From Schoolmarm to Revolutionary:
Annaliese Saupe, Old “New Teacher” and Local Heroine
“Oma der Revolution,” a neighborhood child calls her. “Grandmother of the Revolution.” And that she is: a revolutionary in love with the past, a revolutionary in love with a bygone Germany.
When I first met Annaliese Saupe in 1987, I had no idea that she had been such a hell-raiser: blacklisted by the Nazis, vocal critic of SED educational policies, fired for insubordination by SED school authorities. Nor could I have guessed what would lay ahead for her only two years in the future, when she would be lionized by neighbors for her derring-do against the SED during the Revolution of the Candles. With her hair coiled into a huge white bun on top of her head, her large brown eyes and quick smile, her slight limp and walking cane, her encyclopedic knowledge of grocery prices past and present, her antiquarian’s passion for the history of her native region, her enduring love affair with Goethe and Schiller: Annaliese Saupe seems much like a Hausfrau and history schoolmarm—which is also just what she has been.
I met Frau Saupe in 1987 at a Goethe Institute talk near Freiburg, where she gave a presentation on Goethe’s daily routine in Weimar. Struck by Frau Saupe’s vibrance and energy, I struck up an acquaintance with her. Already 75 years old, she was a dynamo who could easily pass for a woman in her early 60s. She invited me to visit her in her hometown of Plauen, a small Saxony city of 85,000 in the old German region of Vogtland. But the paperwork for my tourist visa to East Germany dragged on beyond my six-week visit in West Germany, and I returned to the United States disappointed.
Nonetheless, we wrote each other, and in early December 1990, during the week of the first free elections in eastern Germany since 1933—in which Frau Saupe voted, now as then, for the Social Democrats—I finally had an opportunity to visit Plauen.
“Please don’t leave Germany this time without coming to see me!” she had written me. “I have much to tell you!” Teaching was her family’s vocation; she had been a teacher for 12 years; her first husband had been a loyal Nazi teacher, her second husband had been a (rather apolitical) teacher during the Third Reich era and DDR-era school principal for a total of 50 years.
And Frau Saupe had much to show me too, she said. She was busy assembling a private photo collection for a history exhibit in a local museum—snapshots that she and her son had taken, secretly, of the local demonstrations in 1989, and which she had smuggled, at great personal risk, to a West German newspaper. Against the denial of memory by a police state, against the obliterating forces of time and death murmured her eloquent plea to remember and to record.
If Annaliese Saupe looks rather grandmotherly, so be it: The streets of cheering grandmothers with their placards and unbowed schoolchildren with their lighted candles led to the Revolution of 1989. In the ranks of those thousands of local heroes was Frau Saupe. Fearlessly and unfailingly, she attended every one of the 22 weekly protest demonstrations against the SED held in Plauen between October 1989 and March 1990. After each Saturday Demo in October-November 1989 she stayed up all night, feverishly writing news accounts and developing photographs of the events. Then she stuffed everything in her underwear and smuggled it on Sunday morning across the border to Hof, Plauen’s former West German “sister city,” a town just fifteen miles away in Bavaria. As a retiree, Frau Saupe was permitted to travel to the West; border guards were usually lax in their searches of senior citizens. In Hof, Frau Saupe had found her way to the newspaper offices of the Hof Frankenpost, where she shared her work with its astonished editors, who in early October 1989 could hardly believe that a revolution was in the making and that a 78-year-old grandmother was risking her neck to document it and come to them with the story about it.
“If the border police had caught me,” Frau Saupe says, “they would have jailed me immediately.”
We are sitting in Frau Saupe’s little living room, on the second storey of her modest home in the Komponistenviertel (composers’ quarter) of Plauen. Her street is the Anton Bruckner Street, named after a distinguished nineteenth-century Austrian composer. The tumultuous events of a year ago seem a world away.
Eagerly, Frau Saupe shows me her smuggled stories in the Frankenpost and the Hamburg Abendblatt, printed merely under the byline “an eyewitness.” Then she proudly unfolds the feature story about her heroics in the Plauen Vogtlandpost of May 1990, after das Volk had triumphed and the Revolution was already history: “Annaliese Saupe: The Woman Who Chronicled the Revolution.”
But neither unsung nor sung heroines—nor even unflinching witnesses—are made in a day. For Annaliese Saupe, the process of gaining the courage to speak out began long ago. Born in 1912, shortly after the 40th anniversary of the Second German Reich and the famous Hamburg speech of Kaiser Wilhelm II insisting that Germany deserved “a place in the sun” among world powers, she has been for decades an “odd woman out,” quietly refusing to go along with the crowd, questioning reigning orthodoxies, speaking truth to power.
A familiar, and yet an exceptional, story: A person goes her own way, and then one day the crisis—like the historic challenge of 1989—suddenly looms, and she is among those few who have committed the resolute daily acts of conscience and so possess the strength of character to speak. And the crisis unveils the person she has gradually become.
No politician or intellectual herself, as she readily acknowledges, Annaliese Saupe did not go in search of experience or consciously insert herself into the stream of German history. Nor has she had professional cause as a journalist or scholar to follow its course. No, as she put it, she was in 1989 “one of the little people who had simply had enough—and found the voice to say so.”
How did she find that voice? I wonder. And the will to raise it? I see a hint in the folders—one for each of her research projects—containing dozens of neatly typed quotations and reports of her experiences in the DDR, before and after 1989. There are many exhortations from Goethe, the last western Olympian, and from Schiller, the poet of Liberty. Here a touchstone about the “ceaseless yearning for freedom” from Schiller’s The Robbers, his stirring drama assailing corruption in high places. There a stanza from his “Song of the Bell”:
It is dangerous to wake the lion,
The teeth of the tiger can prove fatal,
But the most fearsome thing of all
Is the human fanatic.
Frau Saupe presses her finger to a page containing maxims by Goethe, then nods her head: “None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe themselves free.” And from his Faust: “Old we grow indeed, but who grows wise?”
Here in front of me is a life, apparently obscure, that has endured and encompassed three-quarters of a century of History’s march, a life variously touched by a vanished age of imperial grandeur, a Great War to end all wars, a failed communist revolution, a Great Depression that made its American counterpart pale by comparison, a fascist police state, a Second World War fought at the end on one’s own soil, an occupation of one’s homeland by enemy forces, decades of a communist dictatorship, the gradual collapse of that dictatorship in the face of mass protests, and finally the voluntary self-liquidation of the state and its incorporation by its long-estranged sibling and former ideological enemy.
What was it like?
As Annaliese Saupe told me the story of her life, I felt as if I had stumbled across a walking incarnation of modern German social history—complete with walking stick. For the framework of Frau Saupe’s outwardly modest life inscribes the biography of a generation and a nation.
I hasten to point out that Frau Saupe did not present herself in these inflated terms: It was I, the bookish young American who visited her, who envisioned her on the horseback of History. But her range of experience and her diligent preservation of it prompted the apparition; and if it seemed to me that she had seen more, done more, felt more than a roomful of people, this was not because she had devoted her days to angling for her own “place in the sun”; no, she had lived her years in her own humble way as Hausfrau, schoolteacher, and good neighbor. However unassuming the tapestry of her life, it is nonetheless also extraordinarily rich, so much so that I immediately felt that hers exemplified not one life but several: the starving child of a defeated Wilhelmine Germany, the jobless young woman of the depression-era Weimar Republic, the alienated skeptic among Nazi true believers, the hopeful “New Teacher” contributing to the new socialist state, the ideological agnostic and DDR “enemy of the people,” and finally the “Oma der Revolution.”
