Wolfgang Templin was born in Jena on 25 November 1948. His mother worked as a cleaning woman; she had come to Jena from Poland in 1944 as a Luftwaffe auxiliary and stayed there after the war. His father, a Soviet officer, was ordered back to the Soviet Union in 1950. Wolfgang Templin never met him. As a “refugee” and “Russian” child, he became a loner in school. He began an apprenticeship as a book printer in 1965 but had to withdraw for health reasons. The rejection he experienced as a child engendered a “can’t be bothered” attitude in him that stayed with him until he was taught to see things differently by “critical comrades”, whom he met during a training course at the university library in Jena. His new mentors also convinced him to join the Free German Youth (Freie Deutsche Jugend, FDJ). Templin said later that he began trying to “convert” his acquaintances in this period.

In 1968, Templin moved to East Berlin, where he studied at the School of Library Sciences and qualified for admission to university. He decided to study philosophy at Humboldt-Universität and became a coordinator of a group of party activists (he was already a party member). Still quite “provincial” and “not very mobile”, he served in this role as an ideological and social “inspector”, checking up on his fellow students. 1971–75, he was also an unofficial collaborator of the Ministry of State Security (Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, MfS) with the codename “Pete”. He saw this activity as an extension of the function he was already serving for the party. At this stage, he still believed that the GDR’s problems and troubles could be justified, that they were potholes along what was, overall, the right path. The start of the Honecker era encouraged his optimism. After taking his Diplom degree in 1974, he stayed on at the university in a “research student” position to work on his dissertation on the philosophy of Edmund Husserl.

In Templin’s case, it was not the *invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops to suppress the *Prague Spring that gave rise to the first doubts about the socialist idea and practices, but the World Festival of Youth and Sports in 1973, which he helped to organise. Discussions with other students about the enormous obstacles to, for instance, contact with young people from other countries – inspired Wolfgang Templin, Klaus Wolfram, Wolfgang Nitsche and others to form a Trotskyist underground student group, and Templin told the members of this group about his activity for the MfS. On the basis of a joint decision – of which the MfS was immediately notified by another member of the group – Templin gradually pulled back from his collaboration with State Security. The group focussed on drawing up a Marxist critique of socialism. It was not interested in engaging in open opposition.

Templin’s marriage with Renate Karrer, a granddaughter of Jürgen Kuczynski, in 1974, left him with less and less time for the secret police, the SED or the underground student group. Templin seized the opportunity to study in Warsaw, in 1976/77, as it offered a way to escape the constraints of the ideological debates at the university and in the Kuczynski family.

His stay in Warsaw was arranged by Polish students from the Communist Youth League, who also had contacts with Polish Trotskyist emigrants in the West. This Polish Trotskyist group did not have direct ties to the Workers’ Defence Committee (Komitet Obrony Robotników, *KOR), but it did draw up its own critical Marxist analyses. Templin translated them into German and discussed them with others in Berlin.

During Templin’s absence from Berlin, his associates were caught making arrangements for a delivery of books by friends in West Berlin. They were expelled from the party and ordered to work in factories for a time. The authorities reprimanded Templin as well, citing his ties with the group in question. Their evidence for these ties came in the form of a statement provided by Templin’s wife. This resulted in the couple’s divorce and a rupture with the family; Templin was transferred to the Academy of Sciences (Akademie der Wissenschaften, AdW), causing a delay in the completion of his dissertation. 

1977–83, Templin worked as a member of the research staff of the AdW’s Central Institute for Philosophy, but he saw himself as a free agent in Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg district. He met a number of left-leaning people who were not party members and were pursuing their intellectual interests in the context of theological training. They would meet up for discussions in smaller “house groups” and in seminaries under the roof of the Church. Reinhard Schult was one of those whom Wolfgang Templin met in these circumstances. Templin also worked in the peace group of the East Berlin Evangelical Student Union (Evangelischen Studentengemeinde) and in the Naumburg peace group (Naumburger Friedenskreis) led by Edelbert Richter. He met his future second wife, Regina, at a small demonstration of cyclists; at the time, she was finishing her training in Christian education. Before long, Templin had active friendships with people all over the GDR, in Poland and in the West.

This matrix of friendships, the “house groups” and church seminary events, where Templin usually appeared in the role of a speaker, gave him far more scope to pursue his intellectual and political interests than the SED had ever afforded him. During these years, his thinking shifted away from the teleological Marxist view. He would describe himself in a 1991 lecture as someone who went back and forth across the border between theory and politics. The shift Templin’s thinking had direct consequences: he resigned his membership in the SED once the independent peace movement had begun to take shape. His withdrawal from the Party led to his dismissal from the Academy of Sciences and a ban on pursuing his profession. Templin had to find other ways to earn his living, including working a cleaner, forest worker and translator. As the Stasi’s records make clear, he had by then become a target of social/psychological “decomposition” (Zersetzung), measures aimed at controlling, infiltrating and destroying his private and political relationships.

With the deployment of nuclear weapons in 1983 and the large wave of emigration from the GDR in 1984, peace groups in the GDR found themselves in a state of crisis; one way they reacted to this was by making various attempts to link up with one another and coordinate action. To facilitate the continuation of collective action and coordination this required, Templin and others jointly prepared a human rights seminar in late 1985. They had already issued around 200 invitations to people throughout the GDR when the church congregation withdrew its permission for its premises to be used for the seminar. The seminar had to be cancelled.