Markus Meckel was born in Müncheberg (Strausberg district) on 18 August 1953, the second of what would be five children. His father, a former Wehrmacht officer, had not returned from captivity as a POW in Russia until 1949. Ernst Eugen Meckel had studied theology in Wuppertal and Berlin, having once dreamed of missionary work. Although all of his relations lived in the Federal Republic of Germany, he chose to remain in the East and dedicated himself to pastoral work in the Hermersdorf congregation, which had been completely transformed by the influx of refugees. Markus Meckel later recalled that while he always thought of his father as having returned from the war a pacifist, one could still hear the echoes of the officer he had once been. With a father who had been a member of the Confessing Church during the Nazi period, Markus Meckel, who, from a young age, had accompanied his father to youth retreats, was familiar with names like Barth, Niemöller, Gollwitzer, Heinemann and Scharf from a young age.

In 1959, the family moved to Berlin and lived in the building of the Berlin Mission. Markus Meckel was now in school, but above all he was active in the life of the congregation from an early age: he sang in the church choir, played the trumpet, and at the age of 14, led his first pre-teen retreat. The construction of the Wall in 1961 came as a shock to the family. Despite the Wall, though Markus Meckel nevertheless grew up in an international atmosphere, because his father had been charged with forging international contacts on behalf of the Evangelical Church of the Union. Markus Meckel also accompanied his father on trips through Eastern Central Europe. Meckel would later recall that Willy Brandt was the family’s favourite politician. They all believed that the policies of the West German SPD were in the best interests of Germany as a whole.

1967–69, Meckel attended what was called an extended secondary school (the completion of which would have qualified him for university entrance). Due to previous conflicts, concerning for instance the 1968 *invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops, he was not promoted to the 11th year and had to take his school leaving exams at the Church seminary in Potsdam’s Hermannswerder. Half of the pupils at the seminary school were the children of parish priests, and the climate of intellectual freedom there was very different from what Meckel had been used to at the state-run schools. Meckel became a student spokesperson. In 1970, he refused to perform any form of military service – referring to the two world wars initiated by Germany and to his relatives in West Germany, at whom he would never want to fire a weapon. Although arrest was the normal consequence of refusing conscription, nothing happened to him.

Since the school-leaving certificate issued by the seminary was not recognised by the state, Meckel studied theology (1971–1978) at church-run institutions in Naumburg and at Berlin’s Sprachenkonvikt, a Protestant theological college. In 1973, he began to coordinate a group of theology students from across the entire GDR. This group protested the introduction of non-elective military instruction in schools in 1978. Meckel was impressed by the study of philosophy, which he and other students (Martin Gutzeit, Jörg Milbrandt) organised themselves as much as he was by his theological training. The students read Plato, Aristotle, Kant and Hegel and, in 1976, the year that Wolf Biermann was stripped of his citizenship, began to reprint and disseminate illegal literature. Meckel’s final thesis dealt with Nietzsche’s “Zarathustra”.

To enable himself to continue studying philosophy, Meckel worked from 1978 to 1980 in a series of jobs: as a cleaner, a night watchman and a transport worker, for a while he worked nightshifts at the post office. He and Martin Gutzeit came into contact with Michael Theunissen, a philosophy professor at West Berlin’s Freie Universität. This developed into a continuing exchange, a long-running political and philosophical debate, between them, Theunissen, his colleagues and students. Meckel did not complete a course of training as a vicar until 1980–1982. The transition to village life was difficult for him; but he stayed in touch with Martin Gutzeit, who moved to a nearby village in Mecklenburg in 1982. From 1983, Meckel was active in the working group on theology and philosophy at the Federation of Evangelical Churches of the GDR. He later invited people like Richard Schröder, Ibrahim Böhme (an unofficial Stasi employee), Wolfgang Templin and others to the group to create a network for intellectual debates.

Meckel organised a peace group in his congregation in Vipperow/Müritz in Mecklenburg in 1982. This group’s activities included organising annual peace events. He was also active from the period of his training as a vicar in peace group (Arbeitsgemeinschaft Frieden, AGF) of the Mecklenburg state church, which coordinated peace groups across Mecklenburg. In 1982, he also began to organise annual week-long events known as Mobile Peace Seminars. The seminar groups worked on different topics in different towns and parishes in Mecklenburg. At the end of the week, they (about 120–150 participants) would gather to spend a weekend devoted to the commemoration of the victims of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Starting in 1983, workbook on the topics covered were compiled in preparation for the seminars.

