Walter Janka

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Walter Janka at an extraordinary SED party congress in Berlin in 1989

Walter Janka (born April 29, 1914 in Chemnitz ; † March 17, 1994 in Kleinmachnow ) was a German dramaturge and publisher .

Beginnings

Walter Janka was one of six children of the toolmaker Adalbert Janka. From 1920 to 1928 he attended elementary school, from 1928 to 1932 he completed an apprenticeship as a typesetter.

Walter Janka became head of organization in 1930, then political director of the Chemnitz sub-district of the KJVD . After the murder of his brother Albert Janka by the National Socialists, he was arrested by the Gestapo . After pre-trial detention in Chemnitz and Freiberg , he was convicted of preparing for high treason. After one and a half years in prison in Bautzen I , he spent six months in Sachsenburg concentration camp . He was then deported to Czechoslovakia in 1935 .

In 1936 Janka went to the Spanish Republic to take part in the Thälmann Battalion in the Spanish Civil War . In 1937 he became a captain and soon afterwards the youngest major in the Spanish People's Army in the Karl Marx Division. He suffered a serious wound in the Battle of the Ebro . In Spain he also met the later Stasi chief Erich Mielke in his function as an officer of the Stalinist secret police in Spain, SIM (Servicio de Investigación Militar).

After the victory of the Franco coup troops, he fled to France, where he was interned in Le Vernet from 1939 to 1941 . After fleeing again, he went into exile to Mexico via Casablanca in November 1941 , where he founded the Free Germany Movement together with Paul Merker and Alexander Abusch . There he managed the publishing house " El Libro Libre " ( The Free Book ), founded in 1942 , for which u. a. and Anna Seghers worked. In 1946 Janka took over the leadership of the KPD group in Mexico.

In the DDR

Walter Janka (right) 1955, next to him Johannes R. Becher and his advisor Karl Tümmler
Walter Janka (center) at the SED special party conference on December 16, 1989 in Berlin, next to him is Markus Wolf

After the end of the Second World War , he returned to Germany in April 1947. In the same year he married the translator and long-time companion Charlotte (Lotte) Scholz in East Berlin . The couple had two children (André, * 1948, and Yvonne, * 1950).

After brief participation in the party executive committee of the newly founded SED and as the personal secretary of Paul Merker , Janka was supposed to build up the party and security apparatus in Halle an der Saale , but refused. Walter Janka joined DEFA's board of directors in July 1948 and was appointed managing director on October 6, but was replaced in 1949.

In February 1950 he became deputy managing director of the Aufbau publishing house in East Berlin, and in 1953 its director. Janka was planning a film adaptation of Thomas Mann's novel Buddenbrooks in cooperation between DEFA and West German film companies. Another dream project was a DEFA film with Charles Chaplin as the leading actor. For this purpose he met Chaplin on May 18, 1954 in Vevey .

Trial and detention

On December 6, 1956, Walter Janka was arrested on charges of counterrevolutionary conspiracy and taken to the Berlin-Hohenschönhausen remand prison. As a member of the “circle of like-minded people”, which the judiciary and the media referred to as the Harich group, he had called for Ulbricht's removal, free elections, freedom of expression and the rule of law, among other things. These demands had also been passed on to a Soviet ambassador and press representative in West Germany.

After more than half a year of pre-trial detention, the highest court in the GDR sentenced him on July 26, 1957 "as the immediate backer and participant of a counter-revolutionary group" for boycotting to five years in prison with intensified solitary confinement. The process was accompanied by a high level of security; even the Minister of Justice Hilde Benjamin attended as a spectator. No defense witness was admitted. Attorney General Ernst Melsheimer threatened Janka's friend Paul Merker , who had been rehabilitated shortly after a conviction by a GDR court, now appeared as a witness and initially exonerated Janka, successfully with the words:

“Do you even know that you belong in the dock? That only a hair separates you from the traitor Janka. They belong in the seat next to him. And if you are not telling the truth here, you must expect to take the place next to him after all. "

Wolfgang Harich , Janka's employee at Aufbau Verlag, who was already sentenced to ten years in prison in March 1957 , acted as the main witness for the prosecution in this show trial led by Judge Walter Ziegler and severely incriminated Janka. The former friends remained enemies for a lifetime from then on.