That was the story she had “much to tell.”
Annaliese Leonhardt was an only child, daughter of a Leipzig shoemaker and homemaker. Her parents were divorced when she was just two years old, and she was raised thereafter by her mother, who became a postal clerk. Frau Saupe’s vignettes of her Wilhelmine childhood are vivid and poignant. Among her fullest memories are those about popular attitudes toward the German royalty. Like most Leipzig residents and Saxons, her family and neighbors had no great affection for Prussian princes—Saxons and Prussians had been enemies ever since the Saxons had fought on Napoleon’s side in 1800—and most Saxons heartily disliked Prussian Kaiser Wilhelm II. But they had a deep fondness for their own Crown Prince Frederick August III of Saxony, especially after his wife the Duchess ran off with an Italian musician.
“He was so kind, so gemütlich [easygoing, genial],” says Frau Saupe. “Above all, he was so endearingly inept. Even as a child, I felt so sorry for him.” She recalls his visit to Leipzig in the early 1920s, after Germany had declared itself a republic and had forced him to abdicate the crown. As the crowds cheered him ecstatically, he had said with a smirk: “My, you’re a fine group of republicans now, aren’t you?!”
Less pleasant for Frau Saupe are her memories of the atmosphere in Germany at the close of World War I, as arguments raged among her relatives about the wisdom of continuing a war of desperate expedients, about the German High Command and the competence of Ludendorff and Hindenburg, about the Bolshevik Revolution and the German victory at the Battle of Tannenberg, and about the “outrageously unjust” Treaty of Versailles. The 1917 Russian Revolution enflamed left-wing sentiments in Germany. Frau Saupe remembers her own frightening encounter with Germany’s “November Revolution” in 1918, the unsuccessful coup engineered by the Spartacists (communists) just days after the Great War ended: how, as a seven-year-old, she had wandered one day into Augustus Square, where government troops in the streets faced off against Sparticist militia crouched on the roof of Leipzig’s main post office. As she stood, dazed, her mother screamed “Anne!” and ran wildly to spirit her away from the potential crossfire.
But most of all, Frau Saupe recalls how she felt when the food shortages and food riots began during the potato famine of 1916–17, a consequence of the Allies’ wartime “hunger blockade” of Germany, which had depended upon imports for a third of its food supply. Annaliese remembers her hunger.
“I was one of the starving children of the big city,” Frau Saupe says of the famine that swept through Germany during the last years of the war. “The hunger was horrible! Nothing to eat except cabbage and turnips. We called it—rather unimaginatively!—‘the cabbage-and-turnip-time.’ ” At the age of eight, sickly little Annaliese weighed less than 40 pounds. Dark bread, sausage slices without fat, a few potatoes, and lots of cabbages and turnips constituted her weekly diet; the government ration provided less than half the calories necessary for minimum subsistence. The food crisis destroyed the spirit of the home front: neighborhood children stole food from each other’s homes; families with soldiers at the front turned into food scavengers. Annaliese’s mother, also very sick at the time—the mortality rate for women jumped 50 percent during the war—worried whether her daughter would live. Death by starvation and death by malnutrition were common; by 1919, 3 percent of German schoolchildren were suffering some degree of open pulmonary tuberculosis. Fortunately, however, through a program organized by an office of the dismantled War Food Office, Annaliese’s mother registered 10-year-old Annaliese in 1922 for a three-month visit to Holland, sponsored free-of-charge by sympathetic Dutch families to help German children victimized by the war.
“That trip saved me,” Frau Saupe says. “I gained 17 pounds! It was the first time I had ever eaten—or even seen—an apple or a banana.” Frau Saupe pauses and remarks on the need for the Germans of 1990 to help the asylum seekers pouring from poorer countries into Germany, and she shows me a picture of a Ukrainian family for whom she bakes and whose children she tutors in German. She has tried to pass on some of the kindnesses from strangers that she once received. “I’ve never forgotten how those Dutchmen—who, if anything, had certainly been hurt by our conduct of the war—treated me. I’ll never forget the generosity of that family.”
When Frau Saupe dwells on the 1920s, she shudders. Intellectual mythology has it that the decade was “the golden age of Weimar,” the age of Dietrich and decadence, of cabarets and culture, before the onslaught of the Great Depression, the Nazi takeover, and World War II. But outside Berlin and except for the avant-garde in theater and film, says Frau Saupe, there was little about which to be nostalgic—and certainly not for ordinary people. She pages through her mother’s diary to the year 1923. Pasted in it are several clippings from the local Leipzig paper. The headlines startle: “Spartacists steal food; rioting near St. Thomas Church.” “RM [Reichsmark] falls again; Is ‘barter only’ the rule?” And then, in her mother’s handwriting: “21 August 1923: bread RM 480,000; potatoes [one pound] RM 50,000; margarine RM 900,000.”
“After getting her wages, my mother would race to the grocer,” recalls Frau Saupe of her home life in 1923, “because the next day everything would be doubled in price.” As a 12-year-old, she herself often ran straight from school to the grocer with fistfuls of marks, only to be turned away. Largely as a result of war reparations payments and the savage penalties imposed on German trade by the Treaty of Versailles, the Reichsmark fell in 1922 from 16.2 to 7,000 to the dollar. (It had been 4.2 to the dollar before 1914. The DM exchange rate is roughly 1.5:1 today.) Faced with impossible budget deficits, Germany followed a practice already begun during the war: meeting expenses simply by printing more paper money. When the Weimar Republic defaulted on loan payments to France in the spring of 1923, French troops occupied the Ruhr and set up an economic blockade that cut off the Rhineland from the rest of Germany, sending the mark into the stratosphere: July 1923–RM 160,000 to the dollar; November 1923–RM 4.2 trillion to the dollar. “You’ve heard the stories of the men hauling wheelbarrows full of marks through the streets?” Frau Saupe asks me. “They were no exaggeration!”
Annaliese Leonhardt attended the Gaudig School—the best girls’ school in Leipzig, and one of the outstanding girls’ schools in Weimar Germany. Physical education and geography were her favorite subjects; she was a scholar-athlete. In 1929, at the age of 17, she captured the top prize in Leipzig track-and-field in the pentathlon.
Annaliese graduated in 1932, just after the National and the Darmstadter banks, two of Germany’s largest, had failed, and unemployment had risen to 6 million. Inflation and the strictures of the Treaty of Versailles had plunged Germany into a depression more severe than that in any other country, and the extreme suffering generated popular support for extreme solutions. Before 1930, the fledgling National Socialist Workers Party had held only 4 seats in the Reichstag; in the 1930 elections, the Nazis gained a total of 107 seats. By late 1932, the Nazis were the largest, and the communists the third largest national party. Open warfare raged in Saxony streets between communists and Nazis throughout the Weimar era, but especially during the early 1930s. Plauen was a communist stronghold, and had even elected a communist mayor in 1927 (who would be interned in a concentration camp in the 1930s). Upon Hitler’s ascension to power in January 1933, the crackdown was swift and merciless: outspoken Social Democrats and communists, including two of her own former schoolmates, were jailed or driven into exile.
