Gregor Gysi

His mother, Irene Olga Lydia Gysi (née Lessing; 1912–2007), was the sister of political activist Gottfried Lessing, who was married to British writer and Nobel laureate Doris Lessing during his exile in Southern Rhodesia.

The surname "Gysi" is of Swiss-German origin.

He is of partial Jewish ancestry; his paternal grandmother was Jewish, as was one of his maternal great-grandfathers.

One of his maternal great-grandmothers was Russian.

Gregor Florian Gysi (born 16 January 1948) is a German attorney, former president of the Party of the European Left and a prominent politician of The Left (Die Linke) political party.

He belonged to the reformist wing of the governing Socialist Unity Party of Germany at the time of the pro-democracy transition inspired by then Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

He has strongly denied allegations that he used to assist the Stasi, the East German secret police.

He was the last leader of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany and led the effort that transformed it into the post-Communist Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), forerunner of The Left.

Gysi was born in Berlin-Lichtenberg in East Berlin, Soviet Zone of Germany.

In his first speech, Gysi admitted that the SED had brought the country to ruin, repudiating everything it had done since 1949.

He declared that the party needed to adopt a new form of socialism.

To that end, he immediately set about transforming the SED into a democratic socialist party.

Before the year was out, the last hardliners in the SED leadership had either resigned or been pushed out.

On 16 December, the SED was renamed the Socialist Unity Party – Party of Democratic Socialism (SED-PDS), it later became simply the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS).

His father was Klaus Gysi, a high-ranking official in East Germany who served as the Minister of Culture from 1966 to 1973.

Gysi's political career began in the then-ruling Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) of East Germany, to which he was admitted in 1967.

In 1971 he became a licensed attorney, and during the 1970s and 1980s defended several prominent dissidents, including Rudolf Bahro, Robert Havemann, Ulrike Poppe, and Bärbel Bohley.

In addition to his legal work, Gysi emerged as one of East Germany's leading Gorbachev-inspired political reformists within the SED, especially towards the end of the 1980s.

His sister, Gabriele, is an actress who left East Germany in 1985.

Today, she is chief dramaturge at the Volksbühne in Berlin.

In 1989, he and a group of lawyers presented a counter-draft to the government's Travel Bill, which authorised mass public demonstrations.

This led to a mass rally on East-Berlin's Alexanderplatz on 4 November in which he spoke and called for reforms, including free elections.

In December 1989, he became a member of a special SED party session investigating official corruption and abuse of power.

In December 1989, Egon Krenz, the last Communist leader of East Germany, resigned all of his posts.

Gysi was elected as the party's chairman.

He did not, however, become the leader of East Germany; the SED had abandoned its monopoly of power on 1 December.

Gysi remained as party chairman, and in March 1990 was elected to the Volkskammer in the first free election of that body, serving there until it was dissolved upon German reunification on 3 October 1990.

In 1992, it was alleged Gysi was an informer (Inoffizieller Mitarbeiter, IM) of East Germany's Ministry for State Security (the Stasi).

He denied these allegations, and the matter was largely dropped due to his parliamentary immunity.

In 1995, the Hamburg state court ruled in Gysi's favour in a complaint against Bärbel Bohley, Gysi's former client, who had accused him of Stasi collaboration.

However, the allegations were raised again in 1996, and this time the Bundestag voted to revoke his immunity and proceed with an investigation.

He remained chairman of the PDS through 1998, and then from 1998 to 2000 served as chairman of the party's parliamentary group.

In 1998, the Bundestag's immunity committee concluded that Gysi had been a collaborator with the Stasi from 1978 to 1989 under the name IM Notar, and fined him 8,000 Deutsche Mark.

However, both the Free Democratic Party and his own PDS disputed the verdict, and Gysi appealed against the finding.

Despite the affair, he retained his seat in the Bundestag in the 1998 elections.

In the first post-reunification all-German elections, he was elected to the Bundestag from Berlin's Hellersdorf–Marzahn constituency, and served there until 2000.

In an interview conducted in 2011, Gysi recalled that in late 1989 he had become the attorney for several of the people who were arrested in the first early public protests.

As such he became known to leading figures in the Artistic and Cultural unions and was contacted by a group of actresses about the legality of a large demonstration.

He recalls having examined the laws and advising them that they could apply for such a permit from the police and the worst outcome would be that their request could be denied, but they would not be breaking any law or doing anything illegal.

He further recalls assisting the group in requesting and completing the appropriate forms and paperwork required for such a permit.