Original subtitles

Where are they?

I can't find them. Yes, here's something.

This is at her youth initiation.

We offered our children all we could.

But she'd always had a mind of her own.

Like we all did when we were young.

However, according to the laws of the GDR,

she had committed some kind of crime.

It was during her time in Zwickau.

She didn't associate with the right kind of people,

the way we would have liked her to.

She was involved with some youth group.

They put up posters which was neither permitted nor welcomed.

And if you break the law, then you have to accept the consequences.

It's the same today.

If I'm having a good day

and someone says, "Tell me about your time in prison,"

they may as well be spitting on my day.

I don't want to talk about it. Not all the time.

Every September, the Socialist Party organizes a solidarity rally in Berlin.

It's strange. They advertise with coffee at East German prices and hot sausages.

Probably 15-year-old East German sausages, who knows.

And there are so-called renowned personalities from the GDR.

One of them came up to me,

saying he was one of my interrogators in Karl-Marx-Stadt.

He said he felt sorry for me back then and he shared my views.

But if he'd spoken up,

he too would have ended up sitting across the table, in my chair.

I sure wasn't going to have dinner with him. I'm glad I didn't smack him.

That's incredibly rude, telling me this,

after talking away my child, locking me up,

arresting half my family on charges of kin liability,

and then telling me after the wall fell, "I thought the same as you did,

but I couldn't say anything or I'd have ended up on the other side."

Now that's insulting.

"The defendant is suspected of public vilification."

"On March 7th, 1982,

in the lobby of the Ebersbrunn Tavern,

at least five bystanders witnessed her making disparaging remarks

about state order, state organs and their activities."

"She remarked, there wasn't any freedom in the fucking Eastern zone,

and that people only did what the Russians told them to do."

"Children were being turned into criminals in state homes."

"Offense according to Paragraph 220, arrest warrant is legal," etc.

I was saying, "There is no freedom,

and children are being forced into children's homes."

And for that, I'm put into prison and my child is put into state care.

That's completely paranoid, isn't it?

This whole dictatorship and this dollhouse fascism

was sick through and through.

Now why would you want this system back?

It's like having your brain stuck in cement.

I had just left the supermarket carrying my kid.

And the whole street in Zwickau

was full of police and Stasi, the GDR State Security Service.

And I remember, I was standing at the corner, thinking,

"I can leave, but where can I go with my son?"

So I went into the house.

I went upstairs. There were police everywhere.

I can't tell you how many.

Twenty, ten, thirty, fifty… I'd say at least fifty.

On the street, hallway, my apartment…

Worst of all, Sebastian was old enough to walk.

So this sweet innocent little guy

went up to each one of these Stasi crooks saying, "Hello, how are you?"

They didn't know how to react to that.

They were about to take my son, right there.

I said to the only woman there,

"If you take my child from me now, I will start screaming my head off."

"I won't stop. You'll have to kill me."

"I want to change his diaper, I want to call my girlfriend,

I would like this to be done quietly."

Surprisingly, they agreed.

That's what he looked like when we got him.

This picture of her was sitting on the dresser.

Every night, we asked him to say good night to it.

She stayed in his memory this way.

Once he refused. "Not today," he said.

I told him, "Your mom will be sad. I'll write to her that you didn't."

So he finally did…

Well, these are moments when it's all a bit hard for me now.

Right?

That's him now.

Our big guy.

He sends us pictures, but he doesn't visit often enough.

I wish I could see him more often.

Oh well.

My husband says, "Let him be, he's old enough."

But how can you forget your grandparents this quickly?

If he doesn't visit soon, the longer it takes,

the more uncomfortable it may be for him.

He last time he was here was last year in October.

Well…

I have to sit down.

My legs aren't the best anymore.

When we mention the subject,

she usually says, "Mom, don't. It's in the past."

And I accept that.

I don't think she talks to Sebastian about it, either.

She believes he still remembers something.

But I don't think so.

I was in a children's home when I was not yet three years old.

All I remember is a flight of stairs

and a playground and a well.

It's quite possible, he remembers something.

But he never talks about it.

Daddy?

Daddy!

Daddy, you can't just leave me alone!

I know he started commenting on politics in his essays at school

and then got kicked out of school.

