Voices from the GDR

Andrea Tatjana Wigger was born in 1973. As a young girl, she attended the youth group run by the Jewish community in Berlin because she liked one of the boys in the group. When the Berlin wall fell, the granddaughter of British émigré and teacher Marianne Pincus was 16 years old and took her first trip to the West with her father via the Sonnenallee. Today, Wigger is a teacher at the Moses Mendelssohn High School in Berlin.

The video is made up of excerpts from a longer interview from the collections of the Jewish Museum Berlin. You can watch the full interview, along with ten others, in the event space of the exhibition Another country. Jewish in the GDR.

Peter Brasch (1955–2001) grew up as the child of emigrants to England. His father, Horst Brasch, became an SED (Socialist Unity Party) official, a delegate to the People’s Chamber and Deputy Culture Minister. While studying German in Leipzig, Peter Brasch protested against the expatriation of songwriter and poet Wolf Biermann and was ex-matriculated. In contrast to his brother Thomas, he remained in the GDR and worked in radio. When Germany was reunified, he worked as a playwright and director; his publications included the novel Schön hausen.

The video excerpts are taken from the interview collections of the Leo Baeck Institute New York and the Moses Mendelssohn Center for European-Jewish Studies (MMC) in Potsdam. These are being scientifically processed as part of the digital publishing project Jewish history and stories in the GDR.

The interviews have been made available to the JMB by the kind permission of the MMC.

Take a road trip with Peter Brasch’s sister Marion Brasch and her daughter Lena, in a Deutschlandfunk Kultur podcast in cooperation with the Jewish Museum Berlin (in German).

Chaim Adlerstein was born in Leipzig and brought up by his grandparents and his mother. His grandfather, who had grown up as an orthodox Polish Jew, survived the Shoah and met his wife, who converted to Judaism, in Vogtland. It was clear to Chaim Adlerstein from the very beginning that he was Jewish. After his bar mitzvah he changed his name from Wolfgang to Chaim, after a dead brother of his grandfather’s.
As a child, he and other contemporaries from the Jewish community in the GDR attended the summer camp in Glowe on the isle of Rügen, where he later became a counselor. He had good memories of his childhood in the GDR because of his grandparents and also because of the camp.

The video is made up of excerpts from a longer interview from the collections of the Jewish Museum Berlin. You can watch the full interview, along with ten others, in the event space of the exhibition Another country. Jewish in the GDR.

Find out more about the Jewish community in Leipzig at Jewish Places.

Cultural scholar Cathy Gelbin, born in 1963, grew up in a German-American-Jewish household in East Berlin. Her grandmother, the publisher Gertrude Gelbin, migrated from the US to the GDR in 1952 with her husband, the writer Stefan Heym. Gelbin’s son David followed shortly after. The family had left the United States due to McCarthyism. In her youth, Cathy Gelbin took a keen interest in Jewish culture and religion and joined the Jewish community’s youth group. In 1984, having come under increasing pressure for her critical thinking and the political questions she was asking, she applied for permission to leave the country. She emigrated to West Berlin in 1985.

The video is made up of excerpts from a longer interview in the Jewish Museum Berlin’s collections. You can watch the full interview, along with ten others, in the event space of the exhibition Another country. Jewish in the GDR.

The city walk through East Berlin on Jewish Places takes you to the Rykestraße Synagogue, among other places.

Toni Krahl, vocalist with the band City, was born in Berlin-Köpenick in 1949; his parents emigrated to England and he grew up in a communist parental home. His father was member of the Herbert Baum group, a Jewish-communist resistance group. At 19, Toni was sentenced to three years in prison for protesting against the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops. After three months, the sentence was commuted to a two years suspended sentence. In 1975 he joined City as vocalist.

The video extracts are taken from the interview collections of the Leo Baeck Institute New York and the Moses Mendelssohn Center for European-Jewish Studies (MMC) in Potsdam. These are being scientifically processed as part of the digital publishing project Jewish history and stories in the GDR.

The interviews have been made available to the JMB by the kind permission of the MMC.

Renate Aris, born in 1935, narrowly escaped deportation by the National Socialists in Dresden. Three years after the end of the war, she and her brother Heinz-Joachim celebrated their joint bat and bar mitzvahs in the re-established community in their home town. She remained a member of it for many decades before moving to Karl-Marx-Stadt (today known as Chemnitz) and joining the community there. The professional wardrobe mistress has received a number of awards for her work as a contemporary witness, including the Order of Merit of the Free State of Saxony and the Chemnitz Peace Prize.

The video is made up of excerpts from a longer interview in the Jewish Museum Berlin’s collections. You can watch the full interview, along with ten others, in the event space of the exhibition Another country. Jewish in the GDR.

Find out more about the Jewish communities in Dresden and Chemnitz on Jewish Places.

