Theatres in Schumannstraße: Kammerspiele (left) and Deutsches Theater (right)

The Deutsches Theater in Berlin is a well-known German theatre. It was built in 1850 as Friedrich-Wilhelm-Städtisches Theater, after Frederick William IV of Prussia. Located on Schumann Street (Schumannstraße), the Deutsches Theater consists of two adjoining stages that share a common, classical facade. The main stage was built in 1850, originally for operettas.

Adolf L'Arronge founded the Deutsches Theater in 1883 with the ambition of providing Berliners with a high-quality ensemble-based repertory company on the model of the German court theatre, the Meiningen Ensemble, which had been developed by Georg II, Duke of Saxe-Meiningen and his colleagues to become "the most widely admired and imitated company in Europe", thanks to its historically accurate sets and costumes, vividly-realized crowd scenes, and meticulous directorial control.^[1]

Otto Brahm, the leading exponent of theatrical Naturalism in Germany, took over the direction of the theatre in 1894, and applied that approach to a combination of classical productions and stagings of the work of the new realistic playwrights.^[2]

One of Brahm's ensemble, the legendary theatre director Max Reinhardt, took over the directorship in 1904. Under his leadership it acquired a reputation as one of the most significant theatres in the world.^[3] In 1905 he founded a theatre-school and built a chamber theatre. Reinhardt remained the artistic director of the theatre until he fled Nazi Germany in 1933.^[2]

The Deutsches Theater remains one of the most prominent companies in Berlin^[2] and is home to performance artist and choreographer Deiter BlackHeart.

Works cited[link]

• Banham, Martin, ed. 1998a. "Deutsches Theater" In The Cambridge Guide to Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-43437-8. p.294.
• ---. 1998b. "Meiningen company." In The Cambridge Guide to Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-43437-8. p.718.
• Willett, John and Ralph Manheim. 1970. Introduction. In Collected Plays: One by Bertolt Brecht. Ed. John Willett and Ralph Manheim. Bertolt Brecht: Plays, Poetry and Prose Ser. London: Methuen. ISBN 0-416-03280-X. p.vii-xvii.

Notes[link]

External links[link]

• Deutsches Theater site

This article about a Berlin building or structure is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. v t e

This article includes a list of references, related reading or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks inline citations. Please improve this article by introducing more precise citations. (February 2012)

Gerhart Hauptmann
Born	(1862-11-15)15 November 1862 Obersalzbrunn, Silesia, Prussia
Died	6 June 1946(1946-06-06) (aged 83) Agnetendorf (Jagniątków), People's Republic of Poland
Occupation	dramatist
Nationality	German
Literary movement	Naturalism
Notable work(s)	The Weavers, The Rats
Notable award(s)	Nobel Prize in Literature 1912
Signature

Gerhart Hauptmann (15 November 1862 – 6 June 1946) was a German dramatist and novelist who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1912.

Life and work[link]

Hauptmann was born in Obersalzbrunn, a small town of Silesia, now known as Szczawno-Zdrój and a part of Poland. He was the son of a hotel-keeper. After attending the village school he went to the Realschule in Breslau, after which he was sent to learn agriculture on his uncle's farm at Jauer. Having no taste for country life, Hauptmann soon returned to Breslau and entered the art school with the intention of becoming a sculptor. There he met his life-long friend Josef Block. He later studied at the University of Jena and spent the greater part of 1883 and 1884 in Italy. In May 1885, Hauptmann married and settled in Berlin and, devoting himself entirely to literary work, soon attained a reputation as one of the chief representatives of the modern drama.

In 1891 he moved to Schreiberhau in Silesia. Hauptmann's first drama, Before Dawn (1889) inaugurated the naturalistic movement in modern German literature. It was followed by The Reconciliation (1890), Lonely People (1891) and The Weavers (1892), a powerful drama depicting the rising of the Silesian weavers in 1844 for which he is best known outside of Germany.

Hauptmann's subsequent work includes the comedies Colleague Crampton (1892), The Beaver Coat (1893), and The Conflagration (1901), the symbolist dream play The Assumption of Hannele (1893), and an historical drama Florian Geyer (1895). He also wrote two tragedies of Silesian peasant life, Drayman Henschel (1898) and Rose Bernd (1903), and the dramatic fairy-tales The Sunken Bell (1896) and And Pippa Dances (1906).

Hauptmann's marital life was difficult and in 1904 he divorced his wife. That same year he married the actress Margarete Marschalk, who had borne him a son four years earlier. The following year he had an affair with the 17-year-old Austrian actress Ida Orloff, whom he met in Berlin when she performed in his play The Assumption of Hannele. Orloff inspired characters in several of Hauptmann's works and he later referred to her as his muse.

In 1911 he wrote The Rats. In 1912, Hauptmann was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, "primarily in recognition of his fruitful, varied and outstanding production in the realm of dramatic art."

