My father was born in 1932, lived through World War II as a child, and later became a party secretary, Russian teacher, and local chairman for the Society for German-Soviet Friendship (DSF) in East Germany. He was deeply committed to anti-fascism, read Ostrovsky in Russian, and organized exchange meetings with Soviet personnel. That was one side of his reality. The other side was the relentless pressure from the faculty collective and an authoritarian school principal.
My father desperately needed an outlet to decompress. In the basement of our apartment building in Neuhausen, deep in the Ore Mountains, he partitioned off a small area to build his own darkroom. It became his personal safe space. To meet the official recruitment quotas for the youth organization while actually inspiring young people, he started an informal, off-the-books photo club for local teenagers. He built a haven away from state oversight where young people could learn to view the world through their own lens.
