Ralf Hirsch

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Ralf Hirsch (born July 25, 1960 in Berlin ) is a former civil rights activist in the GDR . He was a co-founder of the Peace and Human Rights Initiative (IFM) in Berlin and one of its spokesmen.

Life

Ralf Hirsch - who grew up in East Berlin - first attracted political attention when he was 15. He and four of his classmates wrote a letter to the school principal in which they informed her that they no longer wanted to attend an FDJ week, an affront that led to discussions aimed at reprimanding them. Hirsch did not allow himself to be reprimanded, but instead left the FDJ in 1975.

He came into contact with church youth work and got involved there. In 1977 the council of the Friedrichshain district ordered the admission to the Hummelshain youth work center because of “misguided political views” . But even there, Ralf Hirsch did not want to bend without contradiction. As a punishment, he was locked in the closed youth work center in Torgau .

In the youth workshop he completed a professional training as a locksmith. After his release in 1978, a regular obligation to report to the People's Police and the Department of Home Affairs as well as handling and travel bans were imposed for a period of three years. Hirsch was assigned a job as a locksmith in a transformer factory; he did not receive a real identity card, but only the temporary PM 12 card . This document revealed to every police officer and representative of the authorities that its owner was subject to official requirements.

Nevertheless, Hirsch got involved again in church youth work and from 1980 was also responsible for the practical organization of the blues masses , which were initiated by Pastor Rainer Eppelmann . The blues masses were one of the most important places for youth protest. Those who took part in their organization were actively opposed to the regime.

Hirsch was also active in the independent peace movement that emerged in the GDR in the early 1980s - also a branch of the emerging opposition scene of this time. He belonged u. a. to the decisive persons in the peace circle of the Samaritan community.

In January 1982 he was one of the first to sign the Berlin appeal after it was published. The appeal that Robert Havemann , the most famous critic of the GDR regime at the time , wrote together with Rainer Eppelmann was a political issue. Only because the appeal became too well known and popular in the West did the SED leadership decide to let Eppelmann go after arrest and long interrogation.

By convening the NVA Ralf Hirsch, who refused to bear arms, in September 1982 as a construction soldier taken from the public and came to Prora on Ruegen , where the GDR in Sassnitz-Mukran a new port for cargo ferry in the Soviet Union was built to to bypass insecure Poland if necessary.

Hirsch organized the protests of the Prora construction soldiers - for example they wrote an open letter to Defense Minister Heinz Keßler - and ended up repeatedly in arrest. With his information he made for a sensational report in the Stern about the situation of the construction soldiers in Prora.

After the construction soldiers' time in 1984, Hirsch continued to be involved in the opposition and was one of those who not only wanted to be active in peace and environmental circles, but also wanted to appear clearly as a political opposition.

In 1985, the letter he co-authored on the UN Year of Youth made clear demands for the realization of basic civil and human rights. Hirsch was part of the preparatory group for a human rights seminar that was banned by the state, but led to the establishment of the IFM initiative for peace and human rights . Hirsch was one of the first speakers of the newly founded group, which was a state and church-independent group and was integrated into Bündnis 90 in 1990 .

In the following years he was involved in most of the IFM's actions and was in charge of organizing their press work with Western correspondents. He was also one of the editors of the samizdat magazine Grenzfall . The first of seventeen issues appeared in 1986 in East Berlin.

In the same year two Stasi officers developed a specific murder plan against Hirsch on their own initiative, which was carried out under the case name OV Blauvogel . He was supposed to be given enough alcohol on a cold winter night that could have been frozen to death outside to make it look like an accident. The unofficial employee of the State Security Monika Haeger ( IMB Karin Lenz) was also assigned to Hirsch .

On January 25, 1988, Ralf Hirsch was arrested for treason and threatened with long prison terms in one of several arrests of the past few days with other opposition members such as Bärbel Bohley , Werner Fischer , Freya Klier , Regina and Wolfgang Templin . Lawyer Wolfgang Schnur - who also worked for the State Security as IM Torsten - did not inform his clients about the solidarity actions in the population. Under this pressure, Hirsch declared himself ready to emigrate and expatriate and on February 6th moved to West Berlin. The wave of arrests and expatriations became the starting point for the peaceful turnaround in the GDR.

