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“No one can lock me in any more”

A dossier on the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Wall. In Part 8, Sophie Hellriegel outlines how she feels about reunification today.

22.05.2014
Matthias Juegler - Sophie Hellriege
Matthias Juegler - Sophie Hellriege © Matthias Juegler - Sophie Hellriege

“I remember a single moment, a very specific feeling: I was sitting on my father’s shoulders. We were in the city centre in 1989, not far away from a Monday demonstration. My father wanted to buy a pair of shoes. A man came up to him and asked: ‘What are you doing here?’ I remember there was an argument and the man hit my father with a truncheon in the pit of the stomach. Still on my father’s shoulders, I felt extremely scared. Only recently I talked to him about it. He said the man was a police officer, and he, my father, had not taken him seriously because he knew he was only buying shoes and doing nothing wrong. That had been enough for the policeman to hit him before my eyes.

 

Now, 25 years later, I no longer think at all about whether I’m an Ossi or a Wessi, from the East or the West. In my family, however, the story is different. In particular, my 78-year-old father still lives in the past. The worst thing for him was and still is today that he was not allowed to travel for most of his life; he was not even allowed to go to Russia just because he had relatives in the West. That was an existential restriction for him, one that hit him hard. I know I can travel everywhere; no one can lock me in any more. But I don’t know if I am really consciously aware of the fact – I don’t know anything else. I know there was a system that oppressed people in sometimes very subtle ways and destroyed entire lives, but this system no longer exists. There are new problems, of course. Nevertheless, perhaps that is the lucky situation in which I live, the fact that this system is history.”

 

Sophie Hellriegel was born in Leipzig in 1987. She has just graduated in Germanic literary studies, ethnology and media and communication studies at the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg. She lives with her husband and son in Leipzig.

 

Transcript: Matthias Jügler

 

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