Gerda Szepansky (born Gerda Lange: 6 September 1925 - 3 August 2004) was a teacher in West Berlin who lost her job for political reasons. She had dreamed of working as a journalist since childhood, and following her dismissal was able to focus on building a successful career producing "cheerful stories about dogs and babies" for magazines. She also appeared on stage in post-war Berlin in cabaret and independent theatre groups. She married a concentration camp survivor (who was also a committed communist) and, after their children had grown up, published a number of popular history books focusing on contemporary history and on the Hitler years through which she had lived as a teenager, and during which her husband had been a resistance activist. Literary success and the passing of the years brought her a measure of official respectability: in 1996 she was a recipient of the Order of Merit ("Bundesverdienstkreuz am Bande").
Life
Gerda Lange was born and grew up in central Berlin. Her childhood ambition to embark on a career as a journalist proved unrealistic under Hitlerism during the war or indeed, with the centre of Berlin reduced to rubble and life a daily battle for survival, during its immediate aftermath. There was, however, a desperate shortage of working-age population and of teachers, which was recognised as an important social issue by the military administrators responsible for Berlin. She embarked on a career as a school teacher under the emergency "New Teachers" scheme. It was at an afterhours meeting of antifascist teachers that she met and teamed up with another teacher, Wolfgang Szepansky, a communist who had survived the Nazi years. On 27 September 1947 the two of them married. The children whom they taught formed a neat line as the young couple made their way to the registry office. Despite the widespread austerity of the times, there was some disappointment among their young witnesses that there was no bridal carriage and that they had arrived for the ceremony on foot.
Following the West German currency reform (from which the Soviet occupation zone, including the eastern part of Berlin, was excluded) and the ensuing eleven month Soviet blockade of Berlin, there was an intensification of political and administrative divisions between the eastern part of Berlin and the parts under US, British or French administration, which would come to be known soon after 1949 as "West Berlin". The Tempelhof quarter of Berlin in which the Szepanskys had ended up living was in the U.S. (western) sector of the city. They were nevertheless both members of the recently launched Socialist Unity Party, a successor party to the Communist Party which was already securely rooted in the Soviet zone, but had completely failed to gain traction with more than a handful of voters in Berlin's western sectors. After 1949, the Szepanskys found themselves viewed with intensifying suspicion at work. That year or shortly afterwards they were both dismissed from the West Berlin schools service. In the case of Gerda Szepansky, at least one source refers to her dismissal having resulted from "aktiver Betätigung im Sinne der SED", a convoluted but widely requoted expression referencing her involvement with the East German Socialist Unity Party.
During May 1949, the western occupation zones were rebranded and relaunched as the U.S. sponsored German Federal Republic (West Germany), followed in October 1949 by the rebranding and relaunch of the Soviet sponsored German Democratic Republic (East Germany) in what had hitherto been known as the Soviet occupation zone. The Berlin blocade of 1948/49 and other increasingly alarming "cold war" events had left public opinion in West Berlin deeply suspicious of the Soviets and their comrades in East Berlin. The East German enterprise was frequently seen as no more than an unconvincing proxy for Moscow's continuing imperialist ambitions. Nevertheless, each year, on May Day, the Szepanskys would hang a large red flag from the balcony of the apartment they shared with their children at Berlin-Mariendorf. One year a neighbour alerted the police. As the political division of Berlin came to be matched, during the 1950s and 1960s, with physical barriers, members of the Socialist Unity Party of West Berlin like the Szepanskys were urged by neighbours to "go over there - across "the wall" to East Germany. But their roots were in what had become West Berlin, along with their parents, friends and apartment. They had, in any case, discovered that it was perfectly possible to "show solidarity with the east" from the west.