The tragic story of the hippy who died defying the Stasi

Telegraph

a day ago

Matthias Domaschk was only 23 years old when his body was found dangling from a heating pipe in a Stasi prison, on April 12 1981. Two days earlier, Matthias, known as 'Matz' to his friends, had boarded the fast train from his home town of Jena to East Berlin, the capital of East Germany, or the German Democratic Republic as it was officially known. All he had wanted to do was attend a birthday party there – but he never arrived.
Suspicious that Matz might have plans to disrupt the 10th Congress of the ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED) held in Berlin that weekend, the Stasi had him and his friends arrested en route. Forty-eight hours later, Matz was dead. Attempts to revive the young man were in vain. The Stasi recorded his death as suicide, but many of his friends and relatives suspected, and still suspect, foul play.
But that isn't the point of Generation GDR: Truth, Freedom and One Man's Last Journey, a book written in German by Peter Wensierski and translated seamlessly into English by Jamie Bulloch. It's about the life of Matthias Domaschk, and the one thing that is certain about his death: Matz died desperate and alone, in a place that had broken his spirit. A veteran journalist, Wensierski is uniquely positioned to investigate this story. He began his career in 1979 with reports from the GDR and has spent decades chronicling the inner workings of the post-war state. It's likely down to his journalistic credentials, too, that Wensierski has prioritised readability over academic accountability, choosing to drop footnotes – despite studying around 60,000 pages of archival material – as well as reconstructing some of the speech and thought processes of Matz and those close to him.
As a result, Generation GDR reads as an intimate portrait of Matz's search for personal freedom, ground up by one of the most pervasive surveillance systems in human history. Supported by a network of police officers, teachers and citizen informants, the Stasi had begun to destroy Matz's life long before it ended. From the regime's point of view, he had belonged to the most dangerous type of opponent: he didn't want to leave East Germany but rather wanted to stay and reform it. With his long hair, hippyish clothes and a commune-type lifestyle, he resisted the petit bourgeois ideals of his elders.
Like many other Left-wingers of his generation, Matz didn't want the GDR to dissolve, nor for it to become capitalist. 'The lot that we drew when we were born was the half of Germany in which we had fewer freedoms and fewer opportunities. But the whole time we hoped that the future was on our side, that socialism was the more progressive society,' Wensierski writes, reconstructing Matz's thoughts. 'The dinosaurs in the SED currently in power in Berlin simply haven't got it right.'
So Matz began asking awkward questions in school. Like so many others, his father had been coerced to join the ruling SED party in exchange for an uninterrupted career and certain privileges, such as travel to foreign countries for work. When Matz was 13, he asked his teachers why his father had been forced to join when surely all SED members should do so out of true conviction. His parents were immediately summoned to the school.
Matz later became involved in the Junge Gemeinde, a Protestant youth organisation, where he met like-minded people who became both friends and lovers. When the singer and regime-critic Wolf Biermann, who had emigrated to the GDR from Hamburg as a teenager, was expatriated in 1976, Matz joined the vociferous protests coming from artists and intellectuals all over East Germany against the regime's decision. This was when the Stasi interrogated him for the first time.
Determined not to cow under the pressure, Matz continued to support arrested comrades. He travelled to Czechoslovakia and Poland, where he met more like-minded young people. Here, Wensierski sketches a life full of youthful idealism. Moments of pristine happiness sit alongside moments of deep depression. The Stasi never let Matz out of their sight, narrowing his room to build a free life more and more. Just before gaining his A-level equivalents, Matz was expelled from class, barring his access to university education.
Things eventually became too much for his estranged partner Renate, who was also constantly harassed by the Stasi. She eventually decided to live in West Germany with their young daughter Julia. By the time Matz embarked on his ill-fated journey to Berlin on April 10 1981, the Stasi suspected him of subversive activity, to the point of political terrorism. Matz was clearly well integrated into a network of friends and fellow dissidents – as became evident after his death, when more than 100 people attended his funeral, despite the Stasi's attempt to suppress the gathering.
This was a regime run by a generation of political dinosaurs whose paranoia came from a different age. Stasi boss Erich Mielke himself had been trained in political terrorism in Moscow in the 1930s and honed his skills during the Spanish Civil War. Now he ran the Stasi, still seeing shadows of his own behaviour in a new generation that had grown up in peacetime and without Stalinist schooling.
Just over a week before Matz died in one of his prisons, Mielke gave a speech to his staff in which he outlined his belief that there were six types of citizens, ranging from outright 'enemies' with a 'hostile-negative attitude' to those 'on whom can party and state depend at all times'. The latter was the only positive category out of six. It was this deep-seated mistrust of its own people that drove the regime to curtail the life opportunities of people such as Matz.
As the author points out, Matz was a young man who would have challenged authority in any system. Born in 1957, he belonged to a generation of intellectuals keen to unshackle 'themselves from the authoritarian spirit of post-war society, battling their parents' conformity and apathy'. In contrast to Western democracies, the GDR left little room for alternative lifestyles.
In that respect, the title of the English translation does this book no favours. This isn't a book about an entire generation but about those who chose lives that differed from the mainstream. Much to the frustration of civil rights campaigners, most people in the GDR simply tried to get on with their lives, considering people like Matz troublemakers. Most East Germans did what they felt they had to, which is why there were no uprisings between the major eruptions of unrest in 1953 and 1989. Wensierski's book, then, is about the impossibility of a different life in the GDR, about the hostility those who chose not to blend in encountered not just from the Stasi but also from their peers.
In his research of this story, Wensierski found himself reminded of his earlier 'work on the 1950s and 1960s in West Germany, when almost a million young people were put into children's homes because they didn't correspond to the desired norm'. Whether in East Germany, West Germany, Britain or America, Wensierski muses, long-haired youths like Matz were told to 'Have a wash! Get yourself a job!' But there's no moral equivalence between such attitudes in West Germany and the way Matz's spirit was broken by the GDR, and Wensierski doesn't claim this either.
Though it details events that occurred nearly half a century ago, Generation GDR reads like a cautionary tale for our time. Speaking to 30 former Stasi agents, the author found himself baffled by how those 'who destroyed other people's lives' found it possible to 'believe that they were part of building a more humane society'. His villains aren't shadowy figures in grey cloaks but complex humans who did what they did out of opportunism, idealism or coercion.
We live in an age where many people in positions of authority feel their own outlook to be morally superior and that other views and lifestyles should not be aired or encouraged. Today, voices are also silenced, careers destroyed and life chances diminished, all in the name of building a 'kinder' future. Generation GDR delivers a powerful warning from history – against the curtailment of individual freedoms in the name of a supposed greater good.
★★★★☆