Vera Lengsfeld (Sondershausen, East Germany, 4 May 1952) is a German politician, civil rights activist and representative of the German Christian Democratic Union (CDU).
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Lengsfeld was born in Sondershausen. Her father was an officer in the Stasi, the East German secret police.[1] After leaving school she studied Philosophy at Humboldt University Berlin. Following her studies, she worked as a lecturer and researcher at the National Institute of Philosophy in the Academy of Sciences of East Germany. From 1975, she was a member of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED). After a party procedure she was transferred to the Institute for Scientific Information. In 1981 she left the academy and went to work as an editor.
She became a born-again Christian in 1981, and was active in various civic organizations in East Germany (GDR). She was the co-founder of Pankow Peace Circle in the autumn of 1981, the Environment Library Berlin; Profession group and the Church from Below in 1986. Their commitment included the organization of numerous events of the peace and environmental movements in the GDR, including a "Peace laboratory", "Peace Conference", "Environment Seminar", "Human Rights Seminar," "Church from Below". She was a member of the Continuation Committee for the delegates meeting of the peace group members, who gathered under the title "Specifically for Peace" a year. She was co-organizer of the first human rights seminar held in 1986 in Berlin.
Due to public protests against the stationing of Soviet nuclear missiles in East Germany, she was expelled from the SED in 1983 and her profession. In the following years she earned her living as a beekeeper and translator. In 1985 she graduated with a Theology degree.
In January 1988 she was arrested in advance of the demonstration in honour of Liebknecht and Luxemburg in East Berlin carrying a poster declaring "Every citizen has the right to express his opinion freely and openly" and detained in Berlin Hohenschönhausen prison. She was put on trial by the city district of Lichtenberg on the grounds of "attempted riotous assembly" and although given a custodial sentence she was instead allowed the option of leaving the GDR on a temporary visa[2] effectively deporting her from the country. In February 1988 she went to Cambridge in the United Kingdom where she studied Philosophy of Religion at St. John's College. On the morning of 9 November 1989 she returned to East Germany.
After the Fall of the Berlin Wall she resumed her work as a civil rights activist and served as a member of the Constitutional Commission on the reunification of West Germany and East Germany. At this time she joined the Green Party of the GDR and at the 1990 election was elected to the member of the GDR parliament until its dissolution on 2 October 1990 as a member of the coalition between Alliance 90 and The Greens (A'90/G). Then at the first election after German reunification she was elected to the Bundestag and was re-elected in the 1994 General election. However in 1996 A'90/G decided to enter into alliances with the Party of Democratic Socialism the successors to the former SED. A civil rights activist rather than a leftist, Lengsfeld together with other civil rights activists such as Guenter Nooke and Ehrhart Neubert defected to the CDU. She was re-elected at the 1998 and 2002 elections as a CDU list candidate in her home state of Thuringia. However for the 2005 election she stood in a single member constituency instead and lost her seat. For the 2009 election she ran in the Berlin Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg - Prenzlauer Berg East constituency, the only constituency in the Bundestag to be represented by her former party Alliance '90/Greens. With CDU having finished a distant fourth at the previous election she was thought to have no chance of success[3] and in the event she finished a distant fourth, slightly increasing the CDU vote share.[4]
In August 2009 she produced election posters featuring photos emphazing her bust beside Angela Merkel's with the slogan We have more to offer. The posters were featured on Japanese television and in Brazilian and Peruvian newspapers. Some of the posters were reportedly stolen as souvenirs according to the AFP news agency.[5]
She was married to poet Knud Wollenberger, however in 1991 they divorced after Wollenberger was exposed as a Stasi spy. Wollenberger, whose Stasi code name was "Daniel," had met, dated and married Lengsfeld on orders from the Stasi. Lengsfeld later said that she felt betrayed that anyone could marry and have children under those circumstances.[1] Her son Philip is treasurer of the CDU parliamentary group of the district assembly of Berlin's Pankow district.