But I don't know exactly how he was caught

or why he was locked up.

I just know a bit about mom.

She was arrested on a bus,

for reading a children's book by Rainer Kunze.

That's all I know.

It was a children's book. And I didn't understand why it happened.

I still don't understand.

But it… Sometimes we felt that things were at breaking point.

Yes. There's something going on. Something that's not right.

As if they were keeping something from us.

But I never felt the need to touch on it

or to step in and raise it with them.

There already is some distance there, and I don't want to do anything wrong.

I know what you mean.

At the memorial place in Hohenschönhausen, I saw dad at a reading for the first time.

This place used to be a prison where he was an inmate.

He described, how…

how these white cars with fruit and vegetable ads on them

were transporting prisoners in and out of this high security area.

And how it was all completely shielded.

It all seemed so bizarre.

And that was enough for me at the time.

In addition to my own imagination…

Yes.

I've never really asked him specifically

about everyday life in prison and what it was like.

I always have a bit of a bad feeling

when I see those big yellow or red brick buildings.

They can be factories too, and there are lots of them in Vogtland.

I always think, they could be turned into prisons in less than an hour.

And the guards already exist, but they walk around unrecognized.

Rather than chasing after the old guards, we should look out for the new ones.

We should look for them among people.

Who would make a good prison guard?

Who would be our Mary Magdalene?

And who'll shove the vinegar-soaked sponge into your mouth?

Just to continue the metaphor.

It took a while to notice this deception. That these people are back on top.

That nothing happened to them.

That…

in May 2000, parliament decided to reject

a special retirement pay for those seriously affected,

for political prisoners of the GDR.

And twenty minutes later, all hands went up again.

It was rejected, right?

Twenty minutes later, hands up, to raise pensions for the perpetrators.

I mean, the professional, full-time "Stasi" majors and officers.

I mean, this is a sign. I know the kind of place I live in.

You look at people and you can see what will happen in the future.

You don't even need to remember the past.

We stopped contributing during lessons.

We withdrew more and more from this history

and began to look in our parents' bookcases

for different literature and philosophy.

And we met outside of school.

They were watching us.

And we asked some silly questions in class.

Twenty-four hours after our silly talk they rounded us up in the school yard.

I was interrogated for six or seven hours.

A man introduced himself as an officer from the Ministry for State Security.

He was in the room, in civilian clothes, and he asked me to sit.

He had a blue book on the table, and it was open.

And he said, "Who is manipulating you?"

"Who are the people who are directing you from the West?"

He pushed the blue book towards me. It was the Criminal Code of the GDR.

He had marked two paragraphs,

"subversive formation of groups" and "subversive agitation."

I read it, hastily, and I saw:

"Prison sentence from a minimum of one to a maximum of ten years."

I'll keep it short. As the ringleader of the group, I was kicked out of school.

And after that one time at school, when I was aged 16,

the State Security Service never interrogated me again.

Not for nine years.

Until I was arrested.

They surveyed me through my friends.

They took my friends in turns. Five, six of my friends, and asked them,

"What does he have? Does he have any LPs?"

"Does he have banned books from West Germany?" And so on.

After nine years, my time had come.

In the end they had to arrest me because of my writing.

GDR officials always denied that people were arrested solely for their writing.

So I went to prison, and then I was sold.

Freed in exchange for ransom.

Did you want to know who blew the whistle on you?

Only a few of my friends spied on me.

One of them lived in Berlin.

We did our Abitur together in Freiberg.

He was ordered by the Stasi to regularly visit my mother.

He spent the whole weekend there, from Friday to Sunday evening.

She looked after him like her own son, to compensate for me.

Finally someone to look after.

After many years I found a bill for 100 marks in my Stasi file.

GDR marks.

It was his fee for his trip to my mother.

On top of the fare for the trip.

That was a big disappointment.

My friend had two years, after the wall came down,

to out himself to me.

We often had a beer together, after the wall came down,

usually in West Berlin.

But… he never mentioned it.

If he had told me, "Look, I was scared. They were threatening me."

"It was pure fear, so I signed and gave some information about you."

I'd have said, "That's over and done with. Don't worry, we were all scared."

Utz, put the bread on the board.

It's so long ago.

