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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
It was a bold, ambitious and wildly arrogant idea: extending the reach of communism into space. Spurred on by the defeat of Hitler and the competitive rivalry with the United States, the Soviet space programme saw a frenetic surge of scientific activity focused on the objective of demonstrating Communist mastery beyond the confines of the Earth. In order to create the optimally standardized bodies that cosmonauts would require, top secret military laboratories were set up in 1970s East Germany. The New Man – the modern colonist of space – was intensively trained for the purpose of surviving years of weightlessness in outer space. Experiments were carried out in prisons, hospitals and army barracks with the aim of creating the perfect body: self-sufficient and able to endure extreme conditions for as long as possible. In order to exert dominance over space, it was first necessary to exert total control over those who were being trained to conquer it.
Ines Geipel unravels this largely unknown and extraordinary history by delving into East German military records and talking to those who bear the scars of this state-inflicted trauma. Some of the older scientists conducting experiments had already served under the Nazi regime; others threw themselves into collaborating with the Stasi via the military research programme in order to avoid dealing with the war’s emotional legacy. Written like a thriller and infused with empathy from someone who had herself experienced the debilitating effects of state-administered doping programmes in the former GDR, this book exposes some of the most disturbing episodes in Germany’s recent past.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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CONTENTS
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Quote 1
Unknown soldier
Notes
Quote 2
The New Man
Notes
Quote 3
Cybernetic lanterns
Notes
Quote 4
No admission for unauthorized persons
Notes
Quote 5
Weightlessness
Notes
Quote 6
Coupling manoeuvre
Notes
Quote 7
Abrek and Bion
Notes
Quote 8
Cosmic microwave background radiation
Notes
Quote 9
Suitable ground models
Notes
Quote 10
We are the first
Notes
Quote 11
Revolution of the apes
Notes
Quote 12
Back to the future
Notes
Bibliography
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Begin Reading
Bibliography
Index
End User License Agreement
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Beautiful New Sky
Fabricating Bodies for Outer Space in East Germany’s Military Laboratories
INES GEIPEL
Translated by Nick Somers
polity
First published in German as Schöner neuer Himmel. Aus dem Militärlabor des Ostens © 2022 Klett-Cotta – J. G. Cotta’sche Buchhandlung Nachfolger GmbH, gegr. 1659, Stuttgart
This English translation © Polity Press, 2024
The translation of this book was supported by a grant from the Goethe-Institut.
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6000-4
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2024935057
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Acknowledgements
My thanks go first to Jacob, without whom this book would not have been written. Jacob is not his real name, but his story is authentic.
The research for this book was complex. I should like therefore to thank the archivists at the Freiburg Military Archive, the Federal Archive in Berlin, the archive of the Academy of Sciences in Berlin, the State Archives in Schwerin, the State Archives in Rudolstadt, the Stasi Documents Authority in Schwerin and the library of the German Aerospace Centre in Berlin-Adlershof for making available archive documents, for pointing me in the right directions and their friendly assistance.
Once again I should like to thank my publishers for their belief in the idea of the book, for their support and material and practical generosity. Above all my thanks go to my editor Tom Kraushaar, my proof-reader Christine Treml, naturally Katharina Wilts, Verena Knapp, Marion Heck and everyone at Klett-Cotta who made this book possible in the first place.
And as ever nothing would have been possible without friends. I thank Eva-Maria Otte for helping with the arduous search for material, for her initial proofreading, her precise ideas, her tweaking but also for her dramaturgical reliability. I thank Andreas Petersen for his love, for his care and his moral support. I thank Rena Krebs for her time and indefatigable support. I thank Gerit Decke for her inspiration and long friendship. And I thank Dorit Linke for our runs in the Volkspark and her constant encouragement.
