Katja Havemann
| Katja Havemann | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Annedore Grafe 30 November 1947 (age 69) Neubarnim (Letschin), Soviet occupation zone (subsequently GDR) |
| Occupation | Peace activist Civil rights activist Author |
| Political party | New Forum |
| Spouse(s) | Robert Havemann (1910-1982) |
| Children | Franziska Havemann |
Katja Havemann (born Annedore Grafe: 30 November 1947) is a German civil rights activist and author.
Annedore Grafe was born into a peasant family in Neubarnim (Letschin) in a rural region on the left bank of the Oder river, at that time part of the Soviet occupation zone, and on the "German" side of the newly repositioned frontier with Poland. She attended the local school between 1954 and 1964, and then undertook a traneeship in animal husbandry, till 1967 at the agriculture college in Neuenhagen a short distance to the east of Berlin. In 1967 she moved on to the prestigious in Berlin. However, after a year she voluntarily abandoned her course and in 1968 took work at a Berlin orphanage.
In 1973 she successfully completed a training as a home educationist in (near Leipzig). By this time, back in Berlin, she had become part of a circle of intellectuals - artists and writers - critical of the ruling party. She first met the scientist and high-profile political and civil rights activist Robert Havemann (1910–1982) in 1970 at the apartment of the songwriter Wolf Biermann, another prominent political dissident. She married Havemann in 1974. Their daughter Franziska had been born the previous year. Annedore Grafe marked her marriage by changing not merely her family name but also her first name: Annedore Grafe now became Katja Havemann.
Katja Havemann supported her husband in his dangerous work as a political writer in the German Democratic Republic and shared in the mounting surveillance and other destructive actions to which they were routinely subjected by officers of the Ministry for State Security, including slightly more than two years under house arrest between 1976 and 1979. In numerous critical articles and quotations that appeared in the western media, Robert Havemann's managed to share the basis of his opposition to the political structure in East Germany. His opposition centred on the assertion of one-party power by the SED (party) in the German Democratic Republic. He rejected this as dogmatic and undemocratic.
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