Carlo Jordan in Berlin’s Stasi Museum on Erich Mielke’s square
Photo: imago/Rolf Zöllner
Some time ago, a neighbor received several calls and emails from people who were lovingly outraged. What happened? The man who lives in the house across the street had violated the “calorie embargo” they had imposed on their friend. “You can’t just go shopping for him,” they said, “even if he asks you to.”
Carlo Jordan was sick, very sick. The heart and lungs had gone on strike, but things had gone well again. After several weeks in the hospital, he was finally back home at Fehrbelliner Straße 7 in Berlin. A historical address: It was the first squat in the capital of the GDR, in 1981!
His friends had made a plan about who would look after him and when. They had put the seventy-one-year-old on a strict diet so that he would lose at least a few kilos. The late devastation had almost cost him his life. From now on only healthy food, preferably organic. – And then this! Black pudding, Lyonnais, a can of breakfast meat, chocolate, etc. Two full carrier bags! And the man didn’t want to know anything about the “food sanctions against Carlo.”
Carlo Jordan was a wonderful person. The author met him over thirty years ago at a sit-in in front of the Ravensbrück Memorial. At that time, Tengelmann wanted to build a supermarket on the concentration camp’s old roll call area. The locals were very angry with us, there were attacks, Dark Germany. But in the end the company gave in. Carlo Jordan was a good organizer. When he spoke, in his calm and warm-hearted manner, people listened to him. That year he was a member of the Berlin House of Representatives for Alliance 90/Greens, but only as a replacement. He later ran a few times, including in the European elections, but never got a promising place on the list. The other civic activists felt the same way. With the exception of Werner Schulz with the Greens and Marion Seelig with the PDS or Left Party, no GDR opposition member was able to stay in paid politics. (Joachim Gauck was never in the opposition.)
In the handbooks on GDR history we can read that Carlo Jordan was a “veteran” of the ecological-pacifist opposition, one of the formative personalities of the Peaceful Revolution: co-founder of the environmental library in the Zionskirche in East Berlin and later of the green-ecological network Arche, which is in a certain way considered a forerunner of the Green Party, whose representative he was at the Central Round Table of the GDR. Instead, in February 1990, Matthias Platzek became minister without portfolio for the Greens in the Modrow government, which was voted out the following month. At the time of reunification, the politician Jordan had no real power – but great influence.
Born on February 5, 1951 in Berlin as Karl-Heinz Jordan and grew up in the Friedrichshain district, he first completed an apprenticeship as a carpenter and then studied civil engineering at the technical school, which qualified him as a construction manager at the Charité. During the distance learning course at Humboldt University, he added several more semesters of philosophy, until he was forced to exmatriculate because he had taken sides with the Polish Solidarność.
Carlo Jordan was already in the opposition when there was no such opposition in the “workers’ and farmers’ state.” After Oskar Brüsewitz publicly burned himself in Zeitz in the late summer of 1976, Jordan was one of the 25 signatories to a petition to the Central Committee protesting against the “New Germany.” The central organ had defamed the dead priest in a vile manner. After a house search, Carlo Jordan was arrested, but was released after a few days. The historian Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk writes that he lost his job as a construction manager on the large Charité construction site because Jordan was now considered a “security risk” because of the hospital’s proximity to the West Berlin border.
The letter to Honecker said at the time: “We are not Christians, but socialists and are committed to Marxism; That is precisely why we oppose a practice that involves violating the personal dignity of someone who thinks differently in order to avoid political debate with them.
In the next few days he wanted to go to Ahrenshoop for rehab, recover and live a healthy life. Carlo Jordan was found dead in his apartment on Wednesday morning. He leaves behind a daughter and a son.
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