by Jack Barsky
One of the first things I did after arriving at the university was seek out the basketball coach. Although my experience consisted of exactly one game in high school, I knew this was a game I should be playing. At six feet three inches, I was one of the tallest people on campus, and I could run and jump with the best of them. Coach Stange put me on the second team for my freshman year, but after holding my own in practice against our six-foot-seven-inch starting center, I earned the respect of my teammates, and by the beginning of the next season, I had worked my way up to the first team.
For the next four years, I enjoyed all the practices, games, and tournaments—and, above all, the camaraderie. This was the very first time I had ever been part of a team that had to work together to be successful. I loved it. We were united in our beefs about the coach, and we won and lost as a cohesive team. Either way, there were always a few beers involved.
The basketball team became a family for me, a family to which I developed more of an attachment than to my real family at home. During my university years, basketball was the most important thing in my life emotionally. I felt cared for and appreciated, even on days when I didn’t play very well. The teamwork and camaraderie were connections I had never experienced before, and I came to appreciate the value of being part of something bigger than myself.
Even as I worked to fit in and find my place with the basketball team, in the classroom I found ways—intentionally or not—to set myself apart. Though I was not necessarily the brightest among this elite group of achievers, I managed to establish a reputation for brilliance through hard work, cleverness, and a bit of serendipity.
During our freshman year, the most important interactive small group session was in our general chemistry class. The instructor, Dr. Walther, was a short man whose distinctive features reminded me of Pinocchio. Dr. Walther was a classic example of the breed of elite academicians who rose to prominence in the GDR: smart, incisive, and oh-so-full of himself. He treated us students as if we were on borrowed time—which many of us were, I suppose. Most of our peers seemed intimidated by the mighty Dr. Walther, but Günter and I saw him more as a challenge, and we wore our own self-confidence on our sleeves.
When Doc, as we called him, advised the class to memorize a key formula of thermodynamics in preparation for an upcoming test, I opened my big mouth and blurted out, “No problem. If you forget the formula, you can always just derive it from scratch.”
Günter, who usually sat next to me, pulled at my arm in horror and whispered, “Are you crazy?” He knew what was coming, but what he didn’t know was that I had spent the night before memorizing the fifteen steps needed to derive the formula.
The expression on Dr. Walther’s face said it all: I’ve got you now, you arrogant twit! With a smirk, he stepped grandly to the side and invited me up to the blackboard.
“Well then, Herr Dittrich, derive away!”
I walked calmly to the front of the room and picked up the chalk. After glancing back at my classmates, I began to write out the formula, step by logical step. When I was done, I underlined the final result with a bit of a flourish and turned around to bask in the glory of my accomplishment. Dr. Walther appeared dumbfounded, and the class could barely contain their joy over the defeat of their tormentor. Günter gave me a big grin and flashed a victory sign just above his desk.
Doc’s respect for my performance was clear when he turned to the class and said, “You have just witnessed the performance of a student who will one day be a real scientist.”
From that point on, I became the go-to guy in class discussions when other students responded with silence to a difficult question. Occasionally, the professor would sigh and ask rhetorically, “Do I have to go to Dittrich again?” Of course, this meant I always had to be prepared. But I learned to focus on the toughest subjects and often didn’t know the answers to more basic questions. Still, this “trap” I had set for myself taught me how to discern what was useful and most important.
Continuing to work hard and get good test results bore fruit at the university. Apparently, my reputation as a whiz kid carried over to other sections of the chemistry program as well, and the professors were always looking for ways to trip me up. Once, during organic chemistry, the lab professor gave me a mystery liquid to analyze. Normally, this would have been some kind of organic liquid such as benzene or an ester. But after three days of futile testing, it finally dawned on me: It was tap water. Now, to prove that I had discovered what the substance was, I had to deliver a derivative, another substance made from the original. When I handed the professor a boiled egg, the Dittrich legend continued to grow.
When it came to lab work, I was a sloppy—and sometimes dangerous—scientist. As one of my professors once remarked, “It seems that Albrecht’s theoretical genius is way ahead of his practical prowess.” That pretty much summed up my performance.
One day I was talking with Günter across the aisle. Rather than turn around on my stool, I sat down on my worktable with my back close to a flaming Bunsen burner. When I felt unexpected warmth, I turned slowly to my neighbor and said matter-of-factly, “I think I’m on fire.”
“You are!” he shouted.
Günter immediately put out the flames with a very liberal dose of water, and other students stepped in and “helped” until I was soaking wet. Then we all had a good laugh.
On one particular day in the lab, the assigned experiment gave me pause. I consulted the scientific literature to make sure I had not misunderstood. No, it was all correct. In order to conduct the experiment, I was required to use mustard gas—a chemical weapon that had been used during World War I. It causes severe burns and blistering to every tissue it touches and often results in a painful death.