In West Berlin he took care of organizing support for the GDR opposition from the West.

Hirsch began his career as an employee in the West Berlin State Office for central social tasks. In 1989 he became a consultant in the office of the Governing Mayor of Berlin, Walter Momper , and was responsible for East-West contacts there after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Since the beginning of the nineties he has worked in various functions in the Berlin Senate Department for Building, Housing and Urban Development.

He is a member of the advisory board of the Federal Foundation for Coming to terms with the SED dictatorship.

In 1990, Hirsch was wrongly accused by Bild am Sonntag of having been an unofficial employee of the State Security. The informant was a former MfS driver . After an out-of-court settlement, Hirsch received compensation of 50,000 DM.

In 2006, he and 200 other former GDR opposition members signed a letter to Klaus Wowereit , in which they protested that the Berlin Senate did not clearly distance itself from the activities of former Stasi employees.

literature

  • Short biography for:  Ralf Hirsch . In: Who was who in the GDR? 5th edition. Volume 2. Ch. Links, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86153-561-4 .
  • Ralf Hirsch, Lew Kopelew (ed.): Initiative for peace and human rights: borderline case. Complete reprint of all editions published in the GDR (1986/87). First independent periodical. Self-published, Berlin (West) 1988.
  • Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk , Arno Polzin (ed.): Be brief! The opposition's cross-border telephone traffic in the 1980s and the Ministry of State Security. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2014, ISBN 978-3-525-35115-4 .
  • Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk (Hrsg.): Freedom and public. Political samizdat in the GDR 1985–1989 (series of the Robert Havemann Archive Volume 7), Berlin, 2002.
  • Ehrhart Neubert : History of the opposition in the GDR 1949–1989. Berlin 1997, ISBN 3-86153-163-1 . (limited preview in Google Book search)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Ralf Hirsch | Youth opposition in the GDR. Retrieved June 18, 2019 .
  2. ↑ Ralf Hirsch. Retrieved June 18, 2019 .
  3. ↑ Ralf Hirsch | Youth opposition in the GDR. Retrieved June 18, 2019 .
  4. ↑ Ehrhart Neubert: History of the Opposition in the GDR 1949-1989 . Ch. Links Verlag, 1998, ISBN 978-3-86153-163-0 ( google.de [accessed on June 18, 2019]).
  5. ↑ Timeline. Retrieved June 18, 2019 .
  6. ↑ NDR: 30 years ago: Rügen gets a new ferry port. Retrieved June 18, 2019 .
  7. ↑ PRORA - Nazi spa and restricted area. Retrieved June 18, 2019 .
  8. ↑ Florian Stark: NVA construction soldiers: The suffering of the conscientious objectors in the GDR . September 6, 2014 ( welt.de [accessed June 18, 2019]).
  9. ^ Letter for the Year of Youth | Youth opposition in the GDR. Retrieved June 19, 2019 .
  10. ↑ Gunther Latsch: JUSTICE: "We went terribly wrong" . In: Spiegel Online . tape 47 , November 22, 1999 ( spiegel.de [accessed June 19, 2019]).
  11. ↑ 05911. May 4, 2014, accessed June 19, 2019 .
  12. ↑ Federal Agency for Civic Education: The truth must get out - Confessions of a Stasi agent | bpb. Retrieved June 19, 2019 .
  13. ↑ mdr.de: Prison or West | MDR.DE. Retrieved June 19, 2019 .
  14. ↑ Activity report 2010 - Appendix. In: www.bundesstiftung-aufteilung.de. Federal Foundation for the Processing of the SED Dictatorship, 2010, accessed on June 19, 2019 .
  15. ↑ : Ralf Hirsch . In: Spiegel Online . tape 43 , October 23, 2000 ( spiegel.de [accessed June 19, 2019]).
  16. ↑ Dealing with SED dictatorship: GDR dissidents criticize Wowereit . In: Spiegel Online . April 27, 2006 ( spiegel.de [accessed June 19, 2019]).
personal data
SURNAME Hirsch, Ralf
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German GDR opposition activist and human rights activist
DATE OF BIRTH July 25, 1960
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin