I am currently reading the autobiography of Joachim Gauck “Winter im Sommer – Frühling im Herbst”.
Joachim Gauck rose to international fame after 1990 as “Lord of the Stasi Files”. Born 1940 in Rostock, at the age of eleven, he witnessed the deportation of his father to a Russian Gulag. Typical for opposition figures under the SED regime, he studied theology and became a pastor: His political sermons in the spirit of the civil rights movement contributed to the fall of the Wall. As a member of Bündnis 90, he became a member of the first freely elected East German Volkskammer, in the final chapter of GDR history before German reunification. His autobiography “Winter in Sommer – Frühling in Herbst” was published in 2009. Joachim Gauck has been nominated as the candidate for the SDP and the Greens to replace Horst Köhler as the next German president in the Federal Assembly and became the president in June 2012.
I have currently read his years before the fall of the wall in 1989. His stories reminded me a lot of my childhood, when I used to visit with my mum and brother my family in Mecklenburg Vorpommern. My uncle was the head of a kolkhoze, a farmers cooperative. The kolkhoze was at that time one of the most productives, and he has been several times awarded a hero’s medal. They had a peacefull and good life, living in a small village, they could get most of the things they needed, there was no shortage. Pigs were exchanged against bath tubs, jeans against radio sets. It was also the time when second hand cars were more expensive than new cars: the waiting list for new cars was 18 years long, people bought the first car of their child the day the child was born. There were only a few choices of cars at that time, Trabants, Wartburgs, Skoda, Lada being the most expensive one. Living costs were cheap at that time, bus tickets just a few cents … Basic needs were more than affordable for everyone, only products from the West were expensive and hard to get. When we travelled to East Germany, we had to exchange the D-Mark to the Mark at a fixed rate and a minimum amount had to be exchanged every day. It was one of the ways the regime was collecting western currencies. We always enjoyed spending time there, but slowly the negative sites of the system revealed to me while growing older. They were never able to visit us in West Germany, only my grand parents came once they reached 70 years of age. My cousin was not allowed to study at university because of us relatives living in West Germany. My parents had escaped from East Germany in 1966, which as a consequence, also had an impact to the life of the family which remained in the East. These regimes used the pay back extensively.
Joachim Gauck really describes well in his book the tragedies and feelings people were experiencing: his two sons, seing no future in the GDR, had succeeded in getting expelled from the GDR. It was also the time when West Germany used to buy free East Germans kept in prison due to their opposition. When Joachim Gauck become the head of the commission supervising the opening of the archives of the Stasi (the East German secret police), it revealed many very ugly faces of humanity, where friends you were hosting for dinner over decased, your priest, your girl friend and even your husband were writing files on you, reporting to the Stasi your every day life, your conversations, your meetings with people, friends…
I still remember well when we used to meet our family on their holiday at lake Balaton in Hungary, they always avoided meeting and talking to East Germans in fear of them reporting their doings and whereabouts to the authorities…
I have to continue reading the autobiography in small doses as burried memories are coming up. When I think how easily mankind can forget its own history and adapt to new, better environments…
Story to be continued…