IG, February 2022
The emotional state of a person can be assessed on the basis of the timbre and volume, speech tempo, choice of words and sentence structure. The aim of the ‘speech’ experiment is to assess the subject’s functional state under real flight conditions by examining the frequency and amplitude characteristics of GDR cosmonauts when pronouncing the number ‘226’ in German (in the transcription ‘zwo sechsundzwanzig’). The ‘speech’ experiment is intended to further perfect the medical monitoring of cosmonauts’ health status in flight.
BArch (Berlin), DY 30/69605, p. 89, unnumbered
Unknown soldier
Dual text. 26 April 2018. The day began like days that you can’t ever forget often do: normal, bright, sunny. In Berlin. A normal sky, normal coffee. I had to go into the city. A press conference was scheduled for 11 o’clock. On the podium three women. They were going to tell their stories. I was the moderator and was prepared accordingly.
Today is 26 April 2021. Exactly three years ago, something entered my life. That’s what people say looking back. I clearly remember standing at the front of the stage during the press conference. In the room were a large number of media representatives. To my right, the three women. At some point I stepped back two or three paces so that I could see them from behind. As if their backs would also speak, I thought. As if it were possible to be in front and behind at the same time. As if the two were distinct from one another. A kind of dual text. The women spoke of abuse and violence in sport. Calmly, clearly, forcefully. At least that’s what it must have sounded like in the room. They said what they had to say. The journalists asked their questions. It sounded like a completely normal press conference.
26 April 2021. I am sitting at the kitchen table and start writing this down. I think about a report. The first image is the backs, the second the e-mail I received twelve hours after the press conference. I have it in front of me. It says: ‘OK, sweetie, you’ve had your fun. Much too long, in our opinion. Now it’s our turn and it won’t be fun. No stone will be left unturned. You can bank on it. U.S.’
I sometimes get e-mails that start with ‘sweetie’. Hello, sweetie, or listen, sweetie, or hey, sweetie. I print them out and keep them in a special binder. As far as I’m concerned, they are eyewitness accounts. The sweetie mail of 26 April 2018 had the e-mail address unknownsoldier@ – and didn’t end up in the binder. It remained on my desk. Unknown soldier. It was evidently meant to sound important, some kind of secret mission. But what was to be made of it? Was someone trying to frighten me? And why? Wasn’t it going a bit far? When I think back to the situation today, I imagine Gerhard Richter’s cloudy pictures. Blurred, out of focus, without clear contours. But perhaps there’s no need for a picture. Perhaps I should just try to write down what happened.
The unknown soldier. It called to mind the grave of the unknown soldier in Canberra that I visited years ago. All the red flowers on the wall. They were poppies. Later I thought of camouflage dress, lowered visors, and my father. Almost fifteen years working for Department IV of the State Security, military training, spy, border crosser, West agent with eight different identities. He was the unknown soldier in my head. But was that necessary just because of another stupid e-mail? I hesitated. The thing with the East. It hadn’t got any easier over the years. Something had come back, shifted, moving in an endless loop. At least that’s how I felt. Twenty years ago it had seemed sorted, with dissertations, detailed research and investigation. But now it was as unsettled as ever. Slippery, vague, bottomless. More and more the East looked as if it were being questioned out of existence, rewritten, filtered out, reinterpreted.
If you ask people who know about it, they speak strangely of a Restoration, but they seem tired of it all. What remains of a country and a system that no longer exists? What was its core? What is its legacy if not just personal memories? And why unknown soldier? Who wanted to make their presence felt again? My gaze rested on the two letters U.S. Strange. More so, because the unknown soldier was evidently alluding to what had been occupying me for some time.
Pneumatic. I always have my Mac with me when I travel. That way I can reconstruct fairly well where and when I was in a particular institution, office or archive. According to the computer, in the week before 26 April 2018, I was in the military archive in Freiburg. I like going there. The days in that place are somehow pleasantly ritualized: the entrance door matt white, metal, matter-of-fact. The pneumatic sound, delicate, scraping. A cold suction noise as it closes. Click. I have to pass a checkpoint and them I’m inside.
