Paul Gratzik (30 November 1935 – 18 June 2018)[1][2] was a German dramatist and novelist.[3] He came to wider public attention in 2011 as the subject of the documentary filmVaterlandsverräter (English translation: Enemy of the State) by Annekatrin Hendel about his past as a Stasi informer.[4]
Life and career
Gratzik was born in Lindenhof, near Lötzen in East Prussia (modern Poland), the third of six children of a farm worker. His father fell in the first days of the Second World War.[5] Early in 1945 he, his mother, and siblings fled westwards in an ox cart, ending up in Schönberg in Mecklenburg, in what would become East Germany.[4] After completing compulsory education, he undertook a carpentry apprenticeship from 1952 to 1954, and then did manual work in the Ruhr, in Berlin, in Weimar, and later in the brown coal open-cast mine in Schlabendorf in the Lausitz. In Berlin, he tried to complete his Abitur at evening classes.[4]
In 1971, he began to work as a full-time writer and joined the GDR writer's guild (Deutscher Schriftstellerverband). But in 1974 he began again to work in industry, part-time, at the Dresden transformer factory. From 1977, Gratzik lived in Berlin, employed as playwright by the Berliner Ensemble. He was awarded the Heinrich Mann Prize in 1980.[3]
In 1981, he refused all further cooperation with the MfS and confessed to his friends, amongst them Heiner Müller, that he had informed on them. He was no longer allowed to publish, and many friends shunned him.[7][8] From 1984, he became an object of observation by the Stasi and experienced harassment by them.[4]
Gratzik's work reflects his own experiences as a manual worker under East German socialism. Although a convinced communist, his unadorned realism, and readiness to tackle taboo themes, for example the East German juvenile re-education establishments (Jugendwerkhöfe), brought him into conflict with the censors.[3] In GDR literary circles he was, as a worker who wrote, already unusual, but his gregariousness, charisma, and magnetic effect on women, made him one of the most colourful figures.[7][9]
1997. Litauische Claviere. (Play after Bobrowski). Theater 89 [de], Berlin 1997
1999. Simplizissimus. (Play after Grimmelshausen). Theater 89, Berlin 1999
2010. Der Führergeburtstag. (Play)
Vaterlandsverräter film
Vaterlandsverräter is a 97-minute documentary film about Paul Gratzik directed by the German film maker Annekatrin Hendel [de], who had known Gratzik for twenty years before making the film.[11] It premiered at the Berlinale in 2011. In 2012 it was broadcast by Arte, and in 2013 awarded a Grimme-Preis in the Information category:
Annekatrin Hendel presents her protagonist as a contradictory, sometimes challenging, sometimes repellent character. A protagonist disdaining discretion, pompous, charming, brusque. She allows him no excuses, forces him to confront his past, the while respecting him as a person. It is stimulating, even exciting, and forces the viewer to address this polarising figure, to take a position. There are hundreds of films about the GDR and the Stasi, this is one of the few that do not follow the well-trodden path of self-certainty.
It concerns a traitor who regrets his treachery, finds the courage to confess to his friends, and now waits out his days in provincial Uckermark. Vaterlandsverräter begins to historicize the Stasi, but also to differentiate its image. It is an important film with a new angle on the subject.[7]
The DVD of Vaterlandsverräter has English subtitles.
