Like many members of the generation that grew up under the Nazi dictatorship, Elisabeth Graul entered the post-war era eager to help build a democratic, humanist society. But as people began to vanish without a trace from her Thuringian hometown – again – and the contradictions between the SED’s slogans and reality grew unbearable, Graul felt the call to resist and to seek out others who felt the same. She found them in the Resistance Group of Soviet-Zone Youth, a West-Berlin-based organisation that supported and coordinated resistance activities by young people in the GDR – and did so recklessly and ruthlessly as soon became evident.

Elisabeth Graul grew up in Erfurt, where she was born in 1928. She studied music, first at home in Erfurt, later in Weimar and later still (until her arrest) in West Berlin. Despite the passion with which she pursued her dream of becoming a professional pianist and the intense focus that the writing of her first literary texts demanded of her, she remained aware of the political situation in the Soviet Occupation Zone and the direction in which it appeared to be heading. There were the frequent disappearances: a friend or someone she knew would suddenly vanish, having been arrested or found a way to escape to the West. As a student in Erfurt and Weimar, she experienced the increasingly intense political indoctrination first-hand, saw votes whose results were obtained under duress. When she saw an opportunity to continue her studies in West Berlin, she took it.

Although there were border controls at the crossings between the Soviet Occupation Zone and the Western zones, between East and West Berlin by this time, post-war Germany was still far from being a divided country in the minds of its population. The borders were not impenetrable, so it was quite possible, for instance, to attend school or university, or work in West Berlin while living in the Soviet Occupation Zone or East Berlin. Thus although she began to study in West Berlin in 1950, Graul’s ties to her old home and her old circle of friends and acquaintances remained strong. She kept Erfurt as her official place of residence, regularly visited her friends in the city and, on 15 October 1950, experienced along with the other residents of her building the enormous pressure exerted to make people vote in the sham election to the national legislature, the Volkskammer.

For a young person who had the spirit to resist, what could be more natural in such a situation than to contact resistance groups based in the Western zones, or West Berlin? It was essentially by chance that Elisabeth Graul had a friend put her into contact with the Resistance Group of Soviet-Zone Youth – chance and a lack of guile on her part. This group was affiliated with the League of German Youth (Bund Deutscher Jugend, BDJ), an organisation founded by Paul Egon Lüth. The BDJ presented itself as a rigorously anti-totalitarian and anti-communist youth organisation, but it had an underground paramilitary arm, the “Technical Service” (Technischer Dienst), which was led by former members of the Wehrmacht and SS. Elisabeth Graul was unaware of the existence of this secret branch until after her arrest. Subsequently, in late 1952/early 1953, the BDJ and its Technische Dienst were banned in several West German federal states, but by then Graul was in prison.

Graul acted as a courier for the group, transporting secret handbills to the GDR. She also took part at press conferences in West Berlin on the situation in East Germany. However, she soon found herself disagreeing with BDJ policy and particularly with Paul Lüth. She objected both to the recklessness with which the BDJ leadership risked the lives and freedom of young people from the GDR and to the BDJ’s political aims, which were gradually becoming apparent and which she found intolerable. She would later describe this as a bitter recognition: a restoration of the past was the very last thing she and those like her had wanted. “But we had tried to engage in politics without having the slightest idea how they worked.”

In the summer of 1951, several weeks after Elisabeth Graul severed her ties with the BDJ, the 23-year-old was arrested by State Security officers while visiting her hometown of Erfurt. The accusation: she had been a member of the Resistance Group of Soviet-Zone Youth. She spent long months locked in a windowless underground cell in the central detention facility of the Ministry for State Security (Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, MfS) in Hohenschönhausen. Inmates called this notorious cell block the “Underground” (U-Boot). After enduring seemingly endless late-night interrogations in combination with systematic sleep deprivation, she was sentenced, along with 11 co-defendants, to 15 years of penal servitude in February of 1952 by the GDR’s supreme court, with Judge Hilde Benjamin, later a GDR justice minister, presiding. When she was released in 1962, Elisabeth Graul had been a prisoner for over ten years, nearly all of them spent in the Hoheneck Women’s Prison.

The Berlin Wall had already been built – escape to West Berlin was no longer an option. Graul was fortunate in the sense that she found people willing to help someone who had been labelled an “enemy of the state” to find work in Magdeburg, where she lived after her release. She was hired by the local puppet theatre, where she worked for 13 years, and even allowed to direct productions there after a while. Later still, she was permitted to work as a piano teacher at the Georg Philipp Telemann School of Music in Magdeburg. After the collapse of the SED regime, she had the privilege of seeing one of her piano students go on to train at the Juilliard School of Music in New York and begin a successful career as a pianist, a high point in her own professional life, her own career having been so abruptly derailed in 1951. The pupil realised the lifetime dream of her teacher.

In addition to her passionate love of music, Elisabeth Graul had an affinity for the literary arts. Both helped her to survive the difficult years in prison – years that left their mark on her whole life, as she described poignantly in her autobiography “Die Farce” (The farce). There is a sentence in this book that could be considered as the maxim by which she lived: “It is not what you experience that matters, but how you experience it [...].” Full of energy despite the serious health consequences of her years in prison, she continued to be politically active in a variety of ways, even after 1990, while also finding the time and strength to write collections of sensitive poetry and finish a novel that was published in 1999. In a poem entitled “Mein Credo” (My creed), she wrote: 

Solange ich mich regen kann, 
werde ich mich zu Wort melden
gegen vergangenes Unrecht,
gegenwärtiges
und zukunftsträchtiges.
Ich frage nicht,
ob ich damit die Welt verändern kann […].

(As long as I am able to move,
I will speak out
against injustice past,
present
and latent.
I do not ask
whether I can change the world by doing so […].)

Elisabeth Graul died in Barleben, near Magdeburg, in 2009.