The depression was the indispensable condition of Hitler’s rise to power. It was so severe that, despite her Abitur, Annaliese could find no work. She was exceptionally well-educated, since only 2 percent of German girls before the war earned the Abitur (and only 10 percent of boys). She decided to teach herself stenography and typing, and in 1933 was hired as a secretary in a Leipzig business office.
That year she also met her first husband, Friedrich Flach. He was a student of Romance languages and physical education at the Universities of Hamburg and Leipzig, “a brilliant poet and remarkable athlete,” Frau Saupe says. In April 1930 they married and soon moved to historic Plauen on the Elster. The capital of Vogtland in the thirteenth century, Plauen had become a hub of the European lace industry in the sixteenth century and the scene of the world’s first lace-spinning machine in 1880. (“Plauener Spitze” [lace] is still known today throughout Central Europe). Also near the city is the Vogtland village where the first violin and the first German harmonica were made.
Soon the young couple took up residence in a house on the same Plauen street as Herr Flach’s parents and aunts, the Anton Bruckner Street, located next to the Beethoven, Bach, and Klopstock streets. Here Frau Saupe has resided for the last 58 years. Herr Flach began teaching in the Plauen Realschule, and the marriage was, for a short time, an entirely happy one.
But politics soon intruded. Plauen had been a thriving textile center in the early decades of the century, but its economy tumbled after the 1920s, when European women lost their taste for lace. By 1935 the city suffered the highest unemployment rate (more than 50 percent) of any sizable German city. That same year, though Annaliese and her husband were not political people, school officials required him to join the Nazi Party or face losing his job. He did so, and to Annaliese’s horror, became an ardent nationalist and enthusiastic supporter of Hitler.
“My husband believed that Hitler was our savior,” Frau Saupe says ruefully. “ ‘Der Führer! Der Führer!’ A look of rapture would come into his face as he spoke the words. His beautiful pastoral lyrics and love poetry turned into hymns to the Führerprinzip [leader principle] and for Lebensraum [“living room”; i.e., expansion]. His parents and aunts parroted ‘Heil Hitler!’ when Hitler and Goebbels delivered their speeches on the radio. I used to sit in my room and cry for hours. What has my family become?! What has Germany become?! . . . After a year or two I no longer talked with my husband or his family about it: There was no point to it. And they in turn treated me like a disloyal German, and as a child whose business was the kitchen.”
Why was she so different? Only a perspective gained from her frequent trips outside Germany, concedes Frau Saupe, immunized her from the near-universal Nazi leader-worship.
“Because of my visits since childhood to my great uncle in Switzerland,” Frau Saupe continues, “I knew what freedom of expression was. The fascination with Hitler stopped suddenly at the German border. . . . Almost everyone around me [in Plauen] had been happy about the annexation of the Sudetenland [in Czechoslovakia in 1936] and Austria [in 1938]. They said that the German people were seeking after World War I to become one people in a Greater Germany—Austria had voted to unite with Germany in 1919, but the Allies had invalidated the election. So now that we had the wherewithal to determine our affairs, why shouldn’t we? What had prevented us? Only the punitive provisions of the Treaty of Versailles, everyone said. But no, my great uncle said. He was a strong anti-Nazi, he didn’t want Switzerland to be part of the Reich, and he explained to me that Hitler was preparing for world conquest. He told me during every visit, which I continued until his death in 1940, how horrible the Nazis were. He always said that, if Hitler remained in power, none of us in Germany would inherit a Pfennig from him. From him I learned what humanism and democracy meant.”
Meanwhile Herr Flach had become a reserve officer in the infantry, and with the outbreak of war in September 1939, the infantry called him up immediately to serve in Poland, where he received the Iron Cross for bravery in battle. He was a hero in everyone’s eyes except her own, Frau Saupe says. Soon his commanders promoted him to the rank of major.
Frau Saupe opens the diary of her 29-year-old husband to the entries for 1939 and reads aloud his poem about the invasion of Poland, “We are marching”:
We are marching, we are serving
The formation of a glorious Greater Germany!
Your countryside, your spirit
More than 1000 kilometers away.
She shakes her head, then turns away, holding back the tears. The poem moves her deeply—not because it is a moving poem, I suspect, but because of the memories of the man and the era that it evokes.
“ ‘Heimat! Heimat!’ ” Frau Saupe exclaims. “That was his theme day and night. How impatient he was for war to break out! ‘My smart little wife is anxious!’ he would say. ‘She’s in the know, as always, isn’t she?’ . . . How could such a sensitive, highly educated man become so obsessed about German conquest? How could he imagine that Russians, Poles, and other Slavs were ‘filth,’ and that the Jewish people were subhuman?”
Frau Saupe falls silent.
I wait for her answer; but no answer comes. I broach the question that haunts her generation. Buchenwald is only 70 kilometers away, I whisper. Did your family know about the Endlösung?
But Frau Saupe does not hesitate; she has faced the question before.
“No. I knew about the camps, and I knew the Jews had been interned,” Frau Saupe answers. “But I didn’t know what was happening there. Believe me, many ordinary people didn’t know. Not until the war was almost over. You were surrounded by a wall of propaganda, and I was a young mother at home with two babies [born in 1940 and 1943]. . . . Later I saw the films of the camps that the Americans showed in the theaters. Unimaginable horrors. . . . What my husband and his family knew I have no idea. I never found out. I’m sure he would have heard about it, though, and must have somehow screened it out or rationalized it away. He was home for only a few months between 1939 and 1945. And after the war began, neither he nor his family ever discussed anything with me except home and family.”
Frau Saupe closes her husband’s diary slowly, cradling it in her lap. Then she looks down, as if addressing it.
“How could a man lose his soul to these ideas?” she says, slowly pronouncing each word. She looks up. “What came over him?”
She searches in vain for the answer, as she has for 50 years.
Frau Saupe reopens the diary and finds another poem. “The Self-Evident Duty.” She reads it aloud, then shrugs. “He was mesmerized, hypnotized. It was a cult.” We both nod to each other. That unsatisfactory explanation will have to suffice.
On the second day of the Russian campaign in June 1941, a grenade exploded in Major Flach’s face. Temporarily blinded and with one eardrum shattered, he lay for weeks in a hospital bed in Weimar, suffering excruciating earaches. But characteristically, when the Allied D-Day invasion pushed back the Germans in France in June 1944, and the Russians began to close in on Germany later that year, Major Flach volunteered from his hospital bed to serve on the eastern front. “ ‘To defend the Heimat against the Russian barbarians!’ ” barks Frau Saupe, im itating her first husband’s delivery. Patriotic duty took priority over everything, she says, including his health and his wife and children.
“His pain was so terrible that he would suddenly put his head down and wail in anguish,” Frau Saupe recalls of Major Flach’s visits home after the disastrous campaign on the Russian front. “He was almost deaf—he couldn’t even follow a dinner table conversation. You had to speak directly into his ear. He could never have taught in a classroom again.”
