VATERLANDSVERRÄTER

“The biggest enemy in the entire country, is and remains the informant” – was what his mother had always told him, he recounts. At the same time, he negates it, he says “We didn’t piss you capitalist off enough … these Ackermanns ...Thyssens … The poor people picking the last crumbs from the bread ... employers … yeah and what do they give us?” Gratzik was a worker, ladies’ man, and a celebrated author of the German Democratic Republic in the 70s. In the 1960s he had joined the Stasi out of conviction and informed on his colleagues, such as Heiner Müller. At the beginning of the 1980s he quit and made his own involvement public. Thereafter he hit rock bottom. At his lonely farmstead in the Uckermark he opens himself up to Annekatrin Hendel, insofar as this gruff maverick can. It’s a life full of power, sensibility and inner conflict, which becomes visible in all its ambivalence and contradictions. Just as his informant history appears – he remains understandable and yet always puzzling.