Novel "Society with Limited Hope" | GDR: Completely Disappeared from the Country

Your novel begins with a strange wedding. A guitar solo comes from the pulpit, long-haired men in butcher's shirts fill a small church, everyone roaring along to the beat. Wheelchairs are in the middle of it all, one of them the preacher, another his sister, the bride. You got married yourself shortly before this novel was published. Does this bring your life full circle?

Or he opens up. It feels good.

At the end of the novel, you thank your wife for her five years of patience. Did it take that long to write?

Everything has its time. Some novels just take a little longer. I worked with Matthias Vernaldi, the model for Gruns, on various projects for years. I already absorbed the stories. Matthias Vernaldi was one of the founders of the commune in Hartroda. At the end of the 1970s, the man who was pronounced dead at an early age from spinal muscular atrophy moved into an abandoned rectory in Thuringia with his friends and sister. They founded a "cripple commune," four of whom physically deviated from the norm. Vernaldi, a correspondence student of theology, became the village preacher, and Hartroda became a magnet for "slackers" and dropouts. The dropouts escaped the GDR's forced labor by caring for the physically disabled. After reunification, all the residents gradually left the commune, and Vernaldi moved to Berlin. He fought for the rights of the disabled and sex workers, lived three times as long as predicted, and died in 2020 at the age of 60.

What kind of projects did you work on together?

We founded the magazine "Mondkalb – Journal for Organized Disability" and had a show on the independent radio called "Krüppel aus dem Sack" (Cripple Out of the Bag). He talked a lot there. And I always subconsciously stored it away and only realized what good material it was when I wrote his obituary for the "Tagesspiegel."

The Protestant Church in West Germany supported the project in Hartroda with donations, while the East German church offered it legal protection, sometimes grudgingly. As a historian, you are an expert on GDR church history and wrote your doctorate on Oskar Brüsewitz. Is it important to talk about the church under socialism?

I believe we can't understand the history of the GDR without knowing the history of East German Protestantism. In the Soviet sphere of influence, the SED was the only communist party that, upon coming to power, had to deal with a Protestant majority church. They can be very stubborn.

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

The counter-world that emerged there at the end of the 1970s. It was unique in the Eastern Bloc, except perhaps in Poland. In the Protestant church, you could talk to people about any topic, including socio-political issues. I always secretly went to the youth congregation. I was at an economics college in Frankfurt (Oder) and couldn't stand that FDJ bullshit anymore. There were no other structures in the GDR where people could engage in critical exchange with one another. That wasn't planned. There wasn't even Alcoholics Anonymous, even though people drank so much. More needs to be said about this church niche. Otherwise, the GDR would get worse in literature with each passing year.

You fictionalize this niche, into which entire civic movements and subcultures fit, and loosely based on the facts, unfold a complex world of the Hartroda Communards, including a blues band that plays in the church. Is there a real-life model for this?

In the 2000s, I often traveled around with the band Freygang, for whom I even wrote lyrics. I often went with the band's leader, André Greiner-Pohl, who roughly corresponds to "Eisen" in the novel, to his little house in the Silesian low mountain range. Always for two nights only. We couldn't stand each other much longer. We'd drink beer and play chess. And he'd talk. I also experienced a few rides on the Freygang tour bus, all that sexist crap that was so boring. They even (points to his crippled arm) made short-sleeved jokes.

Were people who did not physically conform to the norm able to lead self-determined lives in the GDR?

The GDR was different at different times. And I was born in 1969, a different generation than Vernaldi. At twelve, I went to a boarding school in Lichtenberg, with its own swimming pool! Nothing better could have happened to me. I learned social skills that I wouldn't have learned at home.

In addition to Gruns and Eisen, there is a third main character in your novel, the former border guard Bernd Morzek.

While researching my books "1976" and "The Brüsewitz Case," I discovered the Corghi case (Benito Corghi, Italian truck driver and communist, who died on the inner-German border; author's note). I was moved by the thought: What about the shooter? How do you go on living after shooting someone in the back at 80 meters?

Was there a real-life model for Gruns' sermons in the novel? Have any sermons by Matthias Vernaldi survived?

I recreated that. For example, in the Gospel of Matthew, I came across the parable of the workers in the vineyard: the rejection of merit-based justice. Justice means doing justice to people. I also studied the theology of Heino Falcke, who criticized the state early on without being able to criminalize it. I adopted his line of argument for Pavel Korchagin's sermon. (laughs)

Punks suddenly appear in Hartroda, trampling everywhere. With them, chaos sets in. And a punk band with a female drummer. Why punks?

I envied them. I wanted to tell a good story, but I had to alienate reality. I was a bit inspired by Otze from Schleimkeim. I always had in mind what Conny Schleime said about Otze: that he played the drums like he was slaughtering a pig. And Crazy Horst is a cross between one of the Freygang guitarists and Georg Timber-Trattnig, the brilliant playwright and bassist of Naked Lunch. He drank himself to death. They had to tie him down in the band bus so he wouldn't grab the steering wheel. The punks weren't my scene, but I had to build a counterweight to the blues musicians. And it was fun. So much literature has been published about punk in the GDR recently that you'd think it was a mass movement. I thought I'd put it back on track. If you decided to become a punk during the GDR era, you were saying goodbye to a life with a future. You couldn't amount to anything in the GDR. With every rebellion, every act of disobedience, one harmed oneself first and foremost, in a very unique way, with every act of contradiction. If I had known that the GDR would only exist for a few more years, imagine how brave I would have been!

The Stasi was particularly keen on these radical people, which plays a role in the novel. It's important to them that we differentiate. But can this heal us? Do we have a chance to truly engage in dialogue and forgive?

It's too late for that, I'm afraid. I noticed in the Left Party's Historical Commission that people aren't interested in a discourse on the GDR. You have to have the right conversations at the right time. In Freygang's changing lineup in the 2000s, they had at least three musicians with IM pasts, but apart from the roadie, no one was willing to talk about it. André (Greiner-Pohl) himself mentioned it in his book, but then declared the debate over. This had consequences: If, as a music journalist, I'm not allowed to ask about the involvement of individual members of a band that was banned in the GDR for a long time, even though it's part of its history, then I'll steer clear of it. Freygang didn't appear in the scene's press at all anymore. And then it's a good thing that this experience is at least recorded in literature.

Shortly before publication, you were awarded the Matthias Vernaldi Prize for Independent Living—as if Matthias Vernaldi had the final say after all. When did you first visit Hartroda?

My setting no longer exists. Perhaps I've never been to Hartroda. That's the beauty of being a writer. I don't have to travel to go on vacation.

Karsten Krampitz: “Society with Limited Hope,” Edition Nautilus, 200 pp., hardcover, €22.