His 1912 novel, Atlantis became the basis for a Danish silent film of the same name. The novel was written one month before the RMS Titanic disaster, and the film's 1913 release was less than one year after the event. The storyline for both involved a romance aboard a doomed ocean liner, and the similarity to the disaster became obvious. This coincidental untimeliness caused the film to be banned in Norway^[1] due to perceived insensitivity.

During the First World War Hauptmann was a pacifist. In this period of his career he wrote several gloomy historical-allegorical plays, such as The Bow of Odysseus (1914), The White Saviour (1912–17), and Winter Ballade (1917). After the war, his dramatic abilities appeared to diminish. He wrote two full-length plays that are similar to the early successes: Dorothea Angermann (1926) and Before Sunset (1932). He remained in Germany after Hitler's Machtergreifung and survived the bombing of Dresden. His last work was the Atriden-Tetralogie (1942–46). His works in German were published by S. Fischer Verlag.

Hauptmann died at the age of 83 at his home in Agnetendorf (now Jagniątków, Poland) in 1946. Since the Polish communist administration did not allow Hauptmann's relatives to bury him in Agnetendorf (although even the Soviet military government had recommended this), his body was transported in an old cattle wagon to occupied Germany more than a month after his death. He was buried near his cottage on Hiddensee.

Under Wilhelm II Hauptmann enjoyed the reputation of a radical writer, on the side of the poor and outcasts. During the Weimar Republic (1918–33) he enjoyed the status of the literary figurehead of the new order, and was even considered for the post of state president. Under Hitler he kept his distance from the regime, but never publicly criticized it. This, and the fact that (unlike so many writers and academics) he stayed in Germany, was strongly held against him after the war. A superb collected edition of his works appeared in the 1960s, and stimulated some impressive studies of his work (e.g. those by Peter Sprengel), but the tide of critical and public opinion remained negative. A few of his plays are still revived from time to time, but otherwise he is neglected. He was certainly an uneven writer, but at his best (as in 'The Weavers', his novel 'The Fool in Christ Emmanuel Quint', and the Novellen 'The Heretic of Soana' and 'Das Meerwunder') he can arguably rank with the best of his German contemporaries.

Works[link]

Poster for a Federal Theatre Project presentation of The Weavers in the 1930s.

Novels[link]

• Der Narr in Christo Emanuel Quint (1910)
• Atlantis (1912)
• Wanda, der Dämon (1926)
• Die Insel der grossen Mutter (1928)
• Um Volk und Geist (1932)
• Im Wirbel der Berufung (1936)
• Der Abenteuer meiner Jugend (1937)

Short novels[link]

• Bahnwärter Thiel (1888)
• Der Ketzer von Soana (1918)
• Phantom (1923)
• Marginalien (selected works, reports: 1887–1927)
• Das Meerwunder (1934)
• Sonnen (1938)
• Der Schuss im Park (1939)

Verse novels[link]

• Romethidenlos (1885)
• Anna (1921)
• Die blaue Blume (1924)
• Till Eulenspiegel (1927)
• Der grosse Traum (1912–42)

Plays[link]

References[link]

Sources[link]

Primary sources[link]

Dramatic works[link]

Secondary sources[link]

 This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. 

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Gerhart Hauptmann

• The Nobel Prize Bio on Hauptmann
• Works by Gerhart Hauptmann at Project Gutenberg
• Authors' Calendar

Günter Grass
Günter Grass in 2004 at Buchmesse, Frankfurt am Main
Born	Günter Wilhelm Grass (1927-10-16) 16 October 1927 (age 84) Danzig-Langfuhr, Free City of Danzig
Occupation	Novelist, poet, playwright, sculptor, graphic designer
Nationality	German
Period	1956–present
Literary movement	Vergangenheitsbewältigung
Notable work(s)	Die Blechtrommel Katz und Maus Hundejahre Im Krebsgang "Was gesagt werden muss"
Notable award(s)	Georg Büchner Prize 1965 Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature 1999
Influences Bocaccio, François Rabelais, Grimmelshausen, Miguel de Cervantes, Voltaire, Denis Diderot Laurence Sterne, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Thomas Mann, Friedrich Hölderlin, Friedrich Nietzsche, Georg Trakl, Ivan Goncharov, Theodor Fontane, Rainer Maria Rilke, Franz Kafka, Alfred Döblin, Albert Camus, Vladimir Nabokov, the Nouveau Roman
Influenced Gabriel García Márquez, Salman Rushdie, Haruki Murakami, John Irving, Philip Roth, Michel Tournier, José Saramago, António Lobo Antunes, Patrick Süskind, Graham Swift, Tom Robbins
Signature

Günter Grass's childhood home in Danzig, today's Gdańsk

Günter Grass's prisoner of war record at age 18, indicating his membership of a Waffen-SS unit

Günter Grass by Irish artist Reginald Gray (The New York Times, 1965)

Günter Grass in 1986

Günter Wilhelm Grass (born 16 October 1927) is a German-Kashubian novelist, poet, playwright, illustrator, graphic artist, sculptor and recipient of the 1999 Nobel Prize in Literature. He is widely regarded as Germany's most famous living writer.^[1][2][3][4]

Grass was born in the Free City of Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland). In 1945, he came to West Germany as a homeless refugee, though in his fiction he frequently returns to the Danzig of his childhood.

