"Wir wollten was tun." Widerstand von Jugendlichen in Werder an der Havel 1949–1953 by Iris Bork-Goldfield (review)

Like all tales of torture and arbitrary punishment, Iris Bork-Goldfield's book is at times hard to read. Her concern is with a group of young people in Werder, west of Berlin, who actively resisted the authorities in the early years of the German Democratic Republic. Having seen the Nazi dictatorship defeated, they did not want it replaced by a communist dictatorship. At the heart of the group were Herbert Herrmann and the author's father, Werner Bork, born in 1932. Bork-Goldfield makes extensive use of an unpublished manuscript written in the 1990s by her father's journalist friend Benno Kroll; this manuscript was based on interviews, personal knowledge, Kroll's research in the Stasi archive, and reports written by Bork in the early 1950s. Bork-Goldfield expands Kroll's work through conversations with her father and interviews with a number of his fellow resisters. She checks these interviews against the Stasi files in order to overcome the problem of the unreliability of participants' memories, while recognizing that the Stasi files are themselves unreliable (161). A scholar of literature and language, the author tells the story as if it were her father speaking, with effective personal touches. Her approach gives a sense of immediacy and energy, which tempts the reader not to question the authority of the narrator. Anticipating this problem, Bork-Goldfield seeks to justify her imagined narrative voice through extensive footnotes.

In the early 1950s, Bork and his group distributed homemade leaflets. They later worked closely, and too trustingly, with the West Berlin organization Kampfgruppe gegen Unmenschlichkeit (Fighting Group against Inhumanity), which was infiltrated by the GDR's Ministry for State Security (the Stasi). Some of the resisters were arrested and tortured in order to extract—successfully—the names of others associated with Herrmann and Bork, then in West Berlin. What is puzzling is the naiveté and cognitive dissonance of the principal resisters. They believed both that their actions would make a difference and that they would have little effect. They also knew that active opposition put them in extreme danger (72, 74). Other accounts of early resistance confirm that it was widely known that young people were being arrested and sentenced to many years in prison by Soviet military tribunals, or that they were simply disappearing. Nevertheless, Bork and his group collaborated with committed Nazis and widened their activities to include espionage for Western intelligence services. No government or occupying power recognizes espionage as legitimate opposition but usually categorizes it as treason.

The consequences were disastrous. A tense passage describes a Stasi attempt to trick Herrmann and Bork into returning to Werder, and the reader is relieved by their narrow escape. The Stasi, however, responded by arresting Herrmann's and Bork's friends in Werder. Some were sentenced to long terms in prison or in Soviet labor camps, whether they had been involved in resistance or not. Seven others, of whom two at least were apparently uninvolved, were taken secretly to Moscow and shot. After these arrests and a Stasi attempt to abduct Bork from West Berlin in early 1953, sporadic resistance continued. During the events of June 17, 1953, Bork and others went into East Berlin and sought to get involved. After the Soviet intervention, Bork left Germany, knowing that the Stasi would continue looking for him. He subsequently became a businessman with a family in West Berlin. Only in the 1990s did he discover that his friends had been shot forty years earlier, since such executions were not acknowledged until after the Soviet Union's dissolution (see Arsenij Roginskij, "Erschossen in Moskau," 2008). Bork was horrified and fought to ensure there was a suitable memorial to them in Werder. There is no indication, however, that he felt any responsibility for their fate.

Bork-Goldfield's book contributes to our detailed knowledge of early resistance in the...