It's hard to trace the exact order of events.

What happened then, and what happened after.

Well, that's gone.

But I don't want to forget a thing.

Those memories belong to my life.

And those were the worst ten years of my life.

Nonetheless, I am glad they are now…

part of my subconscious.

You can't keep opening up old wounds, you'd never cope at all.

Now I have finally found peace.

It was simply too much.

They orchestrated everything to deter the families.

They were addressed in a particularly brutal manner.

Not even the guards bullied us like that.

It was like…

Like a Nazi movie. The faces, the uniforms…

German shepherd dogs running around. Like being in a movie, an old Nazi movie.

And it were the worst ones.

We couldn't talk without one of them sitting at the table with you.

Some of them tried to sweet talk us.

"Are you aware of what your son has done to you?"

And so forth. And…

"He is not being very considerate."

This kind of talk.

Until I got angry and said, "You know something?"

"He's my son. And he'll always be my son." And I left.

They wanted to create an emotional distance between us.

One of them always came on a motorcycle.

After the wall came down he disappeared to Franconia.

But his informants are still here.

One of them is hooking up half of Reichenbach.

He works for a company that has a similar logo to the Telekom.

They use the same "T."

But the address of the company is in Berlin Hohenschönhausen,

opposite the big former Stasi prison in Hohenschönhausen.

When this certain employee showed up at my mother's place,

and she wouldn't let him in,

he stood there and said, "I was an officer on special assignment,

I had to do what I did. But I never harmed Fuchs or your son."

This man has written whole volumes of reports,

about what I said, the length of my beard, how often I come to visit.

They'll keep on lying

'til kingdom come.

And now I'll bury these memories again deep inside.

- You do exactly that. - Yes, for sure.

THE LIFE OF UTZ RACHOWSKI

A SCHOOL ESSAY BY DAGNY DEWATH, 2000

Should we have a look?

I'd like to read you something.

- It's my favorite story. - Okay.

"On October 5th, 1979, my father was arrested,

a month after my mother, who was released after three months due to being pregnant."

"He served 13 months for 'subversive agitation,'

and was deported to the West in November 1980,

five months after my sister Anne was born."

"He describes this change of worlds in some of his writings."

"'Flying Dragon,' for example, contains a letter to a certain Maria."

"'Maria' resembles 'Monika,' my mother's name."

"Since it was written in 1983, I knew my mother had never read it."

"It was a fictional piece."

"The fear and concern for their child and an uncertain future

are expressed in the following lines."

"They call you an 'accomplice,' but you are Maria."

"What kind of person would say that?"

"Who are they?"

"Why do they have power over us?"

"Was the love between two people perhaps strained to the point

that it had to break?"

"I don't know."

"But circumstances surely were responsible

for the separation of my parents in the fall of 1982."

I remember dad being away quite often,

while you, mom and I remained at home.

I also recall a pretty fierce argument.

And I think it was then, after that, I think, that dad left.

Gone for good.

I don't want the subject of my life to be so dark.

I spent a few months in prison.

Before that, I lived in the GDR for a few years.

Then I had a few golden years in the West,

before we knew the truth about the GDR.

All of a sudden, the wall tumbled down and released a wave of…

Well, a wave of dirt spills over this wall

that we had to bathe in.

And now, all cleaned up after a lot of work,

we're supposed to dive back in and I say,

it's now the turn of others to swim in it, if they want to stir it all up again.

But our children had a hard time having to cope with our past.

While other families went to the amusement park,

we went back to the East to read Stasi files.

They remember those experiences.

I think they handled it well.

I also doubt that missing out on visiting an amusement park

is such a terrible thing. I doubt it.

I think it's hard to explain this to children.

Are you going to the children's service? No?

The fall of the wall placed a great burden on the children.

You try to explain why you are in a bad mood right now.

Because you're reading something that's upsetting, or whatever.

Or, we often had heated discussions with people who came here.

Sometimes with a lot of people, or even just the two of us,

having a heated discussion about something in the news.

We sometimes noticed our kids looking at us, perplexed.

We tried to tell them, "We're not fighting, we're having a discussion."

They thought we were yelling at each other,

but it was just…

But we were just agitated and therefore also loud.