Grass is best known for his first novel, The Tin Drum (1959), a key text in European magic realism, and the first part of his Danzig Trilogy, which also includes Cat and Mouse and Dog Years. His works are frequently considered to have a left-wing political dimension and Grass has been an active supporter of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). The Tin Drum was adapted into a film, which won both the 1979 Palme d'Or and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. The Swedish Academy, upon awarding him the Nobel Prize in Literature, noted him as a writer "whose frolicsome black fables portray the forgotten face of history".^[5]

Early life[link]

Grass was born in the Free City of Danzig on 16 October 1927, to Wilhelm Grass (1899–1979), a Protestant ethnic German, and Helene (Knoff) Grass (1898–1954), a Roman Catholic of Kashubian-Polish origin.^[6][7] Grass was raised a Catholic. His parents had a grocery store with an attached apartment in Danzig-Langfuhr (now Gdańsk Wrzeszcz). He has one sister, who was born in 1930.

Grass attended the Danzig Gymnasium Conradinum. In 1943 he became a Luftwaffenhelfer, then he was conscripted into the Reichsarbeitsdienst. In November 1944, shortly after his seventeenth birthday, he volunteered for submarine service with the Kriegsmarine, "to get out of the confinement he felt as a teenager in his parents' house" which he considered stuffy Catholic lower middle class.^[8][9] However, he was not accepted by the Navy and instead was drafted into the 10th SS Panzer Division Frundsberg that, at the time, he regarded as an elite unit.^[10][11] He saw combat with the Panzer Division from February 1945 until he was wounded on 20 April 1945. He was captured in Marienbad and sent to an American prisoner-of-war camp. Danzig had been captured by the Soviet Army and was then annexed by Poland, which expelled its German population. Grass could not return home and found refuge in western Germany.

His military service became the subject of debate in 2006, after he disclosed in an interview and a book that he had been conscripted into the Waffen SS while a teenager in late 1944.^[12] At that point of the war, youths could be conscripted into the Waffen-SS instead of the regular Armed Forces (Wehrmacht), although Grass' division functioned like a regular Panzer division.

In 1946 and 1947 he worked in a mine and received training in stonemasonry. For many years he studied sculpture and graphics, first at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, then at the Berlin University of the Arts. Grass worked as an author, graphic designer, and sculptor, traveling frequently. He married in 1954 and since 1960 has lived in Berlin as well as part-time in Schleswig-Holstein. Divorced in 1978, he remarried in 1979. From 1983 to 1986 he held the presidency of the Berlin Academy of the Arts.

Major works[link]

Danzig Trilogy[link]

English-language readers probably know Grass best as the author of Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum), published in 1959 (and subsequently filmed by director Volker Schlöndorff in 1979). It was followed in 1961 by Katz und Maus (Cat and Mouse), a novella, and in 1963 by the novel Hundejahre (Dog Years). Together these three works form what is known as the Danzig Trilogy. All three works deal with the rise of Nazism and with the war experience in the unique cultural setting of Danzig and the delta of the Vistula River. Dog Years, in many respects a sequel to The Tin Drum, portrays the area's mixed ethnicities and complex historical background in lyrical prose that is highly evocative.^[who?]

In 2002, Grass returned to the forefront of world literature with Im Krebsgang (Crabwalk). This novella, one of whose main characters first appeared in Cat and Mouse, was Grass's most successful work in decades.

Social and political activism[link]

Grass has for several decades been a supporter of the Social Democratic Party of Germany and its policies. He has taken part in German and international political debate on several occasions.

During Willy Brandt's chancellorship, Grass was an active supporter. Grass criticised left-wing radicals and instead argued in favour of the "snail's pace", as he put it, of democratic reform (Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke). Books containing his speeches and essays have been released throughout his literary career.

In the 1980s, he became active in the peace movement and visited Calcutta for six months. A diary with drawings was published as Zunge zeigen, an allusion to Kali's tongue.

During the events leading up to the reunification of Germany in 1989–90, Grass argued for the continued separation of the two German states, asserting that a unified Germany would necessarily resume its role as belligerent nation-state.

