Erika Riemann

Erika Riemann (born December 25, 1930 in Mühlhausen ; née Erika Grabe ) is a German author . In 1945, when he was 14 years old, Riemann was imprisoned in various Soviet penal institutions until 1954 . She published her experiences in the book The Bow on Stalin's Beard .

Life

She attended school in the town where she was born until she was arrested in 1945 at the age of 14 for “anti-Soviet activities” after she had painted a portrait of Stalin with lipstick.

She was convicted by a Soviet Military Tribunal (SMT) and spent 9 years in Soviet penal institutions, initially on the premises of Special Camp No. 7 Sachsenhausen . During her detention, she was mentally tortured for an extended period of time. Among other things, there was a mock execution in which she and others were taken to a shower room in the camp. There the guards threatened to do the same thing to the prisoners as to the victims of the former Sachsenhausen concentration camp , on the premises of which the special camp was operated, because the showers did not come with water but gas.

After her imprisonment, she moved in 1954 to her mother, who had settled in Hamburg-Sankt Pauli . She was only able to catch up on school education in 1962. She was married three times in total and is the mother of two sons and a daughter. She worked in various professions. At the age of over seventy, Erika Riemann wrote the book The Bow on Stalin's Beard , in which she describes her fate. The book caused quite a stir and was widely discussed. Even today she warns against playing down the events of the Stalin era compared to those of the Nazi era.

Conflict with Stefan Raab

In 2002, Riemann was a guest of Johannes B. Kerner and reported on her time in a Russian concentration camp. Kerner had asked her to translate an insult to a Russian soldier. Erika Riemann repeated the quote "Fuck your mother". Raab showed this excerpt several times in his TV total in November 2002 and, according to her lawyer, described Erika Riemann as an 'old, primitive woman who uses dirty faecal vocabulary'. This video was subsequently posted on YouTube and viewed hundreds of thousands of times.

A possible lawsuit against the moderator Stefan Raab was reported in the press, but no trial was conducted.

Honors

• November 16, 2009: Cross of Merit on Ribbon of the Federal Republic of Germany

Works

• The bow on Stalin's beard. A girl prank, eight years in prison and the time after that . Piper, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-492-26165-5 (Piper Boulevard; Vol. 6165).
• Stalin's beard is gone. From Bautzen to the Federal Cross of Merit. Hoffmann and Campe 2010, ISBN 978-3-455-50149-0

literature

• Video Erika Riemann's lost youth  in the ZDFmediathek , accessed on January 26, 2014. (offline)

Web links

• Literature by and about Erika Riemann in the catalog of the German National Library
• Homepage of Erika Riemann
• Discussion in Der Standard v. August 31, 2006
• Meeting in neon on April 28, 2006

Individual evidence

1. ^ My lost world of Communism , BBC News, March 13, 2009
2. Jump up ↑ uproar over the Fäkal quotation. Spiegel.de, September 11, 2010, accessed December 16, 2010 .