When Mielke, the former head of the Stasi, got relocated

because he didn't like the conditions at the prison in Hohenschönhausen

we ran around the house shouting with rage,

telling the other what we'd just heard.

We were calling up and down the stairs and the kids were caught in between.

They'd disappear for a while, very quietly,

then they'd come back at some point and ask, "Any plans for dinner?"

And we'd realize we had forgotten all about it.

And then, of course, we'd have to explain.

We could feel that they felt threatened by what was going on.

Every time I hang up my robe,

I can see that it's been through a lot, more than other robes of this kind.

Because the name of my father is embroidered in it.

It stands for "reconciliation." It stands for "father and son."

Everything is connected through these initials.

And this wonderful story happened in prison in Kissingstrasse.

I was led into a small room.

There were two guards and the interrogator sat at a desk.

The desk was arranged in the shape of a T, and on the long side of the T,

there were two chairs placed opposite each other.

I sat down on one of the chairs. The door opened.

And in came my father.

That was first time in months,

that I saw a person who was not a guard.

And then, as our conversation was coming to an end,

and I had asked about the Last Supper,

my father took a piece of the cake

and spoke over the cake the words of institution to the Last Supper.

"This is my body which is given for you…"

Then he took the cup of coffee

and spoke over that which is spoken over the cup.

"My blood, shed for you for the forgiveness of sins."

And I thought I was going to fall over. That was an incredibly charged moment.

Then we said the "Our Father" and these guards didn't know what to do.

They didn't know whether they should fold their hands or what they should do.

They were absolutely helpless in this situation.

The interrogator was being polite and kept his mouth shut.

Probably because he knew there was no point in interfering.

And then my father was guided out

and I was returned to my cell.

I lived off this story for a long time

without feeling thirsty or hungry.

Sometimes I just stop listening.

I'm still interested,

but some remarks I just don't register anymore.

I don't see it as contemporary history.

It's to do with my parents,

but I don't think of it as being associated with the GDR.

I know the stories. They don't mean anything special to me anymore.

It's no longer something I pay attention to.

I hear them and I think, "Ah, that subject again."

There are other concerns today.

People don't ask us about it every day.

It's only if the subject comes up in the news for some reason

or if someone finds out that my father has written a book on it.

But it's not a topic that comes up regularly.

And when it does, it luckily disappears again quickly.

I sometimes think, "Why dig up the old stories?"

"Why can't we just continue with our lives and leave the past behind?"

- It's the past. - Exactly. You can't change it.

Yes, it happened.

and I do think the next generations learn all about it.

But why keep digging up secret Stasi files?

You may find something

that makes you aware of just how much they knew about you

and you feel even worse at that point.

In the end, what good comes of it?

That's what I ask myself.

My father was very strong and brave.

But he was worn down by GDR tactics,

and profoundly so.

They found an opportunity to blackmail him.

And all of a sudden, this outwardly strong person

found himself under the command of an officer.

The officer had introduced himself as a police captain.

My father clung to that silly belief, even though everyone in the GDR knew

that a police officer in civilian clothes

was certainly anything but a friend.

He was, in fact, a Stasi officer.

Worst of all, I didn't know that

until much, much later, towards the end of the '90s.

He just didn't have the courage to tell me.

That's the most painful part, that we couldn't talk about it anymore.

I know one thing for sure, nobody was ever born a hero.

and that what kept me from finding myself in a similar situation

wasn't my courage, it was the grace of God.

Any one of us could have gotten into a situation,

where we would have been powerless.

I can think of five scenarios where I would have powerless.

If they used my children to pressure me, what would you do then?

He died before we could resolve this issue.

Thankfully, we were able to meet occasionally

and talk about unrelated things.

We were at peace with each other.

But I would have preferred to talk about the pain this had caused him.

First, we'll go to the office of Erich Mielke.

We'll get to his apartment soon. This is his office and anteroom

and over there are his private quarters.

He stayed here frequently during the last years.

After Gorbachev came to power, he was afraid of losing his authority.

How do you feel in here?

It just feels strange.

I've often been asked if I feel a sense of gratification.

Or revenge. But somehow, I don't.

When I look closely at what happened, I sometimes feel sorry for them.