In the two show trials in March and July 1957, the following were further convicted:

Janka served his sentence in prison in Berlin-Lichtenberg and from 1958 in Bautzen II , where he became seriously ill. He later wrote (in third person): “Again Janka had to think of the years of the Nazi era. It always starts with disfiguring the heads ”- cutting off the hair. When he was refused to repair the heating in his cell, it was like back then, “when Janka had been with the Nazis in Bautzen in the 1930s. Back then in the big prison. On the edge of town. The residents of Bautzen call it 'the yellow misery' because all the buildings are made of yellow clinker bricks. "

rehabilitation

On December 23, 1960, Walter Janka was released early from prison due to international protests. After his dismissal and initial unemployment, he worked in dubbing and from 1962 worked as a dramaturge at DEFA . Since the 1950s he lived in Kleinmachnow near Berlin.

Together with other authors, Janka developed scenarios and scripts for feature films for DEFA in the following years . He was significantly involved in the multiple award-winning film Goya - or the arge path of knowledge (1971) , but only received non-public recognition as an Honored Activist . In the early 1970s, he thought about making a film of Klaus Mann's novel “ Mephisto ”. Janka had good relations with the Mann family , which went back to his work as a publisher in Mexican exile in El libro libre (where Heinrich Mann published). Due to legal uncertainties (since "Mephisto" was banned as a book in the FRG since 1966 ), the project was initially shelved by DEFA . Later there were other reservations. (In 1981 the West Berlin producer Manfred Durniok filmed the novel in a West German-Austrian-Hungarian co-production - with the participation of DEFA as a service provider and Rolf Hoppe in a leading role - with the title " Mephisto " and received in 1982 - among other awards - an Oscar .)

In 1972 he was recognized as a person persecuted by the Nazi regime and re-admitted to the SED. His autobiographical scenario of the Spanish Civil War trip to Gandesa remained unfilmed. In 1973 he terminated the contract with DEFA.

In the eighties he wrote articles, traveled several times to the Federal Republic and gave lectures on his experiences in the Spanish Civil War. On May 1, 1989 he received the Patriotic Order of Merit in gold “in recognition of outstanding services in the construction and development of the socialist order in the German Democratic Republic” .

After the turn

At the time of the change in October 1989, Rowohlt Verlag published his memoirs about the imprisonment under the title Difficulties with Truth , which were quickly spread in the GDR. Janka became very popular and the 1957 judgment was declared overturned in a public session of the Supreme Court of the GDR on January 4th and 5th, 1990. At the same time there was a journalistic and legal dispute between Janka and Harich over details of the process. In 1990 Janka was awarded the Heinrich Greif Prize for his overall dramaturgical oeuvre .

On December 16, 1989, Janka was a member of the presidium of the SED / PDS special party conference in the Dynamo sports hall in East Berlin. In 1990 he became a member of the Council of the Elderly in the PDS party executive , which he soon left disappointed. In the same year he received the “ The Political Book ” award from the Friedrich Ebert Foundation . Janka died in Kleinmachnow in 1994 and is buried there in the forest cemetery.

Fonts

  • Trouble with the truth. Essay. Rowohlt Taschenbuch, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1989, ISBN 3-499-12731-8 .
  • Traces of a life. Rowohlt, Berlin 1991.
  • ... until the arrest. Memories of a German publisher. Structure, Berlin, Weimar 1993, ISBN 3-351-02410-X .

Filmography (as dramaturge)

Literature / films

Web links

Honorary grave for Walter Janka in the forest cemetery Kleinmachnow
Commons : Walter Janka  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Ludwig Niethammer: On the death of Erich Mielke: The career of a German Stalinist. In: World Socialist Website. August 16, 2000, accessed February 12, 2014 .
  2. ^ Karl Wilhelm Fricke, Peter Steinbach, Johannes Tuchel (eds.): Opposition and resistance in the GDR: political life pictures. CH Beck Verlag, Munich 2002, p. 226.
  3. ↑ a b c Walter Janka. In: stiftung-hsh.de . Retrieved May 19, 2020 (short biography).
  4. ↑ “A lesson for life”: From Wolfgang Harich's testimony for the Janka trial. In: Der Spiegel . 23/1990, June 4, 1990, pp. 96-98 , accessed May 19, 2020 .
  5. ↑ Difficulty with the Truth , pp. 107, 109.
  6. ↑ From the story of Defa "Mephisto"? D rather not! , Berliner Zeitung, July 24, 2020.
  7. ↑ “Dishonorable into the pit?” In: Der Spiegel. 13/1991, March 25, 1991, pp. 97-107 , accessed May 19, 2020 .
personal data
SURNAME Janka, Walter
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German dramaturge and publisher
DATE OF BIRTH April 29, 1914
PLACE OF BIRTH Chemnitz
DATE OF DEATH March 17, 1994
Place of death Kleinmachnow