In the spring of 1988, in the wake of the events associated with the Liebknecht-Luxemburg demonstration in January, Gutzeit realised that the opposition in the GDR up to this point had essentially failed. For instance, he accused the Initiative for Peace and Human Rights (Initiative Frieden und Menschenrechte, IFM) of lacking clear political objectives directed towards overcoming the system. He called for a complete re-orientation and restructuring of opposition activities. Together, Markus Meckel and Martin Gutzeit planned and founded “Bürgerbeteilung“, an association to promote civic participation. The association’s statutes defined its purpose as the creation of a democratic public, the democratisation and pluralisation of society. This amounted to pursuing an end to communist dictatorship. The experiences and ideas gathered over the past years came together in this project. This project was similar in approach to those of later citizen’s movements like the New Forum (Neues Forum) and the Democratic Awakening (Demokratischer Aufbruch).

Through his work on Hegel’s philosophy, Gutzeit was becoming increasingly convinced that it was both imperative and possible to break open the reality that surrounded him. Writing about the process leading up to this recognition years later, he would note: “I won’t deny that a euphoria came over me when I thought I had found a logic to counter that of the seemingly impregnable power realities, against which I had, until then, felt quite powerless.” However, he was also plagued by doubts as to whether an association would really be able to mount an effective challenge to the state’s monopoly on power. Unlike many other opposition figures, Gutzeit was not opposed to the state as such on principle just to the totalitarian state. Thus he grew ever stronger in his conviction that only a new party would be able to kick off a process of change that would democratise the state and the society.

He discussed the idea with Markus Meckel, to whom it immediately appealed. Meckel presented their early and still vague ideas about founding a party at an opposition meeting in February of 1989, but they were rejected there. Most of the opposition activists were still unable to take in the idea of such a project. Neither Meckel nor Gutzeit was particularly surprised by this reaction; they knew the opposition to well for that. 

Gutzeit and Meckel did not let this deter them though, and their ideas continued to mature over the following weeks and months. The document calling for the foundation of the Social Democratic Party in the GDR (SDP) was drafted in July of 1989 and was presented to the public on 26 August. The initiative had already been announced in opposition circles. The signatures Gutzeit and Meckel under the appeal were accompanied by those of theologian Arndt Noack and Ibrahim Böhme. The former was an old friend of Gutzeit and Meckel from their student days, the latter was revealed in 1990 to have been an influential “unofficial collaborator” of the MfS. In the 1980s, Gutzeit had developed a set of measures intended to expose these informers and protect himself and his friends and acquaintances, to the extent possible, from State Security. Although he had long had suspicions about Böhme, Gutzeit had been unable to act on these, for lack of actual evidence.

That it was Gutzeit and Meckel who founded a social democratic party was no accident. “Freedom, democracy, social justice and the notion of solidarity were always a given in our tradition, as were ecological aspects “, Gutzeit said in the early 1990s. Moreover, Gutzeit had studied the history of European social democracy in the second half of the 1980s. He felt certain that a social market economy, such as that advocated by the Social Democrats in Europe after 1945, was the best alternative for the GDR. The unmistakably provocative intent to challenge the SED with social democratic party in the GDR and to dispute its claim to power also played a role.

Gutzeit and Meckel were not the type of revolutionaries likely to put off the overthrow of the government till after working hours or the weekend. When they tackled their project of founding the SDP – accompanied by a good dose of delusions of grandeur – they had no way of knowing how it would end or above all how fast things were about to happen. The two of them were actually expecting several years in penal servitude followed by a one-way ticket to the West. That things turned out differently was due to many factors, which, taken together, allowed the revolution to break out quickly and effectively and ultimately to succeed. Martin Gutzeit made an important contribution to that revolution. He and his friends in the SDP were the first activists whose aim was not just to enter into dialogue with the SED but also to deprive it of its power. Many others learned from their example quickly, which explains why the revolution soon took on an irreversible momentum.

The date chosen for official meeting to form the SDP was the 7th of October 1989 (in Schwante, not far from Berlin). The 40th anniversary of the GDR would be celebrated by the SED leadership on that day. However, the choice was not based on the date’s symbolic significance alone: all the goings-on in Berlin offered a chance for the founding members to act without as much surveillance. Some found sneaking off to Schwante without being noticed by the MfS proved to be quite an adventure, though.

In the months after the party’s founding conference, Gutzeit was involved in all of the major decisions and activities of the opposition. He was not a public figure, but someone who stayed in the background, patiently pulling strings. Often enough, they were the strings that counted. He became parliamentary manager of the (renamed) SPD parliamentary group in the first freely elected Volkskammer. After serving in the Bundestag for a short period during the transition (1990), an assistantship at the theological faculty of the Humboldt-Universität (1991) and a one-year posting at the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, Gutzeit took up the newly created post of Berlin’s State Commissioner for Stasi Records in January of 1993. He continued to hold this post until 2017.

Gutzeit served as an external expert on both of the Bundestag inquiry commissions established to examine and address the history and consequences of the SED dictatorship. He and, once again, Markus Meckel had been the ones to come up with the idea of setting up commissions of this kind in the first place. This was in part to fend off other proposals being discussed at the time, such as that of setting up a non-parliamentary tribunal.

Martin Gutzeit is the father of two adult children and is now a grandfather as well. He used to like to sit on the comfortable veranda of the family home with his own father and chat about “God and the world”. He still enjoys such conversation today, whether the topic is politics, music, Hegel and Aristotle or when traveling to places in Europe of ancient historical significance, where he can see first-hand the cultural heritage that he could only study in theory for decades. With no more revolutions in need of planning, at least for the time being, his old studies of Hegel are starting to take up more of his attention again. One can but wait and see what kind of political lessons Martin Gutzeit will draw from them this time.