Major Flach’s final posting was near Dresden, shortly after the Allies had firebombed the city on February 13–14, 1945. Frau Saupe reads his last note home from the front: March 3, 1945. By now, the war was an insane lost cause, with half of Germany already occupied by the Allies, but the letter speaks of “trusting to Providence” and the “coming final victory.”
“More Hitler than Hitler,” Frau Saupe says in a low voice. Major Flach believed in the propaganda about the V2, Hitler’s miracle weapon, she says, which the Führer was allegedly waiting to unleash until just the right moment and which would snatch victory from defeat. Frau Saupe folds the letter along the worn creases, and gently lays it down.
“It was a blessing for him that he didn’t live to see the defeat of Germany,” Frau Saupe says. “To him it was inconceivable that Germany could be conquered. Like Hitler, he would say, ‘I do not know the meaning of the word “capitulation.” ’ Never could he have seen 1945 as a liberation.”
In the final week of the war, Frau Saupe says, the entire company under her husband’s command disobeyed his order, possibly communicated directly from Hitler’s bunker, to attack a Russian regiment on the outskirts of Berlin. Her husband and a fellow officer executed the order alone, falling in combat on April 30, 1945: the very day on which Hitler committed suicide.
Back in Plauen, the Allies’ own slaughterhouse of vengeance was proceeding apace. On April 10, 1945, long after air assaults could have had any strategic purpose, Anglo-American bombers, for hours, strafed Plauen, which, like Dresden, was in any case a city of no military importance. Three-quarters of Plauen lay in ruins. Ninety percent of the schools and 70 percent of the houses were pulverized. A fact little-known outside Plauen, Frau Saupe says, is that the city’s wartime damage exceeded that of any other large German city—even Dresden. The air raid claimed more than 500 lives. By April 1945, Plauen, a city of 120,000 in 1939, was reduced through conscription, war deaths, and flight before the oncoming Soviet armies, to a population of 80,000.
“My children [two and four years old] in the bombed-out hospital, suffering cholera,” Frau Saupe says, her voice shaking at the memory of those April days. The entire month is a blur. “I am so weak, I can barely stand up, I can’t hold a cup in my hand. . . . No trains, no heat, no food of any kind. . . . I run to find my babies. . . . I carry them 15 miles to the hospital in Muhltroff. . . . We stagger through the woods together, we look for berries as the planes shoot at us. . . .”
She stops suddenly. It was the war, she says simply. Somehow she and her children survived. They were lucky. Others were not.
When the Russian soldiers arrived in July, Frau Saupe was summoned. She expected the worst: She had been the wife of a Nazi Party member and decorated of ficer. To her surprise, she was congratulated. The Russians had found her name on an anti-Nazi blacklist. Probably she was blacklisted, Frau Saupe thinks, due to her vocal criticisms of a prominent local Nazi and her refusal on two public occasions to give the Heil Hitler! greeting. And yet, ironically, it was probably only her husband’s position as an officer that had saved her from jail or a concentration camp.
Because the Russians had fired all the judges and almost all of the schoolteachers in Plauen, they offered Frau Saupe a position as a magistrate or schoolteacher. She chose teaching. In early 1946, she began an eight-month teacher training course for Neulehrer, which consisted of four months of general education and four months of intensive Russian. Then she took up her post as a 7th- and 8th- grade teacher at the newly opened Julius Moser School, named in honor of a regional poet much admired by her late husband. And she looked forward to better times ahead.
It all began promisingly enough—both for Plauen and for Frau Saupe. SBZ authorities decided to rebuild Plauen as a lace-making capital, make the city a regional center of a new electronics and precision industry, and print the Eastern European editions of Pravda there. Frau Saupe, a Social Democrat, welcomed the common call of the KPD and SPD in June 1945 to build an “anti-fascist democratic” educational system and to remodel the Nazi schools on the experimental progressive schools of the Weimar era.
But by the late 1940s, as we have seen, the KPD had undermined the SPD in the newly formed SED and, following Moscow, began insisting that DDR schools adopt exactly the centralized structure and rigidly orthodox ideology of the Soviet school system. Having been unwilling to swallow Nazi propaganda in silence, Frau Saupe was no more willing to fall in line with communist dogma. But in the early postwar years, a woman of her anti-fascist credentials commanded much official respect—and a Neulehrerin of her educational attainments was still a relative rarity. She was valued and needed. With many educated young men still in Russian camps and qualified teachers hard to come by (only 4 of Plauen’s 350 Neulehrer in 1946 held the Abitur), school authorities tolerated Frau Saupe’s criticisms of Stalinism and her open practice of her Lutheran faith.
By the mid-1950s, however, as Walter Ulbricht began trying to eliminate Christianity and especially the Lutheran youth groups—the Junge Gemeinden—from the DDR, the Ministry of Education introduced a stricter line for teachers: They were expected to patrol the anti-capitalist “cultural front.” Unsurprisingly, Frau Saupe’s iconoclasm provoked keen discomfort among her Party colleagues.
“Every year the pressure to conform increased,” Frau Saupe says. “The spying, the cowardice, the ‘groupthink.’ ” She sighs. “The children, of course, never knew anything different. Indoctrination, not education. It was a communist version of the HJ.”
To illustrate her point, Frau Saupe recites from memory some slogans which schoolchildren learned in the Thälmann Pioneers and the FDJ: “Taglich in Form, das Beste in Norm!” (“Daily dedication to the job produces the best perfor mance!”). “Keiner ist zu klein, um Helfer der Partei zu sein!” (“Nobody is too little to help the Party!”). Frau Saupe shakes her head, as if to say: “It is all so long ago and yet just yesterday.” Then we look through an old Pioneer handbook just given to me by a current Plauen teacher. It contains the bylaws of the Thälmann Pioneers. We turn to “Bylaw #6”:
We Thälmann Pioneers are friends of the Soviet Union and maintain friendship with the children of all countries. We make friendship toward the Soviet Union—the vanguard of the forces of Peace and Socialism in the world—the fondest wish of all girls and boys! We value especially our close ties with the Lenin Pioneers [in the USSR]!
Unlike most other schoolteachers, Frau Saupe refused to join the SED or participate in any communist organization. Nor did she register her children for the Pioneers or the FDJ, an act of passive aggression since, by the late 1950s, two-thirds of all children—and practically every teacher’s child—joined the Pioneers and FDJ.
Her school principal was not amused. In 1958, a trio of events converged to bring to crisis Frau Saupe’s already tense relationship with her superiors. First, a schoolgirl denounced Frau Saupe for concluding a 3rd-grade astronomy class with the words: “So great is God’s Creation.” Second, a teachers’ board publicly reprimanded Frau Saupe for sponsoring parents’ evenings in her home for the Junge Gemeinden. Finally, most egregiously, although 90 percent of East German 14 year olds participated in the Jugendweihe, Frau Saupe—“a teacher no less!” fretted the principal—insisted that her son be confirmed in the Lutheran Church.
