Peter Grimm

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Peter Grimm (born March 24, 1965 in Berlin ) is a German journalist , documentary filmmaker and film producer . In the 1980s he belonged to the civil rights movement and organized resistance in the GDR , was a co-founder of the Peace and Human Rights Initiative (IFM) in Berlin and one of the spokesmen for this state and church-independent group. He was editor and co-editor of the underground samizdat magazine Grenzfall .

Life

Peter Grimm grew up in Berlin-Friedrichshagen . His father is a graduate economist, his mother a graduate surveying engineer. Shortly before graduating from high school, he was excluded from the Extended Oberschule (EOS), the GDR grammar school, on the charge that his “moral and character foundations” did not meet the requirements. Among other things, Grimm attended Robert Havemann's funeral in 1982 . Since then he has been in contact with Werner Fischer and Ralf Hirsch .

In 1983 he resolutely rejected the efforts of the GDR Ministry for State Security to recruit him. He had to leave EOS nine days before graduation. He then did ancillary work in the Oberspree transformer plant in order not to be convicted of being unemployed for “ anti-social behavior ” ( Section 249 of the GDR's StGB ). In the same year he participated in the founding of a peace group in the Confessional Church in Berlin-Treptow and became a member of the Wühlmaus peace group .

In 1985 he was co-editor of the protest letter on the occasion of the International Year of Youth , in July he signed an open letter to the participants of the XII. World Festival of Youth and Students in Moscow. He was one of the speakers in the preparatory group for a human rights seminar in the confessional community, which was banned by the leadership of the Berlin-Brandenburg Evangelical Church.

On November 24, 1985, the Peace and Human Rights Initiative was founded in Wolfgang Templin's home from the preparatory group for the human rights seminar. Grimm was one of the founders of the state and church-independent Peace and Human Rights Initiative (IFM) in East Berlin and was one of its first speakers.

On June 29, 1986, on the day of the Peace Workshop in Berlin's Erlöserkirche, the first edition of the magazine borderfall appeared , edited and produced by IFM employees Peter Grimm, Ralf Hirsch , Peter Rölle and Rainer Dietrich (from the Ministry for State Security as an unofficial employee IM "Cindy" managed). The underground samizdat magazine borderfall already showed its objective explicitly and unambiguously with the cover picture of the first issue: border fall in the sense of the fall of the wall or the destruction of the state border and thus of the GDR state. The magazine was published from 1986 to 1987 in East Berlin and appeared in 17 issues. If the first two editions were produced in an edition of approx. 50 copies on photo paper, the ones reproduced with Ormig hectography reached up to 800 copies, but only through the reproduction technique with wax stencils could editions of over 1000 copies be produced. Printing took place in changing apartments and in the environmental library (UB) in the Zionskirchgemeinde , where the environmental papers were also published.

In 1986, Peter Grimm was one of the co-sponsors of an appeal to the People's Chamber in which, among other things, "the establishment of independent candidates for local and People's Chamber elections" was demanded. In April he participated in the submission to the XI. Party congress of the SED . In September he gave a reading in Steffen Gresch's apartment in Leipzig, which contributed to the establishment of the human rights working group . Christoph Wonneberger was among those present . In October, Grimm signed the Joint Declaration from Eastern Europe by peace and opposition groups from Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia and the GDR to the world public . "The reason for this hitherto unique step by dissidents from four Eastern Bloc countries is the 30th anniversary of the Hungarian uprising on October 23, 1956". In November, Grimm signed the memorandum Bringing Real Life into the Helsinki Accords . In 1987 he was one of the signatories of a letter from the IFM on the tenth anniversary of Charter 77 , and in December he was provisionally arrested.

In spring 1988, Grimm was co-initiator of the Saturday Circle , which regularly met in conspiracy in Leipzig and from which the GDR-wide working group on the situation of human rights in the GDR emerged on Human Rights Day on December 10, 1988 .