As with many difficult lab assignments, I consulted with Günter.
“Listen,” I whispered. “I got this task which seems rather simple, but it involves mustard gas.”
“Are you joking?” Günter responded.
“No, I’m not joking. Take a look.” I showed him the page in the chemical journal where I had found the recipe.
“Don’t do it—this is nuts!” Günter said adamantly.
“But—but if I go to a secondary assignment, the best grade I can get is a B.”
“So you get a B,” Günter responded, “and we all live to play chess on Sunday.”
Clearly he did not understand that a B was unacceptable for Albrecht Dittrich. I thought about it for a moment and created a plan. As I walked toward the exit, I called back to Günter, “I’ll be careful, and on Sunday I’ll beat you at chess.”
After securing the proper permissions from my professor, I went to find the janitor, who would retrieve the mustard gas for me from a basement bunker in one of the buildings. My confidence took another hit when he dragged out a heavy, medium-size gas tank that looked just as scary as its contents—with peeling, light-green paint and some sizable rust spots.
Determined not to back out now, I set up my equipment in the outdoor lab. The configuration was rather simple: a flask on a tripod filled with a solvent and covered with a stopper with two holes, one for the intake of the mustard gas, the other for the gaseous new compound to be piped into another flask that was sitting on a bed of dry ice. The stopper did not fit very well, but getting another stopper from the supply room meant a half-hour delay, so I decided to go ahead with what I had.
I donned my gas mask and turned on the Bunsen burner. Moving over to the tank of mustard gas, I slowly turned the valve until I saw bubbles going through the now boiling liquid.
There was only one problem: the janitor’s very large dog, who was sitting under a tree outside the building. As soon as he saw me with the gas mask on, he got spooked and charged at me, barking violently. With my heart pounding, I hurried away from the lab setup and removed the gas mask. The dog immediately settled down and trotted away.
As I looked around for the janitor, in hopes that he would take his dog away so I could put the gas mask on ag
ain, I suddenly saw flames shooting out of the flask with the bubbling solution.
Cursing the faulty stopper, as if it were the fault of that little piece of rubber I had not placed correctly on the flask, I weighed my options: I could either put on the gas mask and risk being attacked by the dog again, or I could leave the mask off and risk mustard gas poisoning.
Choosing the latter option, which somehow seemed the less risky, I took a deep breath, ran over to the tripod, doused the flames, closed the mustard gas valve, and shut down the experiment.
For the next twenty-four hours, I checked my skin, mouth, and eyes for signs of poisoning, but I also had to admit to the professor that my experiment had failed. He gave me another assignment, and I got the dreaded B, but I lived to tell about it. Then, to add insult to injury, Günter trounced me in chess that weekend after telling me in so many words, “I told you so.”
ONE DAY, IN THE SPRING OF 1968, Günter told me to meet him outside the lab for a cigarette break. After offering me a cigarette from a pack of filterless Karos, by far the most noxious cigarettes on the market in East Germany, he got straight to the point.
“Albrecht, you need to join the Party.”
His directness surprised me. This was the second time since high school that someone had attempted to recruit me into the elite organization that essentially ruled the entire country. By instinct, I was not much of a joiner, but my father’s example had shown me that Party membership was a great career booster.
“Why?” I asked Günter.
“Because you’re the smartest guy in our group and we need people like you in the Party. We will be the leaders of the future,” he said, appealing to both my logical mind and my ego. “So what do you say?”
“I’ll think about it. But don’t push me.”
“Fair enough.”
Unbeknownst to me, Günter had engaged an ally in the recruitment process, our professor of Marxist philosophy, Siegmund Borek. Professor Borek was a firm believer in the Communist cause—so much so that he had chosen to teach Marxism rather than chemistry, the subject he had majored in.
One day, he pulled me aside after class.
“You really ought to think about joining the Party, Albrecht. You have great potential. How would you like to work closely with your friends Günter and Matthias?”
“You aren’t the first one to bring this up,” I said, “but tell me what will be expected of me and how Party membership would benefit me personally.”
“It’s very simple,” Professor Borek said. “You will participate in leading the affairs at the university. You will be privy to information before it is shared with the general public—if it is shared at all. And you will be prepared to become one of the leaders of your generation. Does this not sound good?”
Before I could reply, he took his recruiting efforts to another level by inviting me to his apartment.
“Tell you what,” he said, “come for dinner one night and we’ll talk things through and answer all your questions.”
An invitation to dinner with a professor—now that was something! And though the apartment turned out to be a typical dimly lit, one-room, third floor walk-up, and the lukewarm mutton the professor’s wife served for dinner left something to be desired, the fact that I, a mere freshman at the university, was able to spend time with a professor in his private home was far more significant. Our conversation centered on the future of the world. As a philosopher, Professor Borek had the big picture in mind.