On the last school day in 1958, at the age of 47, Frau Saupe was fired from her job and informed that she would receive the minimum pension under law. Her second husband—in 1955 she married Herr Saupe, a schoolteacher in the nearby Kammler School—himself barely escaped being dismissed for his support of her decision. During the next two decades, the family supported itself on his salary and on her slim earnings from tutoring and secretarial work.
A new life began for Frau Saupe in the late 1970s, after she turned 65. Her health was robust and, like other East German senior citizens, she was permitted to travel—and she could afford to travel, thanks to her resourcefulness. East Germans needed western currency to travel outside the East bloc—and geography was still a favorite subject of hers. And she was still a teacher at heart. So Frau Saupe prepared slide lectures for West German audiences on East German cities and cultural life, and above all on Goethe and Weimar. Her visits to West Germany, the United States, Italy, and other countries reminded her how precious were the “bourgeois” freedoms of travel, association, and expression—liberties sharply curtailed after the abortive workers’ revolt in June 1953 and the erection of the Berlin Wall in August 1961.
Not until the 1972 treaty that relaxed relations with West Germany did the SED liberalize its policies on travel and emigration; even these measures, however, were accompanied by a new program of Abgrenzung (delimitation), an invisible wall of regulations designed to stem the heightened flow of “unwholesome” western goods and ideas. Liberalization and Abgrenzung functioned together like a series of steam valves, allowing for a modicum of freedom and for the venting of some popular frustrations without blowing the lid off the system. Small doses of openness periodically relieved sharp pressures without challenging the internal power structure. But after Gorbachev came to power in the Soviet Union in 1985, dissatisfaction with the Stalinism of the old guard in the SED (old-style “Stasi- nism”) grew.
Like many citizens, Frau Saupe became upset with Party leaders for dragging their feet on reform. In the late spring of 1989, she, like others, watched in amazement and hope as the pace of events increased: In May, Hungary began to dismantle its border with Austria; in August, East German refugees flocked to Hungary, while others sought asylum in the West German embassies in Prague and Warsaw; in September, Hungary permitted 55,000 East Germans to escape (via Austria) to the West.
These events set the stage for the so-called October Revolution, and for the supporting roles that Plauen and Annaliese Saupe were to play. On October 1, the East German government arranged for 6,000 DDR refugees then in Czechoslovakia to travel in six special, closed trains from Prague to Hof in West Germany—but diverted through Dresden and Plauen, rather than direct from Czechoslovakia to West Germany. In this way, DDR officials apparently hoped to save face by pretending that the refugees were not “escaping” but were being officially “expelled.” Plauen was the last city before the West German border, and Plauen citizens lining the tracks jumped on the trains. They had to be forcibly pulled away by local Vopos.
On October 3, as refugees continued to flood the Prague embassy, the DDR closed its border with Czechoslovakia, the last country with which it still had an open border. Two days later, a second closed caravan, this one with 11,000 refugees, traveled from Prague to West Germany via Dresden and Plauen. Fighting erupted in the Dresden and Plauen train stations; police beat one Plauen citizen brutally, and he died during the weekend in the hospital. Still, attention in East Berlin was focused elsewhere. Preparations were in full swing for Gorbachev’s visit and the 40th anniversary celebration of the DDR. It looked as though the dissidents could once again be contained with a minimum of force: as in the spring and summer, security police repressed small counter-demonstrations in East Berlin and other major cities with little difficulty.
Little did the government realize, however, that just as the 40th anniversary parade was proceeding on October 7, 1989—as Gorbachev and Honecker kissed on the steps of the old Reichstag building in East Berlin—a mass demonstration was getting under way in Plauen whose consequences would lead to the fall of the Berlin Wall just four weeks later.
Frau Saupe’s voice swells as she recalls those days of October.
“Saturday, October 7—it was a wet autumn day,” Frau Saupe remembers. “When I went shopping, several different neighbors whispered to me: ‘A gathering at three P.M.in the Theater Square.’ ”
She explains that a whispering campaign by neighbors and friends was virtually the only means of illicit communication in the former DDR. Just as few DDR citizens (apart from Party members and doctors) owned telephones, the public also had no access to photocopy machines—the churches possessed the only nongovernment copiers, and they were required to stamp every piece of paper “for church use only.” As Frau Saupe spoke, I thought how difficult it is to run a modern economy under a dictatorship, and yet also how difficult it is to launch an organized revolution against a dictatorship: totalitarianism as mass paralysis.
“At two P.M.I took the streetcar into town,” Frau Saupe continues, “and as we approached the theater, I saw thousands of people streaming toward the same spot, coming from all directions. Children, old people, mothers with baby carriages, fathers with little tykes on their shoulders! Everyone stood, waiting to see what would happen. The atmosphere was tense—just the day before the man whom the police had beaten [for attempting to board the closed refugee train bound for Hof] had died in the hospital. Everyone knew about it. . . .
“Suddenly several police cars drove toward us,” Frau Saupe continues. “ ‘Pigs! Swine!’ shouted dozens of people. ‘Freedom!’ yelled someone, and thousands of voices echoed him. For the next hour we chanted ‘Freedom!’ together. . . . All the while a helicopter circled overhead, occasionally swooping down toward us. I knew somehow that it contained no bombs, only video cameras, but it terrified my granddaughter and many other people. . . .
“When we saw that the police were keeping back, we began marching down the Wilhelm Pieck Street toward city hall. Dozens of police with revolvers and guns, nightsticks, and German shepherds stood at the entrance. Two fire trucks, with their sirens at full blast, raced toward us, hosing down hundreds of people. As dozens of people advanced, several police beat them back with their nightsticks. At that moment, I think, the crowd was about to turn violent. . . . Abruptly, as if from nowhere, the minister of our Lutheran Church emerged from the crowd, begging, ‘No bloodbath! No Beijing!’
“The police sensed the danger too. Tiananmen Square was in everyone’s mind. The minister demanded a loudspeaker and ordered the police to back off, and to send away the helicopter and fire trucks. We waited several minutes, as the police deliberated. They finally withdrew everything, and the demonstration ended peacefully. . . .”
Frau Saupe lets out a long sigh, as if in triumph. A date that had come to represent a birthday of tyranny—October 7—is now baptized in her memory through that mass cry of “Freedom!” She muses on the aftermath of “October 7”:
“The minister had arrived just in time!” Frau Saupe says. “His plea turned out to have consequences for the entire future of Germany! . . . On the way home I stopped to see a friend who had not been at the Demo. ‘What I’ve seen this evening!’ I cried. ‘This has been the most beautiful day of my life!’ ”
But Frau Saupe’s October 7 wasn’t over yet. With the help of her 90-year-old husband, she typed out a story of the events. On Monday morning, she sewed it into her underwear, along with three rolls of film taken and developed by her son, and hopped the local train to Hof.
Frau Saupe winks, prepared to show me—in case I don’t believe her!—exactly how she smuggled everything. She adds that she didn’t have a Pfennig of West German money in her pockets; she walked the long road from the Hof railway station to the office of the Hof Frankenpost.
“No one at the Frankenpost had any idea what had happened in Plauen,” she continues. “All eyes had been on the celebrations in East Berlin. There were no telephone lines between Plauen and Hof—and every phone call to West Germany would have been monitored by the Stasi, anyway. . . . The editors had no idea that this was the Aufbruch [revolutionary beginning].”