It's strange that I should feel sympathy,

but I often think they had no real life. They lived a lie, and they knew it.

My son, born in 1980, once said to me,

"Mom, you're waiting for those guys to have a guilty conscience."

And I'm quoting my son,

"Hey Mom, they don't have a conscience. How can they have a guilty conscience?"

In a sense, I haven't been free for 15 years.

I don't want to meet Markus Wolf.

I have seen him a few times and avoided him.

I can't handle it, emotionally. I don't want to meet Gregor Gysi, either.

I despise these men. I want nothing to do with them.

I'm avoiding. And perhaps that is not a good thing.

In that sense, I'm still a victim, because I know they hold power over me.

Thanks.

I want to show my files to you. I can't avoid it any longer.

I brought along a "plan for disruptive measures."

It's a wonderful term worth repeating, "plan for disruptive measures."

I'm just going to put it here.

At the center of attention is a particular person.

Here, it's "Hiker Uschi,"

since I liked going hiking.

They went through the trouble, and it's not unique,

there are hundreds of thousands of these, all different with different subjects,

to detail the whole circle of friends and family.

Then they looked where they could plant unofficial collaborators

and who within the circle of friends might be willing to betray Gollin.

Someone who is prepared to write reports.

So I found this plan for disruptive measures.

I tried to find out the true identity of informant "Christel."

Informant "Christel" was the only father among my school friends

who was not an authoritarian bastard.

Someone who'd ask how you were doing and so on.

That man spied on his own daughter

and on his wife, who was a colleague of my mother's.

In his reports, and I copied these for you,

he notes that he stopped talking in bed with his wife

so his wife wouldn't become suspicious.

Because he was gathering information through my mother on Gollin. Me.

So he was gathering information on me through his wife through my mother.

You may ask, "In the '90s,

did you, Anna Gollin, ever tell your friend about her father's reports?"

Well, I met my old friend in the '90s, and I simply told her,

"Take a look at your Stasi files. Just have a read. It's interesting."

A year and a half later, I met her again in Neubrandenburg.

She crossed the road to the other side. I had a déjà vu and thought,

you've done this before in the '70s, cross the road to the other side

and pretend nothing happened.

She told her side of the story.

As she well should.

If everything that's been written is true,

those GDR authorities have created a big mess for lots of people.

There is this big volume, where--

That's my opinion. Though I've grown up in the GDR.

I don't know, but…

I was a police officer. I always worked properly and dutifully.

I never would have thought our authorities would be capable of this,

until I experienced it myself.

While Anne was in prison, we looked after the boy.

From Tuesday to Friday, he was in daycare.

And once Monday to Thursday, depending on our shifts.

In retail, I often had to work Fridays and Saturdays.

So it was his turn to pick up the boy.

But the boy was gone.

The nursery teachers didn't say a word. I went to every hospital.

- The police didn't know anything. - Nobody knew anything.

Neither did the hospitals.

At the last hospital we found the boy. In the quarantine ward.

But he wasn't sick.

- That was the final straw. I collapsed. - Indeed.

He stayed there for four to six weeks.

And they were so mean.

We could watch him through curtains. He wasn't allowed to see us.

Then we were told Sebastian could join his mother in West Berlin.

We waited from December to May the following year,

the whole time with packed suitcases, expecting Sebastian to leave any day.

On a Saturday we received a telegram

saying Annegret could pick up the boy on Sunday.

And when she arrived, Sebastian was very cute.

He came in…

He stood in front of the bed,

"My mommy!"

Exit on the left.

That day went by in a flash. I flew by.

I was there but I have no memory of it.

I do recall that night as we approached the border crossing

just before midnight.

My father drove us and some guy was following us.

And at the border, my son woke up.

He was in in my arms and the border guards were checking.

We had to get out of the car and they looked at everything.

My son wakes up, opens his eyes and says,

"Mommy, I am wearing new socks," and falls back asleep.

That's all.

Now that he was staying with me, some nights…

There was a seating area in the kitchen. I got some furniture from labor welfare.

The shop felt like an exquisite department store.

There was nothing like it in the GDR.

I said, "I'd like this and this," and they delivered and installed it.

There was a seating area in the kitchen.

It was right in the corner of the room.

