Carola Stern
| Carola Stern *** |
|
|---|---|
| Born | Erika Assmus 14 November 1928 Ahlbeck, Island of Usedom, Pomerania, Germany |
| Died | 19 January 2006 Berlin, Germany |
| Occupation | Spy writer journalist broadcaster |
| Nationality | German |
| Spouse | Heinz Zöger (1915–2000) |
Carola Stern (born Ahlbeck 14 November 1925: died Berlin 19 January 2006) was the name under which Erika Assmus reinvented herself as a serious journalist and (subsequently) author and politically committed television presenter, after she was obliged to relocate at short notice from East Germany to West Germany in 1951.
She was a co-founder of the German section of the Human Rights organisation, Amnesty International.
She was held in high regard by her fellow writers, and was the vice-president of the energetic of PEN International between 1987 and 1995, after which she became a PEN "Honorary President".
Carola Stern was born at Ahlbeck on the Baltic Island of Usedom, at that time wholly in Germany, on 14 November 1925. Her father, a civil servant, died before she was born. Her widowed mother ran a guest house.
During the Nazi years she was a group leader in the League of German Girls (BDM/"Bund Deutscher Mädel"), membership of which, as sources are quick to point out, was almost universal among girls in small-town Germany at the time. She herself was later hugely self-critical of her "stupid conformity" ("bescheuerte Gläubigkeit") when writing her autobiographical book "In the Nets of Memory" ("In den Netzen der Erinnerung") (1986) as she grew up in the 1930s, while also savagely lamenting the failure of contemporaries to recall their own conformity with the pervasive themes of Nazi Germany.
She successfully completed her schooling in 1944. The end of the war was a disaster for her mother, a committed adherent of National Socialism, but Erika was by now critical of the politicians' slogans exhorting the people to hold out as the end approached.
As World War II ended she joined the general flight towards the west. Between September 1945 and January 1947 she worked as a librarian at the Rabe Missile Research Institute in Bleicherode, a small town in Thuringia where the Soviets had gathered together rocket specialists from the former Peenemünde Army Research Center, which had itself been destroyed and evacuated when the German military had begun to contemplate the possibility of defeat.
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