Fifteen thousand people attended that October 7 demonstration, almost a third of the adult population of Plauen. Immediately, the medieval-era Luther Church, standing next to city hall and towering above it, became a symbol of hope. Day and night people burned hundreds of candles and laid wreaths of flowers on its steps. Every Saturday at three P.M., the crowds met at the church. Quickly their numbers surged: October 14, 30,000; October 21, 50,000; October 28, 60,000. The newly formed Plauen citizens’ council presented its list of demands to the mayor: freedom of travel and expression, a free press, abolition of the SED’s monopoly on power, abolition of the Stasi, free elections, open borders, schools without communist ideology. By November 4, practically the entire city was on the streets, marching and chanting in unison, “The Wall must go!” “We are the people!” “Democracy Now!” “Egon, DO SOMETHING!” In the days after the fall of the Wall, the chants turned to “Deutschland einig Vaterland!” and “We are one people!” And before the month of November was out, East met West for the first time in Vogtland since 1951—Route 163, the old road connecting Plauen and Hof, was repaved and reopened. And construction was resumed on Route 183—known to locals as Hitlers Unvollendete Strasse (Hitler’s Unfinished Road)—a planned Autobahn through Plauen on which construction halted on the eve of the war and was never completed.
Frau Saupe is proud of her townsfolk, proud above all that her adopted city, Plauen of Vogtland, was the first to launch a major demonstration against the Honecker regime—and that her native city of Leipzig carried the protests to their peaceful conclusion.
“Revolution was in the air,” Frau Saupe says. “Saturday, Plauen; Monday, Leipzig; Tuesday, Dresden. Our proximity to the West German border, the refugee trains passing through to Hof, the fact that Hof is our Partnerstadt [partner city]—that’s probably why we in Plauen were first.”
There is pride indeed in Annaliese Saupe’s voice. How differently she speaks of Germany from my West German friends—or even from my younger eastern acquaintances.
The cultural and economic ties between Plauen and Hof, a town of 15,000, stretch back to their days as medieval villages at the crossroads of Central Europe’s main trading routes, Frau Saupe explains in a clipped schoolteacherly voice: The two communities were under joint rule in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Beginning in 1986, in a mutual gesture of reconciliation in preparation for Honecker’s 1987 visit to Bonn and to promote economic cooperation, East and West German towns began adopting each other as Partnerstädte. Originally wary of the idea, fearing that it might frustrate Abgrenzung, the SED’s warming to it signified its feeling of invulnerability by the late 1980s. By 1989, 30 DDR and BRD cities or towns had “twinned,” but the Plauen-Hof partnership was the only one between adjacent cities—and, even more so, between two towns with a rich shared history.
Frau Saupe pauses. Her smile thanks me for indulging her digression. She clears her throat: Now let’s return to the Plauen of 1989, her businesslike air seems to say. Her voice lowers and softens.
“But what would have happened in the DDR, and in all of Eastern Europe, if the police had opened fire on us in Plauen that day? If the old Stalinist hard-liners had applied the methods of Berlin, Hungary, Prague, Poland? Would Gorbachev have sent in the troops against our men? Would he have risked intervening militarily in our affairs?
“If the SED, even at that late date, had come down hard, could it have contained the protest movement, limiting it to just a few days of mass unrest, as the Soviets did in June 1953? And as China had that very June? If the Party had done so that day in Plauen, then there might have been no Leipzig or Dresden. Yes, it would have been Tiananmen Square all over again. And then it might have been a civil war. . . .”
Frau Saupe pauses again, and it seems to me as if we stand together at an historical crossroads, as if on a single fateful day in 1989 her little city stood poised on the edge of time, at the nexus of the branching paths of two alternative futures for Germany and the world. Would it be civil war and perhaps lead to . . . ? Or, instead . . . ? Yes, the other path: By November 4, a million people marched peacefully and without disturbance from the Alexanderplatz down the Friedrichstrasse in East Berlin, and five days later the Wall was down.
But Frau Saupe puts it another way. Recalling a line of Goethe’s—this one I did not see in her folders—after he witnessed the skirmish at Valmy in 1792, which later proved to be the decisive event which saved revolutionary Paris from capture by the Prussian armies, she declaims: “For today from this place there begins a new epoch in the history of the world.”
No apology follows the rhetorical flight. Goethe, says Frau Saupe, would have understood the significance of October 7.
To this day neither professional historians nor ex-DDR politicians seem to know with certainty who in the SED power structure ordered the Plauen, Leipzig, and Dresden police to hold their fire in early October. All signs were that the government was prepared to commit something comparable to the Tiananmen Square massacres. Indeed the SED head in Gera in Saxony declared on October 3: “We’ll deal with these miscreants after the 40th anniversary celebration, just as they did in China.” On October 6, a news story in Leipzig quoted the police chief as “ready and willing to use our weapons against these counter-revolutionaries, if necessary.” Two days later, Honecker himself announced, after a friendly meeting with high-ranking officials from Beijing, that “counterrevolutionaries” in the DDR would be dealt with just as severely as they had been in China. Weeks—and an era—later, several SED national leaders each claimed to have been the one to prohibit the use of force, among them Egon Krenz, who may have been warned by Gorbachev against it. But their stories are inconsistent; history may never know the full story.
Observers agree, however, as Frau Saupe puts it, that the decision “must have come from someone high up in Berlin, or even in Moscow,” and also that, in retrospect, the decision not to crush the demonstrations spelled the end of the regime. That was the turning point. Why did the government back off? Was it fear? Was it restraint? Was it botched communication? Whatever the reason, from that week on, the marchers sensed that the government had feet of clay, and so they marched on and on until they swept the government away.
To prove how dangerous that momentous week was, Frau Saupe takes out her voluminous photo and clipping collection. She shows me the official report of the October 7 Demo in the regional Saxony Freie Presse, entitled “Unconscionable Provocation.”
. . . an illegal assembly of several hundred persons ended peacefully due to the decisive, thoughtful response of the People’s Police. . . . The malcontents marched through the city, destroying store display windows, setting a People’s Police car in flames, and vandalizing a fire truck. Thanks to the restraint of the security forces, who protected the city hall and the safety of the citizens, nothing serious developed.
Frau Saupe laughs derisively at the lies. “Typical!” she snorts. The “official estimate” of the number of protesters is 10,000, less than one-third the real total.
Frau Saupe shows me several photos from the local Plauen paper, the Vogtland-post, of the SED banners in the October 7 celebrations in East Berlin. How ironic they now sound! “Long live our Socialist Fatherland—the DDR!” “Forty years of the DDR—Work by the People, for the Welfare of the People!” Frau Saupe lingers with relish over a placard from the educational ministry: “Scholars! Students! High goals of teaching and research strengthen the DDR! We belong to the beautiful socialist community of Man!”
The clunky Marxist jargon contrasts badly with the salty language of the marchers in the streets, many of whose banners bore witty rhymed or punning slogans:
SED, das organisierte [V]erbrechen!
[SED, the organized crime (or vomit)!]
Niemand wird die SED vermissen, den sie hat uns 40 Jahre lang beschissen!