Meckel convened several meetings in 1984/85 in conjunction with his coordinating activities for the peace groups in Mecklenburg and for “Frieden Konkret”, a network of independent peace groups in which he became involved in 1983. In various settings, he advocated the development and adoption of a clearer political concept to underpin collective political action. The Ministry for State Security (Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, MfS) referred to a series of such meetings held in Vipperow, Grünheide and Berlin as the “Vipperow conception group”. At these meetings, people discussed possibilities for transforming the activities of the peace groups into those of a political opposition. “The results of these meetings”, Meckel said much later, “were distinctly unsatisfactory, for they made it plain that although there was broad agreement that the GDR’s political system was unacceptable, participants’ attitudes different markedly when it came to their understanding of themselves and their aims. We were ultimately quite helpless. For instance, we could not get beyond agreeing to continue the work of the groups, strengthen the exchange and ties between them and cooperate wherever possible.

1988–90, Meckel headed up an ecumenical centre for exchange and education of the Evangelical Church in Niederndodeleben, near Magdeburg. He continued to think about reshaping the network of peace groups into a political opposition in discussions with Martin Gutzeit. The two of them discussed the plan to create a citizen’s participation association in the spring and summer of 1988, for instance. They wanted arrangements and coordinating among the groups to take on a more binding character, so that the groups would not just be reacting to the SED and the MfS. However, Martin Gutzeit and Markus Meckel ended up abandoning the plan to create a collective organisation representing all opposition figures, once again, concluding that the idea that one group could speak for the entire society was undemocratic. More and more often, each of them, independent of the other, found himself thinking about forming a political party.

During this period, Meckel was also involved in shaping the Ecumenical Assemblies in the GDR. These assemblies, which came together the slogan “Peace, justice and the integrity of creation”, were jointly run by the Protestant and Catholic churches and de facto constituted assemblies made up of church officials and delegates from church and non-church groups that had been active since the late 1960s on peace or environmental or other issues. There was frank and open discussion of the conditions in GDR society at these assemblies, and what is more, the delegates would draw up programmes for improving the deficits identified. Meckel was involved in drawing up proposals for addressing deficits in justice, which included issues of GDR’s internal policies and the relationship to the “Third World”.

Markus Meckel and Martin Gutzeit began to discuss and consider a plan to call for the formation of a social democratic party in the GDR in January of 1989. The document in which they ultimately did so differed considerably from all of the other draft programmes that were put forth by opposition groups in the summer and autumn of 1989 in that it included clear definitions of democratic principles and precisely described party structures. They wrote the final draft of their call for the formation of a new party in July of 1989 and presented it to the public on 26 August.

Finally, on 7 October, the 40th anniversary of the foundation of the GDR, a group of about 40 people met in Schwante to formally established the Social Democratic Party in the GDR (SDP). Meckel participated at the Central Round Table on behalf the SDP and took over as chair of the party after it was revealed, in late March/early April, that the party’s first chair, Böhme, had been an unofficial collaborator of the Stasi. From March to October 1990, Meckel represented the party, which had since been renamed the SPD, in the first freely elected Volkskammer (People’s Chamber) From 12 April to 20 August, he served as Minister for Foreign Affairs. In this capacity, he represented the GDR at the “2+4 Talks” between the USA, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union and France and the two German states, which ultimately led to the end of the Allies’ occupation rights and a reunified Germany gaining complete sovereignty and the recognition of its eastern border.

After the first all-German elections in October of 1990, Meckel became a member of the German Bundestag representing the SPD, and he continued to serve there until 2009. He sat on the Committee for Foreign Affairs, was deputy spokesperson for his parliamentary group, leader of the German delegation to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly and chair of the German-Polish Parliamentary Friendship Group. He also served as spokesperson for the East Central and South-eastern Europe discussion circle of the SPD parliamentary group and, 1996–2000, as chair of the national federation of German-Polish Societies. It was in part at his initiative that the German Bundestag set up the two inquiry commissions that examined the history of the GDR and its consequences for unified Germany (1992–1998). He acted as the SPD spokesperson on these commissions. Meckel has served as the honorary chair of the governance board of the Federal Foundation for the Study of the Communist Dictatorship in Eastern Germany since the Foundation was established in 1998 at the recommendation of the inquiry commission; from 2013 to 2016, he was also the president of the German War Graves Commission.