In 2001, Grass proposed the creation of a German-Polish museum for art lost during the War. The Hague Convention of 1907 requires the return of art that had been evacuated, stolen or seized. Unlike many countries^{[citation needed]} that have cooperated with Germany, some countries refuse to repatriate some of the looted art.^[13][14]

On 4 April 2012, Grass's poem "What Must Be Said" ("Was gesagt werden muss") was published in several European newspapers. In the poem, Grass expresses his concern about the hypocrisy of German military support (the delivery of a submarine) for an Israel that might use such equipment to launch nuclear warheads against Iran, which "could wipe out the Iranian people" (das...iranische Volk auslöschen könnte). And he hoped that many will demand "that the governments of both Iran and Israel allow an international authority free and open inspection of the nuclear potential and capability of both." In response, Israel declared him persona non grata in Israel.^[15][16][17]

On 26 April 2012, he wrote a poem criticizing European policy for the treatment of Greece in the European sovereign-debt crisis. In the poem, called "Europe's Disgrace",Grass accuses Europe of condemning Greece into poverty, a country "whose mind conceived, Europe."^[18][19]

Awards and honours[link]

1999 Nobel Prize in Literature[link]

Grass has received dozens of international awards and in 1999 achieved the highest literary honour: the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Swedish Academy noted him as a writer "whose frolicsome black fables portray the forgotten face of history".^[5] His literature is commonly categorised as part of the artistic movement of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, roughly translated as "coming to terms with the past."

He received the Georg Büchner Prize in 1965 and was elected in 1993 an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature ^[20]

Representatives of the City of Bremen joined together to establish the Günter Grass Foundation, with the aim of establishing a centralized collection of his numerous works, especially his many personal readings, videos and films. The Günter Grass House in Lübeck houses exhibitions of his drawings and sculptures, an archive and a library.

Bibliography[link]

• Die Vorzüge der Windhühner (poems, 1956)
• Die bösen Köche. Ein Drama (play, 1956) translated as The Wicked Cooks in Four Plays (1967)
• Hochwasser. Ein Stück in zwei Akten (play, 1957) The Flood
• Onkel, Onkel. Ein Spiel in vier Akten (play, 1958) Mister, Mister
• Danziger Trilogie
  • Die Blechtrommel (1959) trans. The Tin Drum (1959)
  • Katz und Maus (1961) trans. Cat and Mouse (1963)
  • Hundejahre (1963) trans. Dog Years (1965)
• Gleisdreieck (poems, 1960)
• Die Plebejer proben den Aufstand (play, 1966) trans. The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising (1966)
• Ausgefragt (poems, 1967)
• Über das Selbstverständliche. Reden – Aufsätze – Offene Briefe – Kommentare (speeches, essays, 1968) trans. Speak out! Speeches, Open Letters, Commentaries (1969) with 3 additional pieces
• Örtlich betäubt (1969) trans. Local Anaesthetic (1970)
• Davor (play, 1970) trans. Max (1972) on a plot from Local Anaesthetic
• Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke (1972) trans. From the Diary of a Snail (1973)
• Der Bürger und seine Stimme. Reden Aufsätze Kommentare (speeches, essays, 1974)
• Denkzettel. Politische Reden und Aufsätze 1965–1976 (political essays and speeches, 1978)
• Der Butt (1977) trans. The Flounder (1978)
• Das Treffen in Telgte (1979) trans. The Meeting at Telgte (1981)
• Kopfgeburten oder Die Deutschen sterben aus (1980) trans. Headbirths, or, the Germans are Dying Out (1982)
• Widerstand lernen. Politische Gegenreden 1980–1983 (political speeches, 1984)
• Die Rättin (1986) trans. The Rat (1987)
• Zunge zeigen. Ein Tagebuch in Zeichnungen ("A Diary in Drawings", 1988) trans. Show Your Tongue (1989)
• Unkenrufe (1992) trans. The Call of the Toad (1992)
• Ein weites Feld (1995) trans. Too Far Afield (2000)
• Mein Jahrhundert (1999) trans. My Century (1999)
• Im Krebsgang (2002) trans. Crabwalk (2002)
• Letzte Tänze (poems, 2003)
• Beim Häuten der Zwiebel (2006) trans. Peeling the Onion (2007) First volume of memoir.
• Dummer August (poems, 2007)
• Die Box (2008) trans. The Box (2010) Second volume of memoir.
• Grimms Wörter (2010) Third volume of memoir.

Collections in English translation

• Four Plays (1967) including Ten Minutes to Buffalo
• In the Egg and Other Poems (1977)
• Two States One Nation? (1990)

See also[link]

• List of Nobel laureates in Literature
• List of people declared persona non grata

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Günter Grass

• Works by or about Günter Grass in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Günter Grass in the German National Library catalogue (German)
• Günter Grass at gdansk-life.com (English)
• Günter Grass 'Bookweb' on literary website The Ledge (with suggestions for further reading)
• Portrait on rosenthalusa.com
• "Grass admits serving with Waffen-SS" article in The Guardian
• Detailed article on Waffen-SS membership
• Gaffney, Elizabeth (Summer 1991). "Gunter Grass, The Art of Fiction No. 124". The Paris Review. http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2191/the-art-of-fiction-no-124-gunter-grass. 
• O'Hagan, Andrew (2007). "Real Audio interview with Günter Grass and Norman Mailer". NYPL. http://www.nypl.org/research/chss/pep/pepdesc.cfm?id=2678. 
• "World famous German writer Gunter Grass talks about his controversial masterpiece, The Tin Drum, on World Book Club". BBC World Service (BBC). 3 October 2009. http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/wbc/all. 