[Nobody is going to miss the SED, because you’ve screwed us for 40 years!]
Das Pulver ist verschossen, heran an die Wahrheit, Genossen!
[The game is up, so try telling the truth, Comrades!]
A gleaming smile lights up Annaliese Saupe’s face as she recalls the autumn of 1989. “What an unforgettable, exhilarating spirit those days possessed!” she exclaims. She laughs suddenly. “The only time in 40 years that I ever experienced ‘the beautiful socialist community of Man’!”
July 1992. My second visit to Frau Saupe. A warm reunion.
“I’ve been rehabilitated!” she announces, laughing, as we embrace. She presents me with her recent letter from the Plauen school board that apologizes for her dismissal from teaching—only 33 years late. “I’m no longer an ‘enemy of the people’!” she says, grinning.
She reminisces fondly about teaching and her students. She is donating her time to German tutoring for a Russian girl newly come to Plauen; Frau Saupe stays in touch with dozens of former students from the 1940s and ’50s. In fact, just 10 weeks ago, two dozen former pupils visited her—as they do every year on Holy Thursday. They are the 8th-grade graduates of the Class of ’48. “My favorite class!” Frau Saupe confides. Up to 30 of her pupils have come virtually every year for the last four decades to see her—most of them Plaueners, but a few of them from as far away as Stuttgart, the Rhineland, and Switzerland, despite the difficulties that the DDR government imposed on western travelers to the DDR. My mouth falls open as she recounts this astonishing ritual, which she delivers in such a matter-of-fact style. “All of them are grandparents themselves now,” Frau Saupe adds of her reunion guests. She smiles broadly, noting that graduates from other class years also visit her, but on a less formal, more irregular basis.
Then the smile disappears. Frau Saupe glances at the letter from the Plauen school board again and adds that, even though she has another letter from the 1950s stating that she was dismissed for her “Christian convictions,” she has still received no official statement pronouncing her a “victim of the SED state.” And she continues to receive the minimum pension under law: DM 484 per month. “Too much to die on, too little to live on.”
Still, she considers herself a “ Glückspilz” (lucky mushroom, favored one) of her generation.
“I was never jailed, and yet I was known to be—officially once and unofficially the second time—a victim of Nazism and communism,” she says. “Many people suffered without it ever being acknowledged and without ever receiving satisfaction. They never knew how the Stasi or Nazi informants deprived them of jobs, promotions, educational and travel opportunities. . . .”
“Many elderly people here,” Frau Saupe continues, “especially the men who fought six years in the war and suffered several more in the Russian camps, cry out: ‘First Hitler, then the communists! Sixty years! They’ve stolen my entire life, these dictators!’ But I can’t say that. I’ve had good health and the chance to see a bit of the world. And I’m not burdened by shame or remorse about my activities with the communists or Nazis—I have a weisse Weste [a white vest, i.e., a clean past]. If you lost ten years of your youth to the war and its aftermath, or if you compromised yourself or simply swallowed the garbage that the ideologues tried to force down your throat, well then, yes, I can well understand the guilt and anguish. For some of those people, maybe it’s true: the years are gone and wasted.” Do you feel that you’ve lived under a dictatorship all your life?
Yes and no, Frau Saupe answers. Yes, if one measures the DDR by the hopes attached to it in “Arisen from Ruins,” that the socialist sun would one day “shine over Germany, shine over Germany.” Yes, because after 1950, when the SED extinguished East German democracy by absorbing the other political parties, or after 1952, when it sealed its borders to the West [except through West Berlin], few thinking people could still hold that the DDR was “das bessere Deutschland.”
“The dream of a socialist Germany, which I had once shared too,” says Frau Saupe, “was gone.”
But no, she continues, if one attempts by this question to equate German “democratic socialism” [the SED] with German “national socialism” [the Nazis]. No, because Honecker was not Hitler, the Stasi was not the SS, the corruptions of the SED were not the crimes of the Nazis. She adds that she has recently gotten word that she has no surviving Stasi or other government files: all state documents about her have been lost or destroyed.
“Bad as this state [the DDR] was,” maintains Frau Saupe, “it never divided up people into racial and other groupings, and then pursued and executed them. There were no ‘Final Solutions.’ You could only equate the SED and the Nazis if you had no knowledge of the Holocaust or the Nazis’ grand schemes for world conquest.”
She pauses, her eyes drawn to the photo on the mantelpiece of the handsome young man in his major’s uniform. She sighs.
“Three times my family lost everything and had to begin again—in the 1920s after the inflation, in ’45 after the Zusammenbruch [collapse], and in ’58 after I was thrown out of schoolteaching,” Frau Saupe says. “And now, it’s another new beginning. Some people call it another Stunde Null. For our family, it’s mostly a spiritual beginning. But many families are starting all over again, both materially and spiritually—the unemployed, some former Party Bonzen, and Stasi agents.
“My life hasn’t changed much since the Wende,” she goes on. She could already travel abroad, she notes, and she doesn’t hanker after western goods. But she notices the small changes in people’s attitudes.
“I see the Ich-Menschen [I-people, self-seekers] everywhere now,” Frau Saupe says. “We’re losing our feeling of togetherness. Before, you rejoiced when a friend who had waited for 15 years finally got his telephone or Trabi. Now people look at their neighbors and they feel envy. They say: ‘They have more than we do.’ . . . People never used to lock their doors. Now they do. . . . Perhaps it all had to go, along with the worst of the old system. But now that we all have more money, what do we need neighbors for? You don’t need to have friends now to help you fix your 20-year-old Trabi, or to give you a ride, or for a thousand other little things. Now you can buy everything. . . . Before, money didn’t count for much. For heaven’s sake, you couldn’t buy anything with it, anyway! There was nothing in the stores!”
Plauen has yet to reverse its half-century economic decline. Most western companies, notes Frau Saupe, are waiting for eastern firms to go bankrupt before buying them up—and Plauen families can’t wait forever for the economy to turn around. Thousands of Plaueners have moved to Hof, which is now booming, leaving Plauen with one of the highest proportions of old people in eastern Germany. “The mood here is depressed—just like the economy,” Frau Saupe says. One exception to this trend is the West German wholesale textile manufacturer, Pfersee/Kolbermoor of Augsburg, which purchased Plauen’s famed lace and fabric factories in early 1991—and laid off the majority of its employees after the collapse of the Soviet Union, which had bought 40 percent of Plauen lace. Providing work for 14,000 Plaueners before the Wende, the factories now employ barely 2,000 workers. The only sizable new building in town is a McDonalds—Vogtland’s first. Hamburgers are the big sellers, closely followed by its distinctive serving of Klosse,a Vogtland potato dumpling specialty.
“But is life really any better in the West?” Frau Saupe asks. A sharp note of skepticism is evident in her voice. She wrings her hands, thinking of her daughter in faraway Hanover. Like so many other eastern Germans since the Wende, her daughter’s family has just relocated for employment reasons, seeking a better life in the West. But she is unhappy there, Frau Saupe says. “The people have no time, money is all that counts.” A familiar charge from old easterners. But that would eventually be her daughter’s fate even if she stayed in Plauen, Frau Saupe acknowledges. Creeping capitalism is slouching eastward, and East Germans too are starting to cultivate to the utmost the lesser things of life—shopping, travel, home furnishings—and mistake them for the higher things. She quotes a neighbor who, appalled by the affluent society, gives her a version of the philosophy of West Germany: “I consume, therefore I am.”
