliament (Volkskammer).

Thuringia politics

Following German reunification, in October 1990, Ellenberger was not one of the approximately 40 SPD members of the last East German Volkskammer who transferred to the enlarged Bundestag of the reunited country. Reunification also saw the reinstatement in the "New federal states" (former East Germany) of a regional tier of government that had been abolished in 1952. October 1990 also saw elections to the re-instated Landtag of Thuringia. Irene Ellenberger was one of 21 SPD members elected to the regional legislature, retaining her seat at the next election in 1994. Since 1990 the centre-right CDU (party) has always held more seats than any other party in the Thuringian Landtag, but following the 1994 election they no longer commanded an overall majority of the seats, and a "grand coalition" with the centre-left SPD was accordingly formed. Ellenberger achieved and retained ministerial office as the regional Minster for Health and Social Affairs during the parliament's lifetime, between 1994 and 1999, apparently relishing the challenges presented by the administrative complexities of the department. Overall policy for most of the issues arising was in many respects set at the national level, leaving efficient implementation as the responsibility of regional ministers. A major challenge in Thuringia was the consolidation of the region's medical, veterinary and food research offices, which incorporated consumer protection responsibilities, from three locations down to one, under a plan that envisaged significant staffing cuts, with the accompanying challenge of ensuring that funding cuts were not so large as to damage the effectiveness of the services provided. As a member of the minority party in the coalition she also had to argue her position persuasively in respect of decisions over politically sensitive questions such as hospital planning. She was proud of the labour market programme implemented on her watch which she felt benefited the employment prospects of college leavers and older workers. At the 1999 election the CDU regained their overall majority in the Landtag which put an end, for the time being, to coalition government in Thuringia. However, senior members of the parties that had come second and third were appointed as "Landtag vice-presidents": Irene Ellenberger held this appointment on behalf of the SPD between 1999 and 2004.

Ellenberger did not stand for re-election in 2004. Asked about this later, she explained that after fifteen years as a member of the Landtag she had become exhausted. The decision not to stand for a fourth parliamentary term was also influenced by the fact that several senior SPD parliamentary colleagues, notably Gerd Schuchardt and Frieder Lippmann, whose professional collaboration she had valued, had also decided to retire from the Assembly in 2004.