v t e Works by Günter Grass Danzig Trilogy The Tin Drum (1959) Cat and Mouse (1961) Dog Years (1963) Fiction Local Anaesthetic (1969) The Flounder (1977) The Meeting at Telgte (1979) The Rat (1986) My Century (1999) Crabwalk (2002) Memoirs Peeling the Onion (2006) The Box (2008) Grimms Wörter (2010) Poetry "What Must Be Said" (2012)

Joachim Gauck
President of Germany
Incumbent
Assumed office 18 March 2012
Chancellor	Angela Merkel
Preceded by	Christian Wulff
Federal Commissioner for the Stasi Archives
In office 4 October 1990 – 10 October 2000
Preceded by	Position established
Succeeded by	Marianne Birthler
Member of the Bundestag
In office 3 October 1990 – 4 October 1990
Member of the People's Chamber
In office 18 March 1990 – 3 October 1990
Personal details
Born	(1940-01-24) 24 January 1940 (age 72) Rostock, Germany
Political party	Independent (1990–present)
Other political affiliations	New Forum/Alliance 90 (1989–1990)
Spouse(s)	Gerhild Gauck (m. 1959; separated since 1991)
Domestic partner	Daniela Schadt (2000–present)
Children	Christian Martin Gesine Katharina
Alma mater	University of Rostock[1]
Profession	Pastor
Religion	Lutheran[2]
Signature

Joachim Gauck pronounced [joːˈʔaxiːm ɡaʊ̯k] (born 24 January 1940 in Rostock) is the current President of Germany (since 18 March 2012). A former Lutheran pastor, he came to prominence as an anti-communist civil rights activist in East Germany.^[3][4][5][6]

During the Peaceful Revolution, he was a co-founder of the New Forum opposition movement in East Germany, which contributed to the downfall of the Soviet-backed dictatorship^[7] of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED). In 1990 he served as a member of the only freely elected People's Chamber for the Alliance 90. Following German reunification, he was elected by the Bundestag as the first Federal Commissioner for the Stasi Archives, serving from 1990 to 2000. As Federal Commissioner, he earned recognition as a "Stasi hunter" and "tireless pro-democracy advocate," exposing the crimes of the former communist secret police.^{[8][9][10][11]}

He was nominated as the candidate of the SPD and the Greens for President of Germany in the 2010 election, but narrowly lost to Christian Wulff, the candidate of the government coalition. His candidacy was met by significant approval of the population and the media; Der Spiegel described him as "the better President"^[12] and the Bild called him "the president of hearts."^[13][14][15] After Christian Wulff had stepped down, Gauck was elected President with 991 of 1228 votes in the Federal Convention in the 2012 election, as a nonpartisan consensus candidate of the CDU, the CSU, the FDP, the SPD and the Greens.

A son of a survivor of a Soviet Gulag,^{[16][17][18][19]} Gauck's political life was formed by his own family's experiences with totalitarianism. Gauck was a founding signatory of the Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism, together with Václav Havel and other statesmen, and the Declaration on Crimes of Communism. He has called for increased awareness of communist crimes in Europe, and for the necessity of delegitimizing the communist era.^[3] His 2012 book Freedom. A Plea calls for the defense of freedom and human rights around the globe.^[20][21] He has been described by Chancellor Angela Merkel as a "true teacher of democracy" and a "tireless advocate of freedom, democracy, and justice."^[22] The Wall Street Journal has described him as "the last of a breed: the leaders of protest movements behind the Iron Curtain who went on to lead their countries after 1989."^[23] He has received numerous honours, including the 1997 Hannah Arendt Prize.

Childhood and life in East Germany (1940–1989)[link]

Joachim Gauck was born into a family of sailors in Rostock, the son of Joachim Gauck, Sr. (born 1907), and Olga Gauck (née Warremann, born 1910). His father was an experienced ship's captain and distinguished naval officer (Captain at Sea), who after World War II worked as an inspector at the Neptun Werft shipbuilding company. Following the Soviet occupation at the end of World War II, the communists were installed into power in what became the German Democratic Republic (East Germany). The family was a victim of Soviet persecution. When Joachim Gauck was eleven years old, in 1951, his father was arrested by Soviet occupation forces; he was not to return.^[24] He was convicted by a Russian military tribunal of espionage for receiving a letter from the West and also of anti-Soviet demagogy for being in the possession of a western journal on naval affairs, and deported to a Gulag in Siberia,^[25] where he was mistreated to the extent that he was considered physically disabled after one year, according to his son.^[26] For nearly three years, the family knew nothing about what had happened to him and whether he was still alive. He was freed in 1955, following the state visit of Konrad Adenauer to Moscow. Adenauer negotiated the release of thousands of German prisoners of war and civilians who had been deported.^[27]