That April three years ago was hot, the Freiburg reading room a refrigerator. I had socks with me. The files I wanted were on the checkout counter. The man who slid them towards me smiled kindly. I took the pile. Was that the beginning? There was a term I’d had in my head for some time: military-industrial complex, known in German as MIK. During the GDR days we had often joked about it. When we passed a Russian barracks, we said MIK. Whenever there was the silvery smell of radiation, we called it MIK. Restricted areas, black holes in the system – that was MIK. What did it mean? Who could we have asked?
Polytrauma. In 1989 MIK was gone. Disappeared, like so much else? But somehow MIK was stuck inside me and had a life of its own. Virtual Eye, the bionic brain GPS, Sea Hunter, the Mars cities planned by NASA – whenever I heard or read something to do with military and research, these three letters came into my mind like flashes of light. At some point I thought that whatever it was, it was material that was worth looking into. And also, how come we know so little about it? Or am I the only one who knows nothing about it? That’s why I decided to go to Freiburg. If there was anything to find out about MIK, that would be the place. I looked on the Internet and discovered that Freiburg was where everything to do with the GDR military research complex, or at least what was left of it, was kept. Documents on Bad Saarow Military Medical Academy and the Central Military Hospital, Königsbrück Institute of Aerospace Medicine, Stralsund Navy Medicine Institute, the Academy of Sciences, the Interkosmos programme. Holdings transferred to the Freiburg Military Archive from the Bundeswehrkommando Ost, which only existed from October 1990 to June 1991. MIK. Like investigating an imprecise memory, something that had always been there without ever being questioned. An obsolete fantasy, a relic of the Cold War, a conspiracy theory? Perhaps it had rather to do with what is inside us. With the bloodhound of history, which picks up the scent and trots off because that’s what it does, with its nose to the ground.
The air conditioning clanks. In front of me the files, the catalogue numbers. I look out of the window. Where am I? In April 2018. A bank of early summer clouds drifts gracefully past the archive window. I think of temptation, inertia, overview and distance. I’m sitting over fragile pieces of paper. Archives are strange places. In effect time capsules. Someone shuts out the here and now, draws you down a long corridor, hangs around for a while and then stops in front of something that happened in the past but hasn’t found its place. It’s still on its way, not yet landed.
On my order list for the archive week in April 2018: ‘clinical picture and treatment of selected sabotage poisons’, ‘consequences of ionizing radiation on tissue’, ‘new findings on panic in battle’, ‘placenta research’, ‘medical preparation of cosmonaut candidates’, ‘psychiatric aspects of suicide attempts by prisoners’, ‘blood substitutes’, ‘performance-oriented uses of women’, ‘polytrauma’.1 Items in the digital ordering system that caught my eye. But where to start? With sky. Definitely there. With the question of habitable zones and extraterrestrial life. With something that is bigger, older, more infinite than anything we can imagine. Isn’t there something that exists even without us?
Isolation chamber. ‘Human beings remain the most universal, flexible and important component of a control system, whereby an effectively coordinated distribution of functions between humans and machines improves the reliability of the overall system.’2 This is the first sentence of the postdoctoral thesis by Hans Haase, an aerospace medicine specialist born in 1937, from the Institute for Aerospace Medicine in Königsbrück, just a few kilometres from Dresden. The institute, a facility of the National People’s Army (NVA), was answerable to the Ministry of National Defence. Haase was its deputy director and sometime chair of the Cosmic Biology and Medicine working group3 within the Interkosmos programme. He also supervised Major General Sigmund Jähn, the first German in space, who orbited the Earth in summer 1978. Haase defended his cosmonaut thesis in November 1988. During the intervening ten years, not only in Königsbrück, there was a ‘systematic study of aerospace medicine projects’, as stated in the minutes of a meeting of the Leibniz Sozietät der Wissenschaften zu Berlin in 2008.4
A system within a system that was systematically researched. What was that about? Space travel is the ultimate heroic project, complete with smiling photos and a good portion of national pride. Perhaps it’s the rigid spacesuits, the anachronistic outfits, which have somehow always prevented me from taking all of the space exploration images seriously. Lots of waving from the capsule, floating gently in space, wide-legged hops on the moon. As if watching an ecstatic group of people fooling around in nowhere land, protected only by the universe. But what were we actually seeing?