And Sebastian crawled beneath it, into the corner and wouldn't come out.

I called a psychologist.

Someone came and pulled out the table and told me to stay put

until the boy comes out all by himself.

So I stayed sitting there.

Strange how much we resemble other creatures.

You realize how little difference there is between us and other beings.

The mother animal sits in the corner

waiting for her injured cub to come out.

Losing your fear and becoming a little bit freer

doesn't happen…

It's not that every week, a little bit falls off.

There are setbacks, too.

Sometimes I was up all night crying.

I remember the little guy standing there, "Mommy, are you crying because I was bad?"

"Oh my God, Sebastian! Of course not!"

Children relate everything to themselves.

During the separation, he probably also thought, more than once,

that mom wasn't coming back because he'd been misbehaving.

To be honest,

I let bygones be bygones. I didn't want to stir anything up.

I don't want him to dive back into that oppressive atmosphere,

into that feeling of being crushed.

I don't think I know it yet.

A brief summary of happiness

On my daughter mattress in Zurich lies Rolf

A manager from Basel

Mainly in the chemical industry

How did the water get over the river

Proclamation for my eastern country And taking all the youths with it

The daughters for years now commuters The weekend the last God

Highway, I'm praying for them

For me, the big surprise stayed

A hundred steps from one side of the river To the other

My dream endures

The dissolving fairy tale revolution

I got away, just like the river With blue eyes and unemployed

We had the choice and chose The king who gave us new clothes

They won't go The river below and the surprise above me

Freedom drifts away

We are a people again

We are staying here

Easter at home the daughter tells What holds the world together

Doesn't touch my silence As if to comfort me

"Doesn't touch my silence, as if to comfort me."

I wasn't aware that…

that maybe he was waiting for us to ask him. And…

But at least he found it comforting that I didn't ask him, or that we didn't,

or that I didn't ask him. As if I wanted to comfort him.

I think that also played a role.

Trying to protect him, trying not to hurt him.

I have to read it again.

"During our meeting in Karlovy Vary,

Rachowski told me that Fuchs was involved in the peace movement."

"I am not able to tell you the context in which this remark was made."

"I do not know to what extent this activity is directed against the GDR,

since I am not familiar with Fuchs's specific activities."

"After the meeting in Karlovy Vary 'Name' thinks that Rachowski…

may have succumbed to alcohol."

Cut!

These are the things the Stasi was interested in.

"During the entire stay…"

- Okay. - Wait. Maybe you have to read it first.

That Stasi files can trigger so much joy!

But I have to admit, when I think about it,

for 15 years, in the West, I kept dreaming

that by chance, somehow, I was back in the East,

locked up by the Stasi. And nobody in the West knows.

I still dream of prison as well.

It's more about suffocating situations, when there is no fresh air.

In my dreams, I sometimes say to the officers…

I still have that dream today strangely, after 25 years.

"Your time is up soon!"

They say, in my dream, "Yes we know, but…

your time is up even sooner, Sallmann, because nobody knows we've got you."

A dream I've had for decades.

It's cramped, you can't get out and when will it end?

- This, "how long will it take?" - Exactly, me too. Not often, but…

I've never told my 25-year-old son about these nightmares.

Even though it happened a quarter of a century ago.

This problem remains.

If you talk to someone who's not experienced any extreme situations,

nothing that compares,

you can't communicate something like this.

I am completely convinced

that we always remain excluded from the normal human experience.

Because we've had this extreme experience.

These can be different kinds of extreme experiences.

And this affects the children, too.

- Because there's always a secret. - Yes.

The secret remains ours. Only we know what a day in a prison cell is like.

As a father, I am afraid of my children asking me about certain situations.

To preempt certain questions,

you can provide information in the form of a text.

So there are certain things they don't have to ask, we all know.

And then it comes down to the points that remain, and that's exciting.

The things that are missing, that can be read between the lines.

My children have a chance to ask about it.

So far, they haven't.

It's something they don't want to touch on.

They don't know how to talk to their father about this.

What did it feel like to be beaten up, or to be in solitary confinement.

I think children can't do that.

They take it as a given.

They may think it is embarrassing that their father had been in prison.

And even worse, their mother, too.

It's hard to imagine,

because the world that caused this no longer exists.

