GDR everyday life: How the SED split two brothers

Dieding returned with a straight face from a meeting with the head of the department. "We're getting a new master," he said, "Fiete is coming in. Then another wind is blowing here!"

Dieding was an active Christian, by profession a radar technician and deputy head of a service center of a national Rostock large-scale enterprise, which maintained a small workshop in an oven-heated wooden barracks on the Hohe Düne and looked after civilian naval technology. Dieding had been sent there because he was not considered viable because of his outspoken comments on behalf of another service center, which also took care of ships from the NSW (non-socialist economic area).

Dieding was my colleague. In 1970, at the beginning of my second year of apprenticeship, I was sent to the wooden barracks on Hohe Düne, because I lived close by with my parents. I learned how to repair VHF radios and radars, climb poles and hulls, heat ovens, clean the workshop and loo, find mushrooms for lunch, play doubleheads, and occasionally drink bräu if there is one Reason to celebrate or there was no work. Far away from existing socialism, we felt we were a kind of penal colony, which we could gain more positive sides than our colleagues, who had to pay attention to every word on the West Ships. Wages did not differ.

On Platt Dieding told what he knew of Fiete: born in 1929, when Pimpf in the Hitler Youth on the enemy sworn and rushed as a 16 -year-old in the Volkssturm on the Americans. After the liberation and the occupation of the East by the Red Army, he turned to the red line. The company sent him as assertive SED comrades to build the fishing fleet on the Faroe Islands and to Cuba. Why Fiete should now take over the management of our small and neglected collective in a remote world, remained a mystery for years.

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It was not long before the first thumbscrew started. On the initiative of the state management, Fiete called on all colleagues to cease their contacts with relatives in the NSW, including the Federal Republic, as well as to report any chance encounters with persons from the states of the class enemy. The reactions of the colleagues were ambiguous: "I have no relatives in the West," some said. "I want to keep this job," said the others, and signed under a light protest the commitment submitted to them.

Three colleagues refused the signature: Dieding, my apprentice technician and myself. Because I had a brother who escaped in 1959 as the oldest of us four siblings across the sector border from East to West Berlin and brought it through qualification in the Rhine-Main area to prosperity. He had been a bricklayer in the GDR. From vacation, he now sent picture postcards from Rimini, San Marino, the Alps and for Christmas a moody illustrated three-line. Sometimes my parents also received compassionate letters that everything was so expensive in the West.

Twice my brother and his wife visited the GDR when the forced exchange was not that high. The contacts were provided with much smaller material gifts than was common among many other relatives on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Nevertheless, I felt the demand to dissolve the kinship - which is not possible anyway - as inhumane. After all, he was one of the three sons of our parents and I lived with them.

After the refusal happened first of all - nothing. Very often I stayed with my girlfriend in Warnemünde and felt persecuted. When I looked out of the window in the evening, there was a man in a hat and reading a newspaper under the streetlight. When I went home at night, I heard footsteps behind me and saw no one when I turned around. I used various public transport, looked at the same pair of eyes several times in a row, and thought I had hallucinations.

"It's not worth your while to sacrifice yourself"

After half a year, we received three objectors a summons to the operations center to the head of department. Now it was getting serious, I knew, and asked my friend's father for advice. He had had a profound experience of the system in the fifties. As a young sailor in the Second World War, he belonged to the crew of a submarine; Seven years after the end of the war, the Soviet secret service picked up the engineer who had since become a father. His wife remained in the dark about his sudden disappearance and learned only after persistent demands with baby in arms at the authorities of the GDR, that her husband was in a camp in Siberia. He was interrogated there for a long time and was supposed to sign a paper in Russian that he could not read. He did not sign, was stuck in a water barrel for days, with only his head peering out, starving, freezing, working hard and not knowing what he should have done. After three years he suddenly stood again with his wife and daughter at the door, emaciated to almost unrecognizable.

My dad's father advised me: "It's not worth sacrificing, your brother is busy with his family, his job and himself, traveling on vacation to Rimini, San Marino and the Alps The powers that are here are too strong and unscrupulous, but you can not do that, at least not now. " From the tape, we heard songs: "The gentlemen in the high chair do not need pillows, their bureaucrat butt is fat and shabby, but still this and that depresses ..." It was the popular ballad by Wolf Biermann, three years before his expatriation.

The head of department opened the interview with an assessment that would have been enough for a brilliant career if I had joined the SED. He openly admitted that I was shadowed for months and insisted that he needed me for the tasks of building socialism. An economic lever in material terms, he did not start. Also a convincing attempt did not take place. Instead, his adulation was followed by a threat that he could put me somewhere on the edge of GDR civilization, where there would be no cinema, disco, or West television for young people, which was indeed very deterrent and in line with my employment contract.

"We are not inhumans"

I asked how to behave when my parents invited my brother to a family party. Of course you can join in. Afterwards, you just have to tell them that a casual or unintentional contact with a citizen from the NSW has occurred, "the supervisor answered with a superior smile. As a 22-year-old I followed the advice of my girlfriend's father. Dieding and my teaching staff, both much older, did not sign and were transferred to another part of the company. The entire process was archived in the cadre file.

In the following years, the service center for the ongoing arms race in the Cold War was considerably expanded. I became a section leader, which was the highest career level for a non-party there and received awards up to the banner of work. On vacation, I often traveled to socialist foreign countries, got to know friends there - and did not report my numerous contacts in the FRG, Austria, Switzerland, Japan and the USA. I think nobody will be able to control that. Error.

Even Poland was suspicious. Meanwhile my wife and I had our own apartment. Good Friday in 1985, my brother stood beaming at the door and invited us to a festive family reunion. After the party I went to Fiete and reported the West contact. After all, we had agreed that ten years ago. Master looked at me stunned. I should not have gone to the party, he said, especially since I got my own flat from the state. I made it clear to him that it was not about my brother, but about our common parents, who could do nothing that the SED classified their beloved sons as opposing enemies. After all, the peace state's goal is to give all people a happy future. In no time I found myself in another part of the business again. I had not yet escaped real socialism.