He graduated with an Abitur from Innerstädtisches Gymnasium in Rostock. According to Joachim Gauck, his political activities were inspired by the ordeal of his father,^[28] and he stated that he grew up with a "well-founded anti-communism".^[29] Already in school in East Germany, he made no secret of his anti-communist position, and he steadfastly refused to join the communist youth movement, the Free German Youth. He wanted to study German and become a journalist, but because he wasn't a communist, he wasn't allowed to do so.^[13] Instead he chose to study theology and become a pastor in the Protestant church in Mecklenburg. He has stated that his primary intention was not to become a pastor, but the theology studies offered an opportunity to study philosophy and the church was one of the few institutions in East Germany where communist ideology was not dominant.^[30] Nevertheless, he did eventually become a pastor. His work as a pastor in East Germany was very difficult due to the hostility of the communist regime towards the church, and for many years he was under constant observation and was harassed by the Stasi (the secret police).^[31][32] The Stasi described Gauck in their file on him as an "incorrigible anti-communist" ("unverbesserlicher Antikommunist").^[33] He has said that "at the age of nine, I knew socialism was an unjust system."^[13]

In his memoirs, he writes: "The fate of our father was like an educational cudgel. It led to a sense of unconditional loyalty towards the family which excluded any sort of idea of fraternisation with the system."^[34]

Career during and after the Peaceful Revolution of 1989[link]

During the Peaceful Revolution of 1989, he became a member of the New Forum, a democratic opposition movement, and was elected as its spokesman. He also took part in major demonstrations against the communist regime of GDR. In the free elections on 18 March 1990, he was elected to the People's Chamber of the GDR, representing the Alliance 90 (that consisted of the New Forum, Democracy Now and the Initiative for Peace and Human Rights), where he served until the dissolution of the GDR in October 1990.

Joachim Gauck as a member of the East German People's Chamber in 1990

On 2 October 1990, the day before the dissolution of the GDR, the People's Chamber elected him Special Representative for the Stasi Archives. After the dissolution of the GDR the following day, he was appointed Special Representative of the Federal Government for the Stasi Archives by President Richard von Weizsäcker and Chancellor Helmut Kohl. As such, he was in charge of the archives of the Stasi and tasked with investigating communist crimes. In 1992, his office became known as the Federal Commissioner for the Stasi Archives. He served in this position until 2000, when he was succeeded by Marianne Birthler.

Gauck served as a member of the Bundestag, the Parliament of Germany, from 3 to 4 October 1990 (the 1990 People's Chamber was granted the right to nominate a certain number of MPs as part of the reunification process). He stepped down following his appointment as Special Representative of the Federal Government. As such, he was the shortest serving Member of Parliament of Germany ever.

Joachim Gauck attending a press conference of the International Society for Human Rights, where he lectured about the Stasi campaign to discredit the Society

He refused the position of President of the Federal Agency for Civic Education as well as offers to be nominated as a candidate for parliament by the SPD. Voices inside the CSU proposed him as a possible conservative presidential candidate (against SPD career politician Johannes Rau) in 1999,^[35] and his name was also mentioned as a possible candidate for CDU/CSU and Free Democratic Party in subsequent years. For instance the Saxon FDP state party proposed him as a liberal-conservative candidate in 2004, before the leaders of the parties agreed on Horst Köhler.^[36]

Since 2003, he has been chairman of the association Gegen Vergessen – Für Demokratie ("Against Forgetting – For Democracy"), and he served on the Management Board of the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia 2001–2004.^[37]

Political views and reception[link]

He has written on Soviet-era concentration camps such as the NKVD Special Camp No. 1, the crimes of communism, and political oppression in East Germany, and contributed to the German edition of The Black Book of Communism.

In 2007, Joachim Gauck was invited to deliver the main speech during a commemoration ceremony at the Landtag of Saxony in memory of the Reunification of Germany and the fall of the communist government.^[38] All parties participated, except The Left (the successor of the communist Socialist Unity Party (SED)), whose members walked out in protest against Gauck delivering the speech.^[39] Gauck supports the observation of Die Linke by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution and the corresponding state authorities.^[40] Gauck has lauded the SPD for distancing itself from Die Linke, stating that Kurt "Schumacher was an avowed opponent of any totalitarian rule."^[41]

Joachim Gauck is a founding signatory of both the Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism (2008)^[42] and the Declaration on Crimes of Communism (2010),^[43] both calling for the condemnation of communism, education about communist crimes and punishment of communist criminals. The Prague Declaration proposed the establishment of the European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism and Nazism, that was subsequently designated by the European Parliament. In 2010, Gauck criticized the political left of ignoring communist crimes.^[44]

Gauck is a supporter of the idea to etablish a Centre Against Expulsions in Berlin.^[45]