Like Toni Krahl, Martin Schreier, born in Dresden in 1948 and vocalist with the band Stern-Combo Meißen, was the child of returned Jewish emigrants. His parents were members of the resistance in Belgium. His mother came from an east-European Jewish family, was born in London and grew up in Antwerp. After the war, she followed her husband to his home town of Dresden. Schreier co-founded the band Stern-Combo Meißen in 1964. After German reunification, life became quiet for the band until they celebrated a successful comeback in 1996.

The video is made up of excerpts from a longer interview in the Jewish Museum Berlin’s collections. You can watch the full interview, along with ten others, in the event space of the exhibition Another country. Jewish in the GDR.

Find out more about the Jewish communities in Dresden on Jewish Places.

Rudolf Lappe (1914–2013) emigrated from Nazi Germany to England, where he studied engineering. He came to Dresden not only for the rock-climbing in Saxon Switzerland, but also to help build socialism and earn his doctorate. He was Professor of Electrical Engineering at Dresden University of Technology, and gave lectures in Ghana and Indonesia, among other places.

The video is made up of excerpts from a longer interview in the Jewish Museum Berlin’s collections. It was conducted for the Brüder und Fremde (Brothers and Strangers) exhibition (2008) in the hall of the New Synagogue in Dresden by Sandra Anusiewicz-Baer.

Find out more about the Jewish communities in Dresden on Jewish Places.

Peter Kirchner (1935–2018) was born in the Jewish hospital in the Berlin district of Wedding, the son of a Jewish mother and a Christian father. In 1943, he moved with his mother, who was required to do forced labor, to the transit camp on Große Hamburger Straße. His father managed to retrieve him from the camp and spent the remaining years of the war with him in Neustadt Dosse. In the fall of 1945, the two rejoined Kirchner’s mother in Berlin. Kirchner studied medicine at Humboldt University in Berlin and worked as a specialist in neurology and psychiatry. From 1971 to 1990, he was President of the Jewish community in (East) Berlin.

The video excerpts are taken from the interview collections of the Leo Baeck Institute New York and the Moses Mendelssohn Center for European-Jewish Studies (MMC) in Potsdam. These are being scientifically processed as part of the digital publishing project Jewish history and stories in the GDR.

The interviews have been made available to the JMB by the kind permission of the MMC.

Go on a city walk through East Berlin with Jewish Places!

Born in 1960, Marion Kahnemann moved from Magdeburg to Dresden at the age of two, because her father – who had returned to Germany from exile in Bolivia – was employed as an actor by the Dresden Children’s Theater. From 1981 to 1986 she was a student at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts. Since then she has worked as a freelance artist and has exhibited all around the world. From 1998 she also began to create art for public spaces, including the Memorial to Deported Jews at the Neustadt train station in Dresden.

The video is made up of excerpts from a longer interview in the Jewish Museum Berlin’s collections. You can watch the full interview, along with ten others, in the event space of the exhibition Another country. Jewish in the GDR.

Listen to the podcast Jewish in the GDR. A road trip with Marion and Lena Brasch by Deutschlandfunk Kultur in cooperation with the Jewish Museum Berlin, which features the visit to Marion Kahnemann, among other things (in German).

Find out more about the Jewish communities in Dresden on Jewish Places.

Ruth Zadke’s parents, Gerhard and Alice Zadek, returned to Berlin from exile in Britain in 1947. Before emigrating they had been members of the Jewish resistance group around Herbert Baum; in Great Britain they were founder members of the Free German Youth (Freie Deutsche Jugend, or FDJ). The Zadek couple were closely involved with the political system, both in the Soviet occupation zone and in the GDR.
In 1953, as Western immigrants, the couple lost their functions and offices. Ruth was born the same year in Neustrelitz. The family soon moved to Berlin, where Ruth later studied art education and history at the Humboldt University. In 1981 she left the GDR for Nuremberg, where she studied painting and graphic design. The artist got involved on a voluntary basis with politics, including on the Nuremberg City Council and the Bavarian Association of Cities.

The video is made up of excerpts from a longer interview in the Jewish Museum Berlin’s collections. You can watch the full interview, along with ten others, in the event space of the exhibition Another country. Jewish in the GDR.

Gadaljahu Moschinski was born in 1955 in Israel and grew up there. His father was from Poland and his mother from Lithuania. After his military service, he wanted to study medicine but was not able to secure a university place in Israel. He specifies in the interview how he came to study in the GDR and why he decided to make Dresden his home once he had completed his studies. After German reunification he enjoyed the linguistic and cultural diversity in Dresden’s Jewish community that resulted from the influx of Russian-speaking members.

The video is made up of excerpts from a longer interview in the Jewish Museum Berlin’s collections. It was conducted for the Brüder und Fremde (Brothers and Strangers) exhibition (2008) in the hall of the New Synagogue in Dresden by Sandra Anusiewicz-Baer.

Find out more about the Jewish communities in Dresden on Jewish Places.