Haase’s cosmonaut study offers a precise date for a reality check: 1 October 1976. On that day, seven men – the shortlist following a tough selection procedure involving three hundred GDR military pilots – travelled to the Königsbrück Institute of Military Medicine. In the following weeks, each of them was to undergo a battery of personal hyper-tests. They were to be examined for physical fitness, technical knowledge, spatial orientation, motor skills, in other words their general suitability for space travel. After the hard weeks of testing, only four of them were sent to Star City near Moscow. In the end, just two remained: Sigmund Jähn and Eberhard Köllner. They became research cosmonauts and underwent a two-year special training programme: days spent in a soundproof isolation chamber, flight training on a MiG-21, flight simulators, special training in a chamber heated to 60 degrees Centigrade, reduced-gravity aircraft, training in a human centrifuge, training at high altitude, autogenic training, endless theoretical classes.5
Were they happy about it? Did they feel special? What was it like to be in an isolation chamber for days on end? What kind of body was going to be catapulted into space? I hear portholes, chambers, capsules closing and something getting inside me. People are walking outside on the pavement in front of the Archive. I can hear their footsteps, their voices, their laughter and think of the cheeriness of life. Inside, in the file, are the years 1976, 1977, 1978. Quiet years in the East. It was crumbling. You could hear it. I lived in a boarding school in the Thuringian Forest. When we returned after the summer holidays in early September 1976, Claudia, my friend at the time from Zeitz, talked about the Lutheran pastor Oskar Brüsewitz, who two weeks earlier had doused himself with petrol and set himself alight on the square in front of his church. A public display that left its mark. We lay in our beds and spoke about the burning man, his ‘No’ in our loud silence.
Source texts. A file is a file and initially nothing more than a chance find. If it is to be relevant sometime later for anything, it needs points of references. Source texts, contexts, a fabric in which the individual document begins to speak with others, with time, with other events. It needs a leitmotif, a mental space. Memory is not so simple, however. We tend to reshape the past in hindsight. We would like to have been the ones with the big white bows, the guardians of ambitious dreams. The cheerful ones, the strong, the leaders. We would like to have dared to stuff ourselves with worms, known how to dive head first and tussle with the boys. Hindsight doesn’t like to move in circles but prefers to tell heroic stories. But how to identify what really happened, how to confront it, tease it out, interrogate it? And what does it mean? Is it necessary? Absolutely. The abandoned legacy of the East has still not found a home or points of consensus. There are, no doubt, many reasons for this. What is still lacking is the historical context. What is lacking is a perception of the weight of experience after over fifty years of dictatorship. And despite assurances to the contrary, the necessary research is still missing. Does anyone seriously believe that we’re over it, that we can put it behind us?
I was just sixteen years old when the aeronautic medicine specialist Hans Haase investigated weightlessness in his 1976 cosmonaut study. I know where I was at the time, what I was doing, what I wanted and what I had already become. To put it another way, I can’t read the Freiburg files objectively. I’m part of it, the investigation of the time, the material, the unexplained, the silence in the relationships. That’s how it is and it can’t be changed. Over forty years have elapsed between 1976 and 2018. Even a short while ago I would have said that that’s a long time. But what sources, what contexts, what history are we so sure about that it can’t be questioned?
Everything, from the beginning. I was reminded of Jacob. A few weeks earlier, perhaps in January 2018, he had spoken to me after an event in Berlin. For five years I had been chairperson of Doping-Opfer-Hilfe, an organization that supports athletes who had been part of the dark side of sport. Mostly victims of the official doping in the GDR. What was seen and heard when the floodlights were turned off and in the time after the major competitions cannot be talked about in public. It’s not relevant. Sport is about winning, a world religion without a god, or whatever. But please don’t spoil the programme for all the spectators sitting in their homes. Sport is nice, sport is good, sport is for everyone. And the rest? Shrug the shoulders, bad luck, your own fault. Dark afterimages are not nice. It’s best if they don’t appear in the first place.