We chat for a few more hours. Do I know that coffee costs just DM 6 now, when it was 40 or 50 even after the Wende? But bread is up from 78 pfennigs to almost 3 DM, and cream cheese from 55 pfennigs to DM 1.10. “At least we have fruit now,” she sighs. She draws nearer and looks at me hard. “You know, a vegetarian like you would have starved in the DDR! If you don’t consume enough, you’ll be nothing!” I tell her that she is not the first Hausfrau to alert me to that fact. We laugh.
“Do you want to hear ‘Annaliese’s Advice for a Long, Healthy Life?’ ” she asks me.
I am all ears.
Frau Saupe runs down her list:
“1. Eat modestly. 2. Live a well-ordered life. 3. Challenge yourself mentally. 4. Laugh a lot. 5. Exercise!—I swim and walk as much as possible. 6. Memorize poems—I prefer Goethe and Fontane. But new poets too! 7. Develop hobbies that you love. My hobbies are to research the lives of famous people from Vogtland.”
I tell Frau Saupe that some Americans would dub her list “The Seven Habits of Highly Fulfilled People.” She laughs again, unaware of my allusion to a bestselling American self-help book with a similar title.
As I prepare to leave for the west, Frau Saupe launches into a detailed explanation of the name changes of the Plauen schools and streets. A school in which her first husband did a short stint of student teaching during the Third Reich—then called the Martin Bormann School, and during the DDR era renamed the Ernst Thälmann School—is now the Lessing Gymnasium. The Wilhelm Pieck Street, named after the first general secretary of the SED, is once again the Neundorfer Street. Swept away, in fact, are almost all the famous German and Russian communist names that once adorned practically every public place here. Otto Grotewohl Square, Ernst Thälmann Street, Walter Ulbricht Square, the Yuri Gagarin High School: all gone. Gone too the Platz der Roten Armee (Red Army Square), which Plauen wags called the Platz der Armen Roten (Poor Reds’ Square).
“Some old people can’t even find their way through the center of Plauen now!” Frau Saupe says ruefully. She shakes her head. Symbolizing the difficult and sometimes comical shift from fascism to communism to democracy, the litany of old and new names suggests the burdensome history behind and ahead: The problem of spiritual as well as physical navigation in the age of Germany After the Wall.
October 1994. I can’t leave Germany without at least a whistlestop afternoon visit to Frau Saupe.
“You’ve come just at the right moment!” Frau Saupe exclaims as I show up, unannounced, on her doorstep. Before the front wall of her house now stands one of the old, discarded border posts of the DDR, once used to mark the line between west and east. A reminder, she says, of the narrow horizons that eastern Germans once suffered.
Frau Saupe is a local celebrity this month. Plauen is commemorating the fifth anniversary of the Revolution of the Candles. A regional TV crew interviewed her last week. We watch a tape of the broadcast together; it features Frau Saupe as a central actor in Plauen’s story of October 1989.
“Like many people, she risked a great deal in the fall of 1989,” begins the TV announcer. “But Annaliese Saupe went a step further. She wanted the world to know about the mass demonstrations under way in Plauen of Vogtland.”
“Frau Saupe’s first article hit with the force of a bomb,” the editor of the Hof Frankenpost tells the TV cameras. “News agencies from everywhere phoned us, because nobody knew what was happening in Plauen. And then she came every week thereafter.
“A courageous woman,” the editor concludes. “If only more people like Annaliese Saupe existed!”
As we ride the bus into the city center, townspeople who have known her for decades greet us, obviously sharing the editor’s view. Everyone has seen the TV special; they all trade stories of October 1989. Frau Saupe stops in at the bakery. “Another one of my nicest pupils,” she says, laughing, of the baker, a bald man in his mid-60s.
Now Frau Saupe and I slowly follow the same steps through the streets as did the marchers in October 1989: a pilgrimage to the Rathaus (city hall). Step by step, she narrates the story that I heard in her living room four years ago. “More than 35,000 people were crowding this little street!” exclaims Frau Saupe. We are heading for the special historical exhibit on the Wende in the main foyer of the Rathaus.The exhibit transports us backward in time: the barbed-wire fences, the 98.12 percent vote for the SED in the falsified election of May 1989, a letter from a citizen group formed later that month to protest the election results, a respectful September 29 letter of protest to the mayor from the Lutheran pastor, a threatening public letter of October 11 from the mayor, the plastic dummy of a Vopo raising a weapon, and dozens of photographs that Frau Saupe and her son took of the Plauen Demos.
In the middle of the foyer is a guest book, in which visitors have written their reflections. Frau Saupe and I page slowly through it.
“Be proud of what you risked that month, Plauen citizens, and never forget it!” writes one man.
“This exhibit moves me deeply,” writes a woman. “Despite the hard times since 1989, it reminds me of what we fought for—and that things are indeed better. I thank the people who summoned the courage to speak out for freedom.”
Frau Saupe leans down to write something in the guest book herself.
“Let this exhibit remind all of us of the 22 demonstrations in Plauen. Let us never forget what we used to suffer.”
Returning home, Frau Saupe and I discuss the news—small and big—since our last meeting. Herr Saupe passed away shortly after my last visit—two years ago, at the age of 92. But otherwise, things are good—and getting ever better in Vogtland. Frau Saupe speaks with satisfaction. Even my vegetarianism is invoked to illustrate the point. It is still “worrisome” to her, but she’s glad she’s now able to accommodate me—“something I never could have done in the DDR.”
Chancellor Kohl’s victory in last week’s election was encouraging, says Frau Saupe. She switched allegiances and voted for him this time, and she would have liked a bigger margin of victory for the CDU. She finds the criticism of Chancellor Kohl largely unjustified.
“When the Chancellor promised in 1990 that nobody in the east would be ‘worse off,’ he had no idea how badly off many people here really were,” Frau Saupe says. “Certainly, he painted a rosy vision—such as when he said that the countryside would soon be blooming. But look! Things now are starting to bloom. Only his timing was off.”
Her biggest fear is the PDS.
“Sometimes I wonder if we’ve really learned anything at all. I see many old SED Bonzen back in leading positions in the PDS. I know that people support them as a sign of protest, but it’s a misconceived protest! It’s a giant step backward, not forward.”
More conversation about Goethe and Schiller, more photographs of the grandchildren, more clippings from the newspaper about Plauen and Vogtland. I muse at length on one of Frau Saupe’s quotations from Schiller’s Wallenstein’s Camp: “He who does the best for his own time has lived for all time.”
Whether or not she is a heroine, I conclude, she is a witness. Yes, a witness and a chronicler of her age.
“If only more people like Annaliese Saupe existed!”
As she sees me to the door, Frau Saupe repeats another touchstone by her indisputable hero, Goethe. It is my farewell gift from her: “What you have inherited from your fathers, earn over again for yourselves, or it will not be yours.”
And from your mothers, I want to add, and from your grandmothers too.