The GDR dissident Matthias Domaschk: a search for clues.
On April 10, 1981, Matthias Domaschk boards a train bound for East Berlin. Two days later he is dead. Is the Secret Service version of the suicide true? Peter Wensierski provides an answer in his book “Jena Paradies. Die letzte Reise des Matthias Domaschk” (“Jena Station. Matthias Domaschk’s last journey”).
My radio report also features Renate Ellmenreich, who lived with Matthias Domaschk in Jena, GDR, in the 1970s and has a daughter with him. Because the fate of her former boyfriend gave her no peace, she asked Peter Wensierski in 2019 to research the events back then again. She talks in more detail about her time together with Matthias Domaschk in the circle of the oppositional youth in Jena and her own attempts after the fall of the Wall to clear up his death in her Lived History, which I summarized for West German Radio WDR 5.
You can read Renate Ellmenreich’s Lived History in English on my Substack blog Rebecca’s Transatlantic Post. More info: here.