Someone who had reached Wetzel's level of seniority in the journalism during the 1950s would normally have seen their eightieth birthday celebrated with a congratulatory message from the party, but early in January 1989 Wetzel's eightieth birthday passed without published comment in Neues Deutschland or any other mainstream publication. He had still not been forgiven for that open letter in 1956. Across the border in West Germany it was a different matter: newspapers such as the Frankfurter Rundschau marked the birthday of the communist "non-conformist" and "lateral thinker", quoting a maxim which he had himself used in the part: "Head held high and not the hands" ("Kopf hoch und nicht die Hände"). A couple of weeks later, however, on 25 January 1990, as the authorities struggled to come to terms with the changes slowly but surely transforming the old German Democratic Republic, an "extraordinary congress" of the VDP rehabilitated Wetzel. A few months later, still in 1990, he joined the Party of Democratic Socialism, which was a sometimes uneasy reincarnation, in contemplation of a democratic multi-party future, a relaunched version of the old SED. He did this, in his own words, "out of solidarity" ("aus Solidarität").