Christa Luft
Christa Luft is a German economist and politician of the SED/PDS.
Luft joined the SED in 1958. From 18 November 1989 to 18 March 1990, she was the Minister of Economics in the Modrow government. From 1994 to 2002 she was member of the Bundestag for the PDS.
From 1963 to 1971 Luft was registered as a Stasi informant under the code name IM Gisela.
Life
Provenance and early years
Christa Hecht was born into a working-class family at Krakow am See, a small market town in the flat countryside to the south of Rostock in northern central Germany. Her father worked as a master machinist. at the VEB Mathias-Thesen-Werft Wismar ship building business in Wismar. Her mother was in charge of a schools kitchen. Her father was away for years at a time during the war, but after 1944 he came safely home, and while she was still small the family moved to Wismar in connection with her father's work. She attended junior school in Bobitz between 1945 and 1952, and then upper school at Grevesmühlen, still in the Rostock area. Like most of her contemporaries, she joined the Free German Youth in 1952, remaining a member till 1964.Shortly before the end of her penultimate year at secondary school she was one of four students – two boys and two girls – picked out by the school director to complete her schooling at the prestigious Workers' and Peasants' Faculty attached to Halle University in the central part of what had become, in October 1949, the German Democratic Republic. Her selection held out the possibility of the chance to travel abroad in the future – which in the context of the time and place meant the Soviet Union or the other fraternal socialist member states of the recently launched Warsaw Pact. It was to facilitate the possibility of international exchange that at Halle much of the teaching took place not in German but in Russian. She was also required to attend an interview before arrangements could be finalised, which from a western perspective seems to have been intended to verify her "political reliability". She was able to confirm that she had no close relatives beyond the increasingly impenetrable "inner frontier" in "the other Germany", and knew to keep her indignation to herself when asked almost casually how she felt about the church. Inwardly she thought the matter was none of the business of her interviewers, but the reply she gave, as she would recall it many years later, was restricted to the observation that she enjoyed listening to organ concerts. Before agreeing to the move she had obtained her parents' advice on it, and during her time at Halle she used to return home on the train to the north of the country regularly. She would later tell an interviewer that early on she nurtured ambitions of working in Veterinary medicine, but during her time at Halle it became clear that this was not an option: her ambition and enthusiasm switched to Economics, albeit always with a special focus on foreign trade. Passing her Abitur as a student at the Workers' and Peasants' Faculty in 1956 opened the way to university level education, and she enrolled as a student at the College of Foreign Trade in Berlin-Slaken, then moving on to the Berlin Economics College at Berlin-Karlshorst where her teachers included Helmut Koziolek, and from where she emerged in 1960 with a degree in Economics.
Staying on at the Berlin Economics College (''"Hochschule für Ökonomie Berlin"'' / HfÖ)
Following her graduation she stayed on at the HfÖ as a research assistant, working for her doctorate which she received in 1964. Her doctoral dissertation concerned "The key influences of socialist international division of labour and foreign trade on the beneficial impact for societal labour ". Her supervisors were Gertrud Gräbig and Manfred Funke. Between 1964 and 1968 she stayed at the HfÖ as an academic employee, with co-responsibility for creating a new academic discipline, that of "socialist foreign trade", under the direction of Erich Freund, the founding director back in 1954 of the "Foreign Trade Academy" and co-chairman of the Committee for inter-German trade. She travelled to the west with this working group in 1966 for a study visit to the Krupp heavy-industry conglomerate in Essen: they also visited Bremen for a meeting with Carl Katz, the co-chairman of the Committee for inter-German trade. In 1968 Luft received her habilitation, a higher academic qualification which would have opened the way to a full-time academic career, though her own career trajectory would include a parallel political channel. Her dissertation again addressed the interface between political socialism and foreign trade. Her habilitation was supervised by Gertrud Gräbig and Horst Tiedtke. Remaining at the HfÖ, in 1968 Luft received a full-time teaching contract in the newly developed academic discipline, "socialist foreign trade".Between 1967 and 1970 she worked as assistant dean for distance learning at the Foreign Trade faculty. In 1971 she accepted a full professorship in Socialist Foreign Economics the HfÖ. Between 1973 and 1977 she served as director of the Socialist Foreign Economics section. She was also a regular visitor to "the Academy for Foreign Trade and Tourism " at Maribor, a city in the northern part of what was at that time known as Yugoslavia. She held a guest professorship at the academy in Maribor which was a partner institution of the HfÖ. Between 1978 and 1981 