This essay offers a theoretically informed reinterpretation of the last months of SED leadership after the internal replacement of long-serving party secretary Erich Honecker and before the first free election in February 1990. The focus lies on the party’s efforts of late reform to save its project in face of the rapidly increasing disinterest of the people to engage with these reforms in a positive way. The point of the exercise is the old hermeneutic precept that cultures need to be understood on their own terms, from within themselves, and this must include attention to goals, values, and ideals developed from within that various actors try to realize. Socialism sees itself in terms of totality that one can only wholly accept or wholly reject.