Bertram Wieczorek (born 16 January 1951) is a German physician and former politician (CDU).
He served as parliamentary undersecretary in the East German Ministry for Defence and Arms Procurement between March and October 1990. After navigating the political upheavals of 1990 he served between 1991 and 1994 as parliamentary undersecretary in the German Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Building and Nuclear Safety. His subsequent career in charge of the Berlin Water Company between 1994 and 1999 was not without controversy.
Life
Bertram Wieczorek was born into a Catholic family East Berlin. His father was a physician: his mother an opera singer. He passed his school final exams (Abitur) and qualified for work as a chef in 1969 before he moved on to undertake his military service with medical corps of the National People's Army ("Nationale Volksarmee" / NVA) between 1969 and 1972. After that, in 1972, he enrolled as a medical student.
In 1973 he joined a political party. Ambitious young East Germans generally joined the ruling Socialist Unity Party ("Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands" / SED), but Bertram Wieczorek joined the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). The East German CDU by this point had little in common with its West German counterpart. The CDU in the east was one of ten bloc parties and mass movements controlled by the SED through a structure known as the National Front. Apart from the SED no political party ever scored significantly in any general election between 1949 and 1989, but they nevertheless received seats in the national legislature (Volkskammer), according to a predetermined fixed quota. Under the highly centralised Leninist political structure that the country had copied from the Soviet Union, this was seen by the authorities as a way to make the system more broadly based. Within the CDU, between 1973 and September 1989, sources identify Wieczorek as a "local party official" ("CDU-Ortsfunktionär").
Wieczorek emerged with his degree in medicine in 1978. He completed his professional practical training and then worked as a physician in a succession of medical practices, specialising in various "in-patient" procedures. In 1987 he was appointed Medical Director at the Regional Rehabilitation Centre in Auerbach, a small industrial in the far south of the country between Zwickau and the border with Czechoslovakia.
In September 1989 he resigned from the CDU and became a founder, in Auerbach, of a local branch of New Forum. New Forum was a political party like no other. It emerged from various underground opposition groups. It was declared illegal by the authorities on 21 September 1989, but with the winds of Glasnost blowing across from – of all places – Moscow, the East German government was undergoing a crisis of confidence. In shared export markets the Soviet Union and East Germany were increasingly coming across one another as commercial rivals, while on a personal level there were rumours that the personal chemistry between comrades Gorbachev and Honecker was terrible: it was no longer possible to rely on comradely Warsaw pact tanks to intervene in order to put down street protests as they had in 1953 or (in Prague), in 1968. New Forum was not crushed: after the Berlin Wall was breached by street protesters in November 1989 as Soviet forces looked on but did nothing to intervene, a momentum towards a more democratic future for East Germany gained traction. Bertram Wieczorek himself resigned from New Forum at the end of the year and in January 1990 returned to the CDU. However, during 1990 the CDU in East Germany systematically transformed its relationship to the old East German political establishment, even though western commentators (and others) sometimes struggled to keep up with the significance of what was going on.