"Jena Paradise" describes the youth scene in the GDR in the 1970s using the example of Matthias Domaschk from Jena and his friends. It also provides unusually intense insights into the East German youth scene and society. Reservations for the event are unfortunately not possible.
Friday, April 10, 1981: In Jena, 23-year-old Matthias Domaschk boards the express train to Berlin. He wants to go to a birthday party. But he never arrives because the packed train is stopped in Jüterbog and Matthias is arrested. Two days later, he is dead after being interrogated in the Stasi detention center in Gera. What happened back then?
The Matthias Domaschk case has kept courts and committees of inquiry busy. Peter Wensierski, who has spent decades researching the various groups, resistance circles and subcultures of the GDR, has now been able to reconstruct the last days of Matthias Domaschk's life in "Jena Paradise". He discovered revealing new files and interviewed more than 200 contemporary witnesses, including, for the first time, those officers of the former Ministry of State Security who were directly involved in the case and had mostly remained silent until now. Never before has there been such a look behind the scenes of the Stasi.
With numerous photos and original documents such as letters and diaries, Peter Wensierski gives Matthias Domaschk a new and surprising face and at the same time portrays a young counter-culture that goes beyond Jena and the GDR and is exemplary of a time of change.
Peter Wensierski, born in 1954, studied political science, history and journalism at the Free University of Berlin. He has been reporting from the GDR as a journalist and documentary filmmaker since 1979. From 1986 to 1993, he was a television journalist for ARD, working for the magazine Kontraste and, from 1993, for Der Spiegel. Wensierski was awarded the Federal Film Prize, the European Television Prize and the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. He has published several books, including "Von oben nach unten wächst gar nichts" (1986), "Schläge im Namen des Herrn" (2006), "Die verbotene Reise" (2014), "Die unheimliche Leichtigkeit der Revolution" (2017), "Berlin - Stadt der Revolte" (with Michael Sontheimer, 2018).