On the occasion of his 70th birthday in 2010, Gauck was praised by Chancellor Angela Merkel as a "true teacher of democracy" and a "tireless advocate of freedom, democracy and justice".^[22]

The Independent has described Joachim Gauck as "Germany's answer to Nelson Mandela".^[46] The Wall Street Journal has described him as "the last of a breed: the leaders of protest movements behind the Iron Curtain who went on to lead their countries after 1989," comparing him to Lech Wałęsa and Václav Havel.^[23] Corriere della Sera has referred to him as the "German Havel."^[47]

Gauck is a member of Atlantik-Brücke, an organisation promoting German-American friendship. Gauck supported the economic reforms initiated by the red-green government of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. He also supported the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, to end Yugoslav atrocities in Kosovo. He also supports the German military presence in Afghanistan. Gauck is a proponent of market economy, and is sceptical towards the occupy movement. In 2010, he said SPD politician Thilo Sarrazin had "demonstrated courage" in opening a debate on immigration.^[48] However, he criticized several of Sarrazin's views.^[49]

In an interview with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in 2007, Gauck said that "we have to delegitimatize [the communist era] not only because of the many victims and criminal acts, but [also because] modern politics in the entire Soviet empire was basically taken backward."^[3] According to The Wall Street Journal, he "has dedicated his life to showing that the Soviet system's evils were no less than the Third Reich's."^[23] In his 2012 book Freedom. A Plea, he outlines his thoughts on freedom, democracy, human rights and tolerance.

2010 presidential candidate[link]

"Citizens for Gauck," a demonstration in support of Gauck in front of the Brandenburger Tor in 2010

On 3 June 2010, Joachim Gauck was nominated for President of Germany in the 2010 election by the SPD and the Greens.^[50] Gauck is not a member of either the SPD or the Greens (although his former party in East Germany eventually merged with the Greens after reunification)^[51] and has stated that he would have accepted a nomination by the CDU as well.^[52] Gauck once described himself as a "leftist, liberal conservative"^[51] and after his nomination, stated: "I'm neither red nor green, I'm Joachim Gauck".^[53] The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung described him as a liberal conservative.^[54]

Gauck is widely respected across the political spectrum^[55] and is very popular also among CDU/CSU and FDP politicians due to his record as an upstanding, moral person during the communist dictatorship as well as his record as a "Stasi hunter" in the 1990s.^[56] His main contender, Christian Wulff, and politicians of all the government parties, stated that they greatly respected Gauck and his life and work.^[57] Jörg Schönbohm, former Chairman of the CDU of Brandenburg, also supported Gauck.^[58]

The only party that in principle rejected Gauck as a possible president was the legal successor of the East German communist party, Die Linke, which interpreted the nomination of the SPD and Greens as a refusal to cooperate with Die Linke,^[59] a party which contains factions that are considered extremist by federal authorities.^[60] CSU politician Philipp Freiherr von Brandenstein argued that the election of Joachim Gauck would prevent any cooperation between SPD/Greens and the party Die Linke for years to come: "Gauck has likely made it perfectly clear to Gabriel that he will never appoint any of the apologists of the communist tyranny as government members".^[58] Die Linke nominated their own candidate, former journalist Luc Jochimsen^[61] and chose to abstain in the third ballot.^[62][63] Die Linke's refusal to support Gauck drew strong criticism from the SPD and Greens.^[64][65] Sigmar Gabriel, the SPD chairman, described Die Linke's position as "bizarre and embarrassing," stating that he was "shocked" that the party would declare Joachim Gauck their main enemy due to his investigation of communist injustice.^[66] According to Gabriel, Die Linke had manifested itself once again as the successor of the East German communist party.^[64] A politician of Die Linke compared the choice between Gauck and Wulff to the choice between Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, drawing strong condemnation from the SPD and Greens.^[67]

In the election on 30 June 2010, Gauck was defeated by Christian Wulff in the third ballot, with a margin of 624 to 490.^[68]

Gauck was originally proposed as a presidential candidate for the Greens by Andreas Schulze, then communications adviser to the Greens in the Bundestag. Schulze was appointed as Gauck's spokesman in 2010, and again in 2012.^[69]

President of Germany[link]

Election[link]

Following the resignation of President Christian Wulff on 17 February 2012, Joachim Gauck was nominated on 19 February as the joint candidate for President of Germany by the government parties CDU, CSU and FDP, and the opposition SPD and the Alliance '90/The Greens. This happened after the FDP, the SPD and the Greens, which together alone controlled a majority in the electoral body, had strongly supported Gauck and urged the conservatives to support him.^[70] The SPD chairman, Sigmar Gabriel, said Gauck was his party's preferred candidate already on 17 February, citing Gauck's "great confidence among the citizens."^[71] Reportedly, Chancellor Merkel gave in to FDP chairman (and Vice-Chancellor) Philipp Rösler's staunch support for Gauck; the agreement was announced after the FDP presidium had unanimously voted for Gauck earlier on 19 February.^[72][73] He was thus supported by all major parties represented in the Federal Convention, except Die Linke, the successor party to the former East German communist party.^[3]