Jacob and his restless eyes, the faded jeans, the baseball cap with NY on it. His way of coming straight to the point, of taking me over to a table and starting to unpack his photos. His time as a circus acrobat. Here, he points proudly, that was me. On the photo a fine-limbed body, swinging high up under the dome of the big top. On the other side, two hands ready to catch him. Then one time it went wrong, he said, looking at me steadfastly. And then? – It was over. I was too scared and started racing.
His time as a cyclist and the next stack of photos. And certificates. And medals. I took that just as seriously as my time in the circus, he assured me. I nodded and studied him more closely for the first time. Why are you here? I asked. Jacob explained. I was in the forecourt of Dresden train station. A car arrived. We drove for almost an hour. We got out and I spent the next ten weeks in a room next to Sigmund Jähn. – Next to Sigmund Jähn? The first German cosmonaut? The man with the baseball cap pushed more photos across the table as if they would prove something. He was on one of the photos, very young, with a laurel wreath around his neck, his face sweaty and beaming. When was that? – 1974. – I mean with Sigmund Jähn? – Oh, also around that time. But I only realized it later when he kept on waving at me on the television from his space capsule.
Jacob’s eyes, his body, thin as a rake. He spoke of needles, wires, biopsies. Are you sure they did something to you? A question I needn’t have asked. That’s why he was here. He shook his head. There’s nothing, no records. I looked at his face. I’d been doing it for over five years: research, conversations, authorities, archives, at the end almost nothing, at least nothing of importance, nothing incriminating, nothing that could help someone like Jacob. It’s not about you, he broke the silence. What then? – I need to know. I need to know about the programme, everything, from the beginning. – They did something to you, you say? – Yes. – And now you want to know what they did because you’re not well?
We both looked at the same spot on the floor as if it could pull us out of this situation. Jacob took off his baseball cap. Not a hair on his head, no eyelashes, no eyebrows. You’re not interested, are you, he said dismissively. But that’s not even the point. It’s about fighting the void. That nothing is being done, no explanations, no one who will talk. As if it never happened. – But couldn’t it have been different? – How so?
Anaemic. ‘The special characteristics of space travel,’ says the Haase study, are ‘weightlessness, cosmic radiation, artificial living space, nervous and emotional tension’.6 Longing for the forests, I would have thought, or fear perhaps. But in fact I’d never really thought about it. Weightlessness for me was a trampoline or roller coaster, an elusive feeling of flying, something inevitably to do with the air. Now I read that in weightless conditions the muscles lost their strength and the blood rushed to the head. That it caused a ‘negative water balance’ and ‘acute deterioration of visual acuity’.7 Energy consumption under weightless conditions was also five times greater.
As if our earthly bodies in space took a blow to the system. Particularly muscles, bones, blood, brain. As if we headed in the sky towards a profound state of physical dementia, I thought. And added to that, being forced to stay in a hermetically sealed room, to arrange oneself in a tightly confined space, to shut down one’s body. For weeks, months, even years. It was also incredibly loud in the capsule, apparently. The machine worked continuously. The inside of the spacesuits was cold. Because the eyes don’t become heavy, it’s almost impossible to sleep. Day and night cease to exist in space. And finally the stress of ionizing radiation, flashes of light, ‘sensory hunger’.8
The air conditioning is struggling. I’m sweating. I hadn’t imagined it like that. The fact that you can’t move. Blood, bones, muscles, brain going haywire. No sleep, intensive radiation, utter boredom. Haase’s investigation makes the particular drama of the cosmic hero more like a bizarre theatrical spectacle.
