Roland Jahn was born in Jena on 14 July 1953. His mother worked as an accountant at the university, his father as a design engineer at VEB Carl Zeiss Jena. Jahn’s father, a volunteer official at the tradition-steeped football club Carl Zeiss Jena, passed his enthusiasm for the sport on to his son Roland: as an emerging young talent, Jahn played with the club’s top team all the way through to top division for the junior class in the GDR.

Jahn, who completed lower secondary school at a school offering special instruction in Russian, passed his upper secondary school leaving exam in 1972. He then did his compulsory military service in the Kasernierte Volkspolizei (“barracked people’s police”, the precursor to the Volksarmee) in Rodolstadt (Thuringia). He would later describe this as the most severe disruption in his youth. He struggled with the morality of the exercises based on fictive scenarios of student unrest in his hometown, aware that he himself might very well be the enemy he was being trained to fight. 

Jahn returned to Jena after his 1974 discharge. At the time, more and more young people in Jena were rejecting the attitude towards life prescribed by the state and pursuing individual modes of life. People would meet up in their homes, in the rooms of the Young Congregation (Junge Gemeinde), on walks, in poetry and reading groups, and organised small art exhibitions and their own celebrations. Some were in contact with opposition figures like Robert Havemann, Wolf Biermann and Jürgen Fuchs. A strong community based on solidarity was slowly taking shape in Jena.

Jahn began to study economics there in 1975 but was expelled in 1976 after criticising the revocation of Wolf Biermann’s citizenship. Ordered to work for a probationary period in production (Bewährung in der Produktion), he took a job as a transport worker at VEB Carl Zeiss Jena. In 1978, he met Petra Falkenberg. Together, they helped support friends who had been arrested. Their daughter Lina was born in 1979. They talked about “The Alternative” by Rudolf Bahro and works by other theorists in small discussion groups.

On 12 April 1981, Jahn’s friend Matthias Domaschk died at the Stasi detention facility in Gera, where he had been taken after being arrested two days earlier. The circumstances of Domaschk’s death have never been clarified. According to the Ministry for State Security (Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, MfS), he had used his own shirt to hang himself. The death of Matthias Domaschk triggered a widespread increase in opposition activities.

On the first anniversary of Domaschk’s death, Jahn posted a Memorial notice in the SED newspaper for Thuringia. The wording was intentionally ambiguous: “We commemorate our friend, Matthias Domaschk, who was torn from life in his 24th year.” It was signed “His friends”. Jahn clipped several copies of the notice and pasted them up around central Jena the next night. A close friend, the sculptor Michael Blumhagen, created a sculpture commemorating Domaschk and placed it in the cemetery at Easter in 1982. The MfS attempted to have the object “disappear”, but Jahn was able to take photographs of it being driven away. His pictures made their way across the border to Jürgen Fuchs in West Berlin, thanks to the efforts of the writer Lutz Rathenow, who had known Jahn since he was in school, and those of a West German journalist accredited to work in GDR. These pictures, along with other photographs from Jena, were published in West German magazines.

In the years 1982/1983, protests against the increasing militarisation of the GDR and the nuclear missiles stationed in the East and the West intensified in Jena and elsewhere. The younger generation was trying to make their demands heard. Postcards were used as flysheets and disseminated throughout the country. Information was passed to people from Jena who were now living in West Berlin or directly to Western correspondents: “We are creating a public arena. From Jena directly to the Tagesschau news broadcast and back to Jena and into the entire GDR.” During one of his many interrogations by the police and the MfS, Jahn was told: “You are like poison! Poison belongs in the poison cabinet and the cabinet has to be locked.” Along with the Berlin Appeal of Rainer Eppelmann and Robert Havemann and the Peace Forum at Dresden’s Frauenkirche, the activities in Jena generated the most attention in the GDR public.

On 1 May 1982, Roland Jahn went to the annual official May parade and positioned himself next to the SED tribune to watch the parade. One side of his face was made up to look like Hitler, the other to look like Stalin, his hair was styled accordingly. His friend Manfred Hildebrandt took photographs of him in this makeup. The images were disseminated as a postcard.

Jahn rode around Jena with a small Polish national flag affixed to his bicycle for months. He had written “Solidarity with the people of Poland” in Polish on it, a response to *martial law in Poland. He was arrested on 1 September 1982 for “disrespecting state symbols”. Jahn spent five months in solitary confinement before being sentenced, in January 1983, to 22 months of imprisonment for “public defamation of the state order” and “disrespecting state symbols”. Under the duress of prison conditions, his lawyer was able to persuade him to apply for permission to depart to the West. This decision was also made in light of developments in Jena: In a wave of arrests there in January and February of 1983, among those who were arrested was Petra Falkenberg. All faced the very real possibility of multi-year sentences. Friends, and particularly Lutz Rathenow, organised solidarity campaigns and protests in East Germany and abroad. Amnesty International and representatives of the West German Green Party and the peace movement in the FRG all called for their release. The national magazine programme “Report” of the West-German public-service broadcaster ARD aired a piece on the escalating situation in Jena. The SED leadership felt compelled to order the release of almost all detainees in the GDR in February 1983. His unexpected release made Jahn more optimistic again. He revoked his application to depart, stating that he had issued it under duress.