I found this.

Ms. Suttinger, when you meet former prisoners who come here,

to Hoheneck,

if you were to meet a former political prisoner again,

someone you saw pass through ten years ago.

How would you react?

What do you expect me to say? I have a clear conscience.

I treated everybody decently and in a humane way.

The way they were supposed to be treated. I have a clear conscience.

-I never did anything… - At that point I'm about to puke.

I've never done any harm to a prisoner.

I never did.

This is where I admire my wife the most. The fact that she didn't leave.

Or strangle that woman.

I had to keep looking at the stupid doll wearing a prison uniform.

Or her husband in his underwear with pimples

wanting to save mankind with his wisdom.

And that awful woman.

She looked exactly the same as before.

And I immediately had the same feeling, the same as the first time.

The same feeling as when I first saw her, when I arrived all by myself, at Hoheneck.

I had to stand up there, in front of the locked cell.

And from a distance, I heard them arrive, walking up the stairs.

So many women, in those strange shoes, on the metal stairs.

It was such a creepy sound.

And they arrived at the top,

and I saw this woman, this dwarf, this face…

I thought I'd never survive a day in there.

You have to do something now, you won't cope.

You were guarded by dogs

and led along in handcuffs…

And I think, what…

What did this do to me, that I'm not aware of.

As far as I'm concerned, they had violated existing law.

It was important to me that they behaved correctly and followed our orders.

In principle, that meant observing the house rules.

Nothing impossible was asked of them.

When I think that they were just a little older than me…

I wonder if I could do that, assert my opinion so vehemently,

to the point of possibly risking my future.

I do admire that, in a way. But they are still my parents.

I think they get angry that when we discuss the GDR at school,

we are taught a glorified version of life in the GDR.

They get angry when we come home and say:

"Yeah, we heard about it, it sounds fun."

And then we watched movies, like Good Bye Lenin,

which portrays life in the GDR as fun and airy-fairy.

They get upset, because they know what it was really like.

Sometimes, they get upset about our lack of interest

when we say, "Please, not that again."

However,

dad tried to do something about it by writing books.

You can tell it's important to him to pass it on and tell the story.

At times, I felt it was difficult to read. I didn't enjoy reading it.

I always had a mental picture of my dad and that was difficult.

When you read a book, you want your imagination to run free

rather than seeing a particular person. That's why I found it difficult.

It's different imagining someone else going through this, but…

with this image…

Yeah.

In the Federal Chancellery, there's a painting by A. R. Penck.

It's called: All problems of the past will have to be solved in the future.

And I think that's it.

Our children are carrying our burden,

and we can't really help them resolve it.

We can only do one thing, step back and not get in the way.

At some point, in the '80s, Sebastian said to me,

"Hey mom, you're not my real mom. You're just my friend."

Well, what could I say?

It's praise and rebuke all at once.

And…

I guess it stayed like that.

Me always trying to be strong may have affected him.

But could I afford to be weak?

I don't know.

I've thought a lot about that day, when…

I almost said, "when we were arrested." When he was arrested…

No, when I was arrested!

Was I right to act strong?

I said, mom has to go to work, and bye.

Grandma and grandpa will come, and Gabi will get you,

and it may take a long time, I have to go with the men.

Or could I have afforded to collapse,

knowing that this would have shocked him.

I believe I did the right thing.

Even though, in the eyes of this little boy…

a normal situation developed.

"Mommy is going away. Mommy will be back soon."

This "soon," for him,

lasted longer than his life had been up to then.

For him, this time must have been incredibly deep and incredibly long

as perhaps no adult can imagine.

And only he suffers from it. But I cannot heal him.

I can offer what I did, to say to him,

"I went to Mr. Crazy." That's what I called the psychiatrist.

"You can go there, too. He is a professional, not a victim."

I don't believe…

that two one-legged persons will make a good sprinter

just because they have two legs between them.

They still only have one leg each.

That's why, as his mother, I still can't help.

Sure, those times have passed.

However, it's always there, always part of the picture.

The sense that I don't need to feel guilty towards my child.

I didn't leave him or put him into a children's home.

Others were responsible for that, and I still have that feeling.

Still, this feeling

of guilt and responsibility remains.