Terra incognita. Five days after the first sweetie e-mail came the second one. ‘Hey, sweetie, are you getting worried? Don’t worry, we haven’t forgotten you. Just a couple of details to clear up. It’s all about the fine-tuning, as they say. U.S.’ Mails of this type often come in series. So it wasn’t really surprising. And yet, there was something. Something in the words, the tone. As if I somehow recognized where the words were coming from. Unknown soldier. Like in a Sunday evening police thriller without an ending, a shady figure with a black hood pulled over his face. The detective murmurs mystifyingly about someone who has been living in the city for a long time, maybe a refugee from the Bosnian war or Afghanistan. An old soldier who knows his trade. Someone in the shadows who has learned from scratch how to work quietly. A social outlaw who prefers to remain hidden.
Notes
1.
BArch (Freiburg Military Archive), DVW 2-1/39604, DVW 2-1/39605, DVW 2-1/39606.
2.
Hans Haase, ‘Studie zur Schaffung von Grundlagen für die Festlegung von Tauglichkeit und Eignung sowie für die medizinische Vorbereitung von Kosmonautenkandidaten der DDR’, BArch (Freiburg Military Archive), DVW 2-1/39885, p. 26.
3.
See Zentrales Archiv des Deutschen Zentrums; documents unnumbered, no page reference possible.
4.
Winfried Papenfuß, ‘Der Beitrag des Instituts für Luftfahrtmedizin Königsbrück zur raumfahrtmedizinischen Forschung’, Sizungsberichte der Leibniz-Sozietät, Berlin, vol. 96 (2008), p. 97.
5.
Haase, ‘Tauglichkeit’, BArch, DVW 2-1/39885, p. 294.
6.
Ibid., p. 27.
7.
Ibid., pp. 113 ff.
8.
Ibid., pp. 213 ff.
What do cosmonauts eat? Most of the food is like on Earth. There are seventy products available, packed in portions, with 65 per cent in dehydrated form. Eating from tubes is already a thing of the past in manned space flight. The only products still in tubes are fruit juices or concentrates, puree and paste-like items. This is because of the special features of food intake under weightless conditions. No crumbs or drops of fluid can be allowed to escape into the cabin atmosphere, because if inhaled they could lead to serious complications.
Zentrales Archiv des Deutschen Zentrums für Luft- und Raumfahrt e.V., Göttingen, BAAR, A872, unnumbered.
The New Man
Sense of wellbeing and total experience. What did Jacob have to do with Sigmund Jähn? Did I have something to do with the unknown soldier, and if so, how come? Where was the link? Today, three years later, these questions are no longer relevant. In April 2018, however, I was completely in the dark. All I had was the cosmonaut study. And I was stuck there.
‘Humanity is taking the first steps towards overcoming geocentrism as the prevailing and historically conditioned world view of humanity,’ it says on page 23. It continues by asserting that it is a question of ‘overcoming organ-based thinking’.1 But what would that look like? Were the organs placed neatly side by side and only lined up in front of the worn-out heart for the daily briefing?
The New Body and the various concepts promoted in the past century. A lot has been said about this. I’m talking about the new perceptions and new realities of the individual within the new collective. In every case there must have been a specific date and location for the laboratory assistants and designers in the various research complexes. They will have sat down, discussed and thought about the issues. The most important decisions, as in most cases of this sort, will not have been written down. And then, what happened next?
‘One day you can tell all this to anyone who is willing to listen. No one will believe you.’2 A line from the film The Serpent’s Egg by Ingmar Bergman. I saw it in autumn 1980 in Jena. I was twenty years old at the time. I can still recall what I felt as I watched it, or rather the fact that I didn’t want this feeling. As if something was getting too close to me. The images, the nervousness, the excessiveness, the swirling. ‘Through the thin membranes, you can clearly discern the already perfect reptile.’ This sentence seemed to me like a code, just as the entire film was evidently conceived as a code. Life as if in a cocoon, the walls, the mirrors, the cameras behind them. It was a mild evening when I came out of the cinema. I waited at the bus stop and took the bus to a satellite community near the autobahn. Something in me preserved the film like a canned product, like a place in my mind.
