Fritz Raddatz on his failures as a GDR citizen

Fritz J. Raddatz, author, editor and translator, reflects self-critically on the time he spent living in the GDR between 1950 and 1959 on a voluntary basis. He asks himself why he chose to ignore the dictatorial injustice of those times despite being very much aware of it. "I won't say 'I didn't know about it', as millions of Germans did after 1945 in an effort to exculpate themselves. I knew - about the plays withdrawn from theatre programmes, about the censored films, about forbidden books (often enough my own, published by the Volk und Welt publishing house). I took delight in breaking the rules, in a subversive poem in an anthology, in a Böll book in the publisher's programme, in my own little acts of subversion. When the SED party secretary approached me trying to get me to join the party - he was the sales manager at the time and came around just as often to covertly ask for 'West licenses' because these books sold well - I would turn him down saying 'You always talk of 'the party' you want me to join - which one do you mean?' Such were my pathetic attempts at rebellion."

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