Honecker widow refused pensions

The German welfare state has turned its back on the pleas of a poor widow. Margot Honecker, a cobbler's daughter, erstwhile culture minister and the woman behind the man who built the Berlin Wall, yesterday lost a five-year court battle to regain her pensions.

Now aged 69 and living with her daughter in Chile, Mrs Honecker had been suing the German state for her monthly entitlement of 900 Marks (pounds 390) and an additional widow's pension of DM1,700. As an "anti-fascist combatant", her husband had received the latter after his involuntary retirement in 1989. However, in April 1991 payments were suspended, because the Honeckers had meanwhile fled from reunited Germany to a vanishing country called the Soviet Union.

That was only the beginning of the former first couple's tribulations. A year later a court in Berlin decided to restore the pensions, about the same time as Honecker returned to Germany to face trial for the murder of a policeman in the 1930s. The trial was eventually suspended because of his faltering health, and the couple were allowed to emigrate to Chile.

In May 1994 the former East German president died of cancer, and Mrs Honecker again applied to German social security, to no avail. The case reached the highest court on such matters yesterday and wasdismissed.

It was a judgment Honecker and his Politburo chums ought to have applauded. The East German constitution banned the "export" of pensions and as Mrs Honecker was claiming on the basis of East German law, the West German judges had no option but to turn her down. Socialist justice prevails.

During her government career, Mrs Honecker enthusiastically enforced ideological purity, consigning cultural figures who sailed too close to Westerly winds to penury. Now that the winds have changed, she gets the opportunity to indulge in a proletarian lifestyle.