Words are sometimes so delicate that they want to dissolve. The thin membrane. We look back from the present to the previous century. We would like to have been special, balanced, well-disposed, gentle. But how to make out the thin membrane in all this, how to defend it, how to keep on resisting it at all? The New Man and Communism. That was my starting point. That’s where I come from. The desire afterwards to talk about it as accurately as possible from the very beginning. There probably wasn’t a precise starting point. The fear of not being able to talk about it accurately enough, of not getting it right. Communism as utopia, promise, illusion, myth, madness, crime. Communism as reality. As a concrete experience in time, as a concrete life in a particular place, as a perception, as a feeling, as a physical sensation. What it means in principle for all of life to be controlled from a single centre. In return, every thought, every movement, every feeling in society was directed towards it. The world as a total experience.
I am sitting in Freiburg and looking at the 1970s in the East. The time oozes out of the words. It still tastes today of utopian innocence. Better, more cheerful, more peaceful, more unified. More progressive. A dense rhetorical forest. What is between the words and not expressed in the letters is also there. But what does it signify? And above all, what does it mean today? As if the reality could be pushed beyond the limits of the words.
The 1970s. We wore bell-bottoms, platform shoes and surreal hairstyles. Biermann’s expatriation in 1976 and Charter 77 in Prague a year later. And, finally, August 1978 and Sigmund Jähn in space. An unparalleled propaganda coup. While the first German orbited the Earth 125 times, compulsory military training was introduced in all schools in the country. Girls now also learned how to shoot. They marched, threw hand grenades, tackled assault courses with gas masks, rescued their fellow pupils from burning bunkers. Later, before lights out in the military camp, we turned our boots at the end of the bed towards the West. We lay awake and waited for the camp commander’s shrill whistle in the corridor. It told us that we were about to go on a night-time run to throw back the enemy.
State trauma. The week in Freiburg. The press conference just a few days later. A normal day in Berlin. I drove to the university, met friends, worked in the Doping-Opfer-Hilfe advice centre. The second Compensation Act was in full swing. I was thinking of Jacob and everything about him. Johanna with the nervous blotches on her face, who sent us a letter every three months in which she wrote that there was a crack in her life that couldn’t be papered over. Karla, now a successful senior doctor in Leverkusen, who overnight couldn’t run anymore and spent the evenings crying in the gymnasiums of her childhood. My role was to listen and just to be there.
The major trial of those responsible for the official GDR doping programme took place in 2000 in Berlin. Twenty former female athletes and one male athlete testified and were questioned in court. I was one of the co-plaintiffs. The first Compensation Act covered almost 200 former athletes; with the second law there were almost 2,000. Numbers are numbers. But between them is a wound. It can only tell its story, stutteringly, partially, sketchily. It has to overcome many holes and obstacles. And yet this wound just got bigger over the years.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, there were drawn-out investigations, then lots of research, trials, sentences, ultimately compensation. At first it was about understanding and scandal, but then the focus shifted increasingly to those who had been used by the system. The question of what the compulsory official doping did to people’s lives, the violence, abuse, dependence, destabilization. These facets gradually became better known. I regarded it as my job to help make a political issue of this physical state trauma, to draw attention to it and to ensure that it was not forgotten.
Radiating bodies. But where did the official physical conditioning in the East come from? What was behind it? What ideas, what hopes, what realities? The New Man as an anthropological dream loop, as a constantly transforming hope, as a great exculpatory narrative. Healing through renewal, solace through nature, much vitalist manna, the belief in the true society, the ultimate escape project. It was in this optimistic mood that a shaky Europe set out in the twentieth century and transformed its old belief in the afterlife into social utopias in the here and now. In particular, the two political religions – Nazism and Communism – based their promise of salvation on Christian traditions, which they fed into their radicalizing programmes.
