Paul Gratzik

Life

Paul Gratzik was the third of six children of a farm worker in the then German state of East Prussia, now in eastern Poland. His father fell in the first days of the war. Early in 1945 he, his mother, and siblings fled westwards in an ox cart, ending up in Schönberg in Mecklenburg, in what would become East Germany. After completing compulsory education he undertook a carpentry apprenticeship from 1952 to 1954, and then did manual work in the Ruhr, in Berlin, in Weimar, and later in the brown coal open-cast mine in Schlabendorf in the Lausitz. In Berlin he tried to complete his Abitur at evening classes.

In Weimar, in 1962, he was an official in the local Free German Youth and decided to collaborate with the Ministry for State Security (MfS or Stasi) as an informer. He also began to write.

From 1963 to 1968 he studied at the Weimar teacher training institute (de:Institut für Lehrerbildung). His first play was published in 1966. In 1968 he enrolled at the "Johannes R. Brecher" Institute for Literature at Leipzig University, a creative writing school, but after a short time, by almost unanimous vote of faculty and students, he was expelled. He then taught at a children's home in Dönschten in the Osterzgebirge.

In 1971 he began to work full-time as a writer and joined the GDR writer's guild (Deutscher Schriftstellerverband). But in 1974 he began again to work in industry, part-time, at the Dresden transformer factory. From 1977, Gratzik lived in Berlin, employed as playwright by the Berliner Ensemble. He was awarded the Heinrich Mann Prize in 1980.

Then in 1981 he refused all further cooperation with the MfS and confessed to his friends, amongst them Heiner Müller, that he had informed on them. He was no longer allowed to publish, and many friends shunned him. From 1984 he himself became an object of observation by the MfS and experienced harassment by them.

Since the middle of the 1980s he has lived in seclusion in the Uckermark, between Templin and Prenzlau.

Paul Gratzik's work reflects his own experiences as a manual worker under East German socialism. Although a convinced communist, his unadorned realism, and readiness to tackle taboo themes, for example the Jugendwerkhöfe, East German juvenile re-education establishments, brought him into conflict with the censors. In GDR literary circles he was, as a worker who wrote, already unusual, but his gregariousness, charisma, and magnetic effect on women, made him one of the most colourful figures.

Neither the British Library nor the German National Library list any English translations of his work.

Works

(This list is taken from with some publication data added from the German Wikipedia article Paul Gratzik)

Vaterlandsverräter film

Vaterlandsverräter is a 97-minute documentary film about Paul Gratzik directed by the German film maker Annekatrin Hendel, who had known Gratzik for twenty years before making the film. It premiered at the Berlinale in 2011. In 2012 it was broadcast by Arte, and in 2013 awarded a Grimme-Preis in the Information category:

Annekatrin Hendel presents her protagonist as a contradictory, sometimes challenging, sometimes repellent character. A protagonist disdaining discretion, pompous, charming, brusque. She allows him no excuses, forces him to confront his past, the while respecting him as a person. It is stimulating, even exciting, and forces the viewer to address this polarising figure, to take a position. There are hundreds of films about the GDR and the Stasi, this is one of the few that do not follow the well-trodden path of self-certainty.

Die Zeit, amongst others, also praised the film:

It concerns a traitor who regrets his treachery, finds the courage to confess to his friends, and now waits out his days in provincial Uckermark. Vaterlandsverräter begins to historicize the Stasi, but also to differentiate its image. It is an important film with a new angle on the subject.

The DVD of Vaterlandsverräter has English subtitles.