“Think about it, Albrecht. We’re going to put Marx’s theory into practice, and we will finish what Lenin started. We will build a just world that is free of any kind of oppression, and we are inviting you to participate in this great endeavor.”
His enthusiasm was contagious, and soon after that evening at his home I applied for Party membership, sponsored by the professor and Günter. After an interview with the leadership of the Party organization within the chemistry section, I was voted in as a candidate of the Party for the standard one-year probationary period.
Once I began to understand what I had joined, I was delighted to be part of a group of intelligent people who believed in the same ideals I did and who were in a position to put those beliefs into practice. Party members believed in the cause, and we all understood that bumps in the road were only minor obstacles to building a fully functional Communist state. The sincere efforts at intellectual honesty along with the openness of this group were the final blocks in my ideological foundation. I believed wholeheartedly in the Party’s objectives, and I never would have expected that, in the decades to come, I would come to see the world completely differently. At the time, it was all very clear to me:
Marxism-Leninism is a science with a sound economic and philosophical foundation. Mankind moved from slavery to feudalism to capitalism. The logical next and final step is communism.
Capitalism is based on the exploitation of workers by the rich owners of the means of production. The Marxist maxim, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,” would guarantee happiness for all human beings regardless of their innate capabilities.
The Soviet Union and its allies would succeed in freeing the world from the scourge of capitalism. Signs of progress were already visible all over the world as newly freed Third World colonies often wound up with socialist-leaning governments.
The working class would take the leading role in overthrowing capitalism, and the working class had taken its rightful leadership role in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc countries. The Communist Party was the key instrument of the working class to fulfill its destiny.
West Germany was the successor state to Hitler’s Germany. It was fully supported by the ultimate enemy of all mankind, the United States.
Certainly, there were some questions that contained seeds of doubt: How could the working class be in a leadership role when most of the workers I knew were not very bright? Why did our leaders, Walter Ulbricht and, later, Erich Honecker, sound so unintelligent and boring? Why did our teachers have no convincing answers to the question of the meaning of life?
But as a newly minted member of the elite, with a vested interest in the success of the established order, and because my fundamental beliefs were rock solid, I easily swept those questions and doubts under the carpet.
After attending my first Party meeting, I joined Günter, who was already a full member, for a cigarette in front of the building.
“Hey, this was great,” I said. “Thanks for inviting me in. This is a very good place for me.”
Günter smiled proudly. “Yes, my friend, this is a very good time to join the Party. All of the hard work has already been done by the older generation, and it will soon be up to us to finish the job. Look how far we’ve come since the war. We have better consumer goods now, my parents just bought a color TV set, our athletes are among the best in the world, and the GDR is getting respect from everywhere.”
Soon I was recruited to take a prominent role in the Freie Deutsche Jugend (FDJ), the Communist youth movement. Prior to college, I had stayed under the radar by volunteering for the modest role of treasurer, but this was the big leagues now. I could not, and would not, evade the call to duty any longer.
At the beginning of our sophomore year, I was elected secretary of our twelve-student youth group. The following year, I became first secretary of the entire class of approximately sixty-five students, and by my senior year, I had been elevated to first secretary of the Communist youth organization of the entire chemistry section, comprising nearly four hundred students.
In May 1970, because of my volunteer work and my outstanding grades, I was nominated for and received the Karl Marx Scholarship, a prestigious grant that was awarded once a year to approximately seventy students nationwide. The award included a stipend of 450 marks per month, which was a fortune to me.
Through my first three years at the university, I essentially aced the entire program, and I was a well-respected student leader in
the chemistry section. As such, several enticing career options quickly presented themselves to me. Though I still held to my dream of becoming a tenured professor in chemistry, a goal that now seemed well within reach, there were competing interests pointing me in the direction of a career within the Party or with the government. I had been approached by university Party officials about possibly taking over leadership of the Party group in the chemistry section. It was highly unusual to offer such an important position to a man of my limited years. At the same time, I was recruited to become the deputy youth leader for the entire university. The typical succession pattern would have led to my becoming the leader of approximately ten thousand students within two years.
But there was another unexpected option that would soon appear on the scene, an opportunity that began with a simple knock on my dorm room door.
THAT LIFE-CHANGING KNOCK came in September 1970, just after the start of my fourth year at the university.
I’d done some dorm hopping in the previous years and currently lived very close to the cluster of chemistry buildings in a three-story dorm at August Bebel Straße 26. Spencer, my roommate from the beginning, shared a room with me on the second floor, with windows overlooking the street.
One Saturday afternoon, I was alone in our dorm room because Spencer had decided to make the long trip home to visit his parents that weekend. Günter wasn’t around, so I decided to work on some lab reports until it was late enough to head over to the Rosenkeller for my usual Saturday night of partying.
When I heard the knock, I looked up from my papers and waited for the door to open. It was customary among the students to announce ourselves with a knock, but then to immediately enter.