Roman “Society with Limited Hope” – GDR: Completely fell out of the country

Your novel begins with a sloping wedding. The guitar solo comes from the pulpit, long -haired people in the butcher shirt fill a small church, all roar in time. Right in the middle of wheelchairs, in one of the preachers, in another his sister, the bride. You got married yourself shortly before this novel was published. Does this make a circle in your life?

Or it opens up. It feels good.

At the end of the novel, thank your wife for five years. Did it take so long to write about it?

Any one has his time. Some novels need a little longer. I worked with Matthias Vernaldi in various projects for years, the model for Gruns. I already took the stories with me. Matthias Vernaldi was one of the founders of the municipality in Hartroda. At the end of the 1970s, the spinal muscular atrophy, who had been dead with friends early on with friends, and sister moved into an abandoned rectory in Thuringia. They found a “crippled community”, four of them physically do not correspond to the norm. Vernali as a remote -studied theologian becomes a village preacher and Hartroda attraction for »Latscher« and dropout. The dropouts are eluded by the compulsion of work of the GDR by taking care of the physically impaired. After the reunification, all residents gradually leave the municipality, Vernaldi moves to Berlin. He argues for disabled rights and sex workers, lives three times as long as forecast and dies in 2020 in the age of 60.

What were these projects that you fought together?

We founded the magazine “Mondskalb – magazine for organized ailments” and had a show outdoors: “Krüppel from the sack”. He told a lot. And I always saved it so unconsciously and only noticed what kind of good fabric it is when I wrote his obituary for the “Tagesspiegel”.

The Evangelical Church in West Germany supported the project in Hartroda with donations, while the East German church offered legal protection, sometimes grinding her teeth. As a historian, they are a connoisseur of the GDR church history, have received his doctorate on Oskar Brüsewitz. Is it important to tell about the church in socialism?

I believe that we do not understand the GDR history without knowledge of the history of East German Protestantism. In the Soviet area, the SED was the only communist party that was dealing with an Evangelical majority church when it came to power. It can be very stubborn.

What was special about the church in the GDR from today’s perspective?

The opposite world that arose there in the late 1970s. It was unique in the Eastern Bloc, except maybe Poland. In the area of ​​the Evangelical Church you could talk to people on all topics, also on socio -political questions. I always went to the young community secretly. I was in Frankfurt (Oder) at a technical school for economy and no longer endured this FDJ shit. Otherwise there were no structures in the GDR where people came to a critical exchange. That was not intended. There were not even the anonymous alcoholics, although people drank like that. More has to be told of this church niche. The GDR otherwise gets worse in the literature every year.

They fictionalize these niches that fit into the whole civil movements and subcultures, a complex world of Hartroda Communities including blues band-which plays in the church, develop freely according to the facts. Is there a real role model for this?

In the zero years I moved around with the band Freygang, for which I even wrote a text. With the head of the band, André Greiner-Pohl, which roughly corresponds to “iron” in the novel, I often drove to his house in the Silesian low mountain range. Always only for two nights. We haven’t endured each other longer. We then drank beer and played chess. And he told. I also experienced some trips in Freygang-Tourbus, the whole sexist shit that has been used to do so. They even torn short-arm jokes (pointing on his crippled arm).

Could people who do not physically meet the norm in the GDR a self -determined life?

The GDR was different at different times. And I am born in 1969, a different generation than Vernaldi. At the age of twelve I came to a boarding school in Lichtenberg, with my own swimming pool! Something better couldn’t have happened to me. I have learned social skills that I would not have received in my parents’ house.

In addition to grans and iron, there is a third main character in her novel, the former border guards Bernd Morzek.

During the research on my books “1976” and “The Brüsewitz” case, I discovered the Corghi case (Benito Corghi, Italian long -distance driver and communist, fatalities at the inner German border; editor). The thought moved me: What about the shooter? How do you continue to live when you shot a person in your back at 80 meters?

Was there a real template for the Sermons of Gruns in the novel, have Matthias Vernali sermons preserved?

I modeled that. For example, in the Gospel of Matthew, I came across the parable of the workers in the vineyard: the cancellation of performance justice. Justice means fulfilling people. I also dealt with Heino Falcke’s theology, who criticized the state early on without being able to criminalize it. I took over his chain of arguments for the Pawel Kortschagin sermon. (laughs)

Punks suddenly appear in Hartroda that trampled everywhere. The chaos moves in with them. And a punk band with a drummer. Why punks?

I envied them. I wanted to tell a good story, but I had to alienate reality. I was inspired by Otze from Muceleim germ a bit. I always had it in my head, as Conny Schleims talked about Otze: that he plays drums as if he slaughtered a pig. And Crazy Horst is a mixture of one of the Freygang guitarists and Georg Timber-Trattnig, the brilliant theater poet and basser of Naked Lunch. It hit himself dead. They had to tie it into the band bus so that it does not reach into the steering wheel. The punks were not my scene, but I had to build a counterweight to the blues. And it was fun. Lately, so much literature about punk has appeared in the GDR that you think that was a mass movement. I thought I put it in the right solder again. If you have decided to become a punk in GDR times, you have said goodbye to a life with a future. In the GDR there was nothing more of you. With every rebellion, every disobedience, first of all, you have harmed yourself, in a very own way, with every contradiction. If I had known that the GDR only existed for a few more years, what do you think how brave I would have been!

The Stasi was particularly sharp on these radical people, which plays a role in the novel. It is important to them that you differentiate. But can that heal? Do we have a chance to really talk to each other and to forgive?

I am afraid for that. I noticed this in the Left Party’s historical commission that you are not interested in a discourse on the GDR. You have to have the right conversations at the right time. At Freygang, they had at least three musicians in the changing line-up of the zero years, but besides the roadie, nobody was ready to talk about it. André (Greiner-Pohl) himself mentioned it in his book, but then declared the debate over. This had consequences: If I as a music journalist at a band that had been forbidden in the GDR for a long time, I shouldn’t ask about the entanglements of individual members, even though it belongs to the story, I will keep my hands off it. Freygang no longer appeared in the scene press. And then it is good if this experience is saved at least in the literature.

Shortly before the publication, the Matthias Versaldi Prize for self-determined life was given-as if Matthias Vernaldi still had the last word. When were you in Hartroda for the first time?

My place of action no longer exists. Maybe I’ve never been to Hartroda. This is the nice thing when you are a writer. To travel, I don’t have to go away.

Karsten Krampitz: “Society with limited hope”, Edition Nautilus, 200 pages, born, € 22.