Peter Wensierski's book "Jena Paradise" describes the life and death of a GDR teenager.
one name: Matthias Domaschk,
his story:
Friday, April 10, 1981: in Jena, 23-year-old Matthias Domaschk boards the express train to Berlin. He wants to go to a birthday party. But he never arrives because the packed train is stopped in Jüterbog and Matthias and three other Jena residents are arrested. Two days later, he is dead after being interrogated in the Stasi detention center in Gera. What happened back then?
The Matthias Domaschk case has kept courts and committees of inquiry busy. Peter Wensierski, who has been researching the various groups, resistance circles and subcultures of the GDR for decades, has now reconstructed the last days of Matthias Domaschk's life in "Jena Paradise". He discovered revealing new files and spoke to more than 160 contemporary witnesses, including, for the first time, those former officers of the Ministry of State Security who were directly involved in the case and have so far mostly remained silent.
Like many young people at the time, Matthias Domaschk wanted a different, more tolerant society. This united him with many of his generation in East and West Germany and around the world. In Wensierski's meticulous reconstruction of the events, it becomes clear how much pressure the GDR security services put on him - and that dividing society into friends and foes can end fatally.
With numerous photos and original documents such as letters and diaries, Wensierski gives Matthias Domaschk a new, surprising face and at the same time shows a young counterculture that goes beyond Jena, beyond the GDR and is exemplary of a time of change in Germany.