According to a poll conducted for Stern, the nomination of Gauck was met with high approval. The majority of the voters of all political parties represented in the Bundestag approved of his nomination, with the Green voters being most enthusiastic (84% approval) and Die Linke's voters least (55% approval); overall, 69% support him, while 15% oppose him.^[74] His nomination was "broadly welcomed" by the German media,^[75] which were described as "jubilant."^[76] However, his candidacy was criticized by Die Linke, and met with some other individual criticism; he was criticized by individual CSU members for not being married to the woman he lives with,^[77][78] and by individual politicians of the Greens, notably for his earlier statements on Thilo Sarrazin and the occupy movement.^[77] The SPD chairman, Sigmar Gabriel, however, stated that the reason that Die Linke as the only party did not support Gauck was its "sympathy for the German Democratic Republic."^[79][80]

David Gill was appointed head of Gauck's transition team.^[81]

On 18 March 2012, Gauck was elected President of Germany with 991 of 1228 votes in the Federal Convention.^[82] Upon accepting his election, he assumed the presidency immediately.^[83] The new President took the oath of office required by article 56 of Germany's Constitution on Friday 23 March 2012 in the presence of the assembled members of the Bundestag and the Bundesrat.^[84][85][86]

Administration[link]

On 19 March 2012, David Gill was appointed head of the Bundespräsidialamt.^[87]

Personal life[link]

Gauck married Gerhild "Hansi" Gauck (née Radtke), his childhood sweetheart whom he met at age ten,^[88] but the couple has been separated since 1991. They were married in 1959, at 19, despite his father's opposition, and have four children: sons Christian (born 1960) and Martin (born 1962), and daughters Gesine (born 1966) and Katharina (born 1979). Christian, Martin and Gesine were able to leave East Germany and emigrate to West Germany in the late 1980s, while Katharina, still a child, remained with her parents. His children were discriminated against and denied the right to education by the communist regime because their father was a pastor.^[89] His son Christian, who along with his brother decided to leave the GDR in early 1984 and was able to do so in 1987, studied medicine in West Germany and became a physician.^[90]

Since 2000, his domestic partner has been Daniela Schadt, a journalist.^[91]

Selected publications[link]

• 1991: Die Stasi-Akten. Das unheimliche Erbe der DDR. (= rororo 13016) Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1991 ISBN 3-499-13016-5
• 1992: Von der Würde der Unterdrückten (contributor)
• 1993: Verlust und Übermut. Ein Kapitel über den Untertan als Bewohner der Moderne (contributor)
• 1998: Das Schwarzbuch des Kommunismus – Unterdrückung, Verbrechen und Terror (contributor of the chapter "Vom schwierigen Umgang mit der Wahrnehmung", on political oppression in East Germany), Piper Verlag, Munich 2004, ISBN 3-492-04053-5
• 2007: Reite Schritt, Schnitter Tod! Leben und Sterben im Speziallager Nr. 1 des NKWD Mühlberg/Elbe (contributor), Elisabeth Schuster (ed.), German War Graves Commission, ISBN 978-3-936592-02-3 (on the NKVD Special Camp No. 1, a Soviet NKVD concentration camp)
• 2007: Diktaturerfahrungen der Deutschen im 20. Jahrhundert und was wir daraus lernen können (Schriftenreihe zu Grundlagen, Zielen und Ergebnissen der parliamentarischen Arbeit der CDU-Fraktion des Sächsischen Landtages; Band 42), Dresden 2007
• 2009: Die Flucht der Insassen: Freiheit als Risiko (Weichenstellungen in die Zukunft. Eine Veröffentlichung der Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung e.V.). Sankt Augustin-Berlin 2009. ISBN 978-3-941904-20-0
• 2009: Winter im Sommer, Frühling im Herbst. Erinnerungen. [Winter in Summer, Spring in Autumn. Memoirs]. München: Siedler 2009 ISBN 978-3-88680-935-6
• 2012: Freiheit. Ein Plädoyer [Freedom. A Plea]. Kösel, München 2012, ISBN 978-3-466-37032-0.

Honours[link]

• 1991: Theodor Heuss Medal
• 1995: Federal Cross of Merit
• 1996: Hermann Ehlers Prize
• 1997: Hannah Arendt Prize
• 1999: Honorary doctorate of the University of Rostock
• 1999: Imre Nagy Prize of Hungary
• 2000: Dolf Sternberger Prize
• 2001: Erich Kästner Prize
• 2002: „Goldenes Lot“ des Verbandes Deutscher Vermessungsingenieure
• 2003: Courage Preis
• 2005: Honorary doctorate of the University of Augsburg
• 2008: Thomas Dehler Prize
• 2009: Das Glas der Vernunft
• 2010: Geschwister-Scholl Preis

References[link]