Repeated Attempts of a Life

This is Part One of the exceptional life story of Wolfgang Harmann, an East German research scientist covering the period from his birth to imprisonment as a prisoner of conscience in East Germany. Based on his diary and extensive research, it is both personal biography and a literary Polaroid of life in the bipolar era of the totalitarian fascist and communist societies during his life at that time.The book begins by describing his early life and the hardships surrounding his abandonment at war’s end and aftermath and goes on to describe his difficult life as the adoptive son of a miller in East Germany. His difficult family situation in his adoptive family and the challenges his family and others who owned small businesses faced at the hands of corrupt local communist officials is described in detail. Against the odds Wolfgang able to leave the mill, receive a college education, and rise to become a prominent scientist in East Germany.When the East German secret police (Stasi) tried to recruit him to help entrap visiting American scientists for espionage on East Germany’s behalf, Wolfgang was able to warn the Americans off without being arrested by the Stasi himself.When Wolfgang protested his denial to visit his terminally ill biological mother, though, he was imprisoned in secret service prisons where he did forced prison labor and endured protracted solitary confinement in a “tiger cage” for protesting his unsafe working conditions.Part Two of this book will detail how Wolfgang was eventually bought out of the East and his new life in the West as a statistician in North Carolina.This first person account of life and resistance in a surveillance state contains many pictures of life in East Germany. Extreme care has been taken to document Wolfgang’s story from official records released after German reunification.