she was a deputy director of the "International Institute for the Economic Problems of the Socialist World System" attached to the Moscow-controlled Council for Mutual Economic Assistance. She was able to build on her contacts with comrade-academics from other socialist countries, representing The Institute at international gatherings and at conferences organised by the United Nations in Geneva and New York City. After returning the German Democratic Republic, between 1982 and 1987, she again served as dean in the Foreign Economics section at the HfÖ. With the Soviet Union investing heavily in modernising its own engineering and heavy industry sectors, the traditionally complementary economic relationship between the Soviet Union and East Germany was becoming more overtly competitive, and economic pressures were forcing the East German government to try and diversify its trading relationships. As a representative of the largest Economics teaching and research institution in the German Democratic Republic, Luft participated during this time in a succession of international congresses at which she made presentations: venues included Athens, Madrid and New Delhi. From 1985 Christa Luft was involved in setting up regular one and two term study visits for HfÖ students of Foreign Economics at the Vienna University of Economics and Business. She also initiated a collaboration programme with East European specialists at the Sorbonne in Paris. Out of this there emerged a series of bilateral colloquia in Paris, Lyon and Berlin. In 1987 Christa Luft was appointed a corresponding member of the German Academy of Sciences.
By 1988 the HfÖ in Berlin-Karlshorst had been renamed as the Hochschule für Ökonomie Bruno Leuschner. On 28 October of that year Christa Luft was appointed rector of the institution which had by this time been the focus of her professional and academic life for three decades. The accelerating pace of social and political changes over the next year would mean that she stayed in post for slightly more than one year.
National politics
In 1989 Christa Luft entered politics at a time of national transition. Between 18 November 1989 and 18 March 1990 she served as first of the three vice-chair of the East German Ministerial Council and as Minister of Economics in the Modrow government. During this time she participated alongside Hans Modrow, in January 1990, in the final Comecon meeting. The meeting was held in Sofia and made the important decision to migrate member states towards a system of trade based on freely convertible currencies, and thereby implicitly put an end to the system of fixed exchange rates within the Eastern bloc. Less than a month later she was in Bonn taking part on the first and last joint cabinet meeting between the East and West German governments, again discussing currency exchange rates, this time between East and West Germany. The first free and fair general election ever held in East Germany took place on 18 March 1990. One result of the new approach was that the Socialist Unity Party, struggling to reinvent itself for a democratic future as the Party of Democratic Socialism, received only 66 of the 400 seats in the national parliament and its proxies had not commanded a comfortable majority in the chamber. Christa Luft was one of the 66 SED/PDS members, elected for the Karl-Marx-Stadt electoral district. She served as chair of the Budget Committee of the Bundestag. Nevertheless, with her party excluded from the governing coalition under Prime Minister Lothar de Maizière, she no longer held ministerial office. The Economics Ministry now went to Gerhard Pohl of the centre-right CDU party.During her time as a national politician Christa Luft retained her links with the HfÖ, in charge of the "East European Economics" teaching chair till 1 October 1991, which was when the Berlin senate, a couple of days ahead of reunification, closed down the entire institution.
After reunification
Between 1 October 1991 and 31 October 1994 Luft was a member of the governing executive and a lecturer at the "Berlin Institute for International Education" of which she was a co-founder. The focus was to educate a generation Russian speaking economics experts from Russia and the surrounding post-Soviet successor states, especially from Bulgaria and also from China. During this time she accepted a number of invitations to appear as a guest lecturer on the East German experience of political and economic transformation. Within Europe she delivered such presentations at St. Gallen, Mülheim an der Ruhr and the Free University of Berlin. Farther afield she also shared her insights in China and in Vietnam.As part of the unification process 144 members of the East German Volkskammer, including 24 of the PDS members, transferred to the enlarged Bundestag of a reunited Germany. Christa Luft was not one of them. However, she stood for election in the 1994, when the PDS experienced a modest recovery, increasing the number of its seats from 17 to 30. Luft's candidacy, which was as a "directly elected" member for the Berlin-Friedrichshain-Lichtenberg electoral district, was successful, with 44.4% of the first preference votes: between 1994 and 2002 she served as a PDS member of the Bundestag. Between 1998 and 2002 she served as chair of the PDS group in the chamber and as the party's parliamentary spokesperson on Economics and budgetary matters.