Mit beiden Augen: Mein Leben zwischen den Zeilen

by Heinz Knobloch

German

141 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1997

Reviews

[Nathaniel Flakin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Heinz Knobloch’s three-part autobiography was published, who knows why, in two volumes. Knobloch was East Germany's most famous newspaper columnist. His weekly column in the Wochenpost reached over a million people. He also wrote a number of amusing, meandering history books about Moses Mendelssohn, Mathilde Jacob / Rosa Luxemburg, Sally Epstein / Horst Wessel, and others. Knobloch was never in opposition to the German Democratic Republic, but he was always subtly critical. When the dissident singer-songwriter Wolfgang Biermann was expelled from the country in 1976, no one asked him to sign the petitions for or the petitions against Biermann — both sides saw Knobloch as unreliable. These books (actually three separate books, rather than a three-part autobiography) were all written after the GDR collapsed.


Part 1 is about his childhood in Dresden, and I didn't enjoy this volume much at all. The style he uses in history books involves jumping back and forth from the narrative to tangents from other historical periods, personal anecdotes, and experiences while writing. This is normally great, but his childhood memories are already so disjointed that the whole volume reads like nothing but tangents.


Part 2 is about World War II is much better. The 17-year-old Knobloch resisted getting recruited by the Waffen-SS, and instead joined the Wehrmacht. He ended up in Normandy. As his unit was retreating after D-Day, he and three companions managed to surrender to U.S. troops. This book is dedicated to Knobloch's passionate antimilitarism.

Part 3 is about his life in the German Democratic Republic. Sometimes I wonder if he was really as oblivious to politics as he makes himself seem. He was present, for example, at the Berlin city council meeting on September 6, 1948, when communists occupied the city hall and the pro-capitalist parties fled to West Berlin, an important step in the division of the city. Knobloch claimed he had no idea what was going on and only learned about it much later. Who knows? This book shows the good and the bad of East Germany: both the terrible censorship and also the sincere attempt to meet the basic needs of every citizen.

Knobloch comes across as a great humanist who was sympathetic to socialism but skeptical of any form of authority, especially military authority. His history books are excellent. I would recommend this to people who already enjoyed those.