In October 1989, during the revolution in the GDR , Grimm joined the newly founded Social Democratic Party (SDP) , worked in its press office and was co-opted into its executive committee. Only one issue of the planned Depesche was published. Grimm left the SDP in January 1990 when it terminated the opposition alliance (alliance of organizations of the civil rights movement and the newly founded parties against the camp of the state party SED and its bloc parties). Grimm was co-editor of OSTKREUZ in 1989.

In the years 1990/1991 he worked as editor of the newspaper die other in Berlin. From November 1990 to March 1991 Grimm was the press spokesman for the Bündnis 90 / Die Grünen parliamentary group in the first democratically elected Saxon state parliament of the Federal Republic in Dresden .

He then worked for various television production companies. Since autumn 1995 Grimm has been a freelance writer and journalist, has made documentary films to come to terms with GDR history and the resistance in the GDR, and was a film producer for Tangens-TV. In the meantime he was editor of the magazine Horch & Guck from 2007 to 2012 . In addition, he regularly publishes Axis des Guten in the weblog . Since 1998 he has been involved in the archive of the Initiative Peace and Human Rights Saxony eV (IFM Archive Saxony) on the board and in research.

In 2011, Avant-Verlag published a comic adaptation of the opposition story about Peter Grimm and the borderline case , which was funded by the Federal Foundation to Cope with the SED Dictatorship and which can also be used as teaching material in schools.

Filmography

  • "The Troublemakers" (30 min./ MDR / 1999)
  • "New Fronts" (30 min./ MDR / 2000)
  • "The Umbetter" (30 min./ MDR / 2002)
  • "Ernas Courage" (30 min./ RBB / 2004)
  • "The Son of the Public Enemy" (30 min./ MDR / 2004)
  • "The prisoner messenger" (30 min./ MDR / 2005)
  • "The children of those shot" (30 min./ ARD / MDR / 2005)
  • "The Bessarabian" (90 min./ 2006)
  • "Insubordinate or work-shy - condemned as 'anti-social' in the GDR" (30 min./ MDR / 2006)
  • "The Breaker" (30 min./ MDR / 2007)
  • "Rischkanowka or The King of Bessarabia" (90 min./ 2008)
  • "Born behind barbed wire" (30 min./ ARD / MDR / 2008)
  • "Conspiracy under the church roof?" (30 min./ MDR / 2009)
  • "The courage of the decent" (30 min./ MDR / 2010)
  • "Bangladesh Extra Dry" (30 min./ CIPSEM / 2011)
  • "The Forest Brothers" (90 min./ 2013)
  • "The forgotten children's homes in the GDR" (45 min./ ARD / MDR / 2014)

literature

  • Ralf Hirsch / Lew Kopelew (ed.): Initiative for peace and human rights: GRENZFALL. Complete reprint of all editions published in the GDR (1986/87). First independent periodical , foreword by Lew Kopelew, Berlin (West), self-published, 1988, 2nd edition 1989.
  • Thomas Henseler / Susanne Buddenberg: borderline case . Comic. Berlin, avant-verlag, 2011, ISBN 978-3-939080-48-0 .
  • Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk (Hrsg.): Freedom and public. Political samizdat in the GDR 1985–1989 (series of the Robert Havemann Archive Volume 7), Berlin, 2002.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Cf. Araki-Verlag: Brief Vita of Peter Grimm ( Memento of the original from May 10, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / weg-in-den-aufstand.de
  2. ↑ Thomas Rudolph later remarked splendidly on this foundation : “The initiative has taken to overthrow the SED, even if it did not say so at the beginning.” - Interview with Thomas Rudolph in: Hagen Findeis / Detlef Pollack / Manuel Schilling: Die Disenchantment of the political. What happened to the politically alternative groups in the GDR? Interviews with former leading representatives, Leipzig, Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 1994, p. 195.
  3. ^ Joint declaration from Eastern Europe by peace and opposition groups from Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia and the GDR to the world public , in: SPIEGEL No. 43 (1986), p. 16: Struggle for a freer, better life.
  4. ↑ Short profile and contributions by Peter Grimm on the axis of the good .
personal data
SURNAME Grimm, Peter
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German journalist, documentary filmmaker, film producer and GDR civil rights activist
DATE OF BIRTH March 24, 1965
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin