Staucha in Saxony is located twenty-four kilometers west of Meißen, 207 kilometers south of Berlin. The next bigger city is Riesa. On his 85th birthday, Peter Sodann actually wanted to move back to Halle, where he was once director of the Landestheater and then director of the New Theater. But on the grounds of a former manor in Staucha there is not only his house, there are also the many books with which he has grown together, it will probably be several million.
We cross the yard and a man with a full Ikea bag comes towards us. “Can you hand in books here?” “Noja,” is his answer. What he brought is later packed in banana boxes because they are easier to stack. “The knowledge of the East slumbers in the banana boxes of the West”, says a poster on the wall of the former barn – a large room, and above it there is an upper floor, also full of boxes. I want to know how many books are stored here. “Send me three companies of soldiers, they can count them.”
Although many people don’t know anything about the small town of Staucha, I am probably not the first journalist to appear here. Peter Sodann seems somehow tired. Depressed? Bitter?
Are you welcome here?
How often in his life has he been confronted with discouragement and yet never let himself get down. In 1961 he was sentenced to ten years in prison for dangerous agitation. The reason was a program in the Leipzig student cabaret Rat der Mockers, in which, according to Wikipedia, a teddy bear was a copy of the SED central organ New Germany stuck in the buttocks. The 25-year-old’s sentence was later suspended, but he has served ten months. “I was lucky enough to have experienced everything in the GDR and I’m still for the GDR,” he says. Not more.
Such an attitude does not make oneself popular in the new circumstances. But without such defiance, this collection would not exist. Peter Sodann could not bear how books ended up in rubbish dumps with the currency union, because the trade no longer took them and the warehouse of the Leipzig commission and wholesale book trade were overcrowded. “You don’t even know how many were burned in power plants,” he says. What hit him particularly: how libraries suddenly sorted out.
Even when people bring him books, his heart bleeds. I can’t throw it away, he hears. But you give them away, he replies. He may have offended some of you with his grumpy manner. Instead of the lively conversation you might expect about books, a monosyllabic that you might perceive as a rejection. Are you welcome at all?
When, a few weeks after me, a photographer of the Friday – young, from the west and, as with all appointments since the corona pandemic, with a mask – when I go to Staucha, I find out later that there is a scandal. The photographer describes how he treated him from above from the very first moment: As a Westerner, he has no idea, none of this interests him anyway, he is probably one of those who had been vaccinated. Has he ever heard of Erich Kästner? All efforts to exchange ideas on an equal footing have failed, says the photographer. He has the impression that someone here was deliberately trying to humiliate him. You can’t really work together like that, so he just wants to see the photos from Staucha published in the newspaper without his name.
I then experience differently myself. I surrender to my amazement at what he has created. Every now and then small word skirmishes, I react with humor, so we get on the same wavelength.
He switches on the light and a multitude of different lamps from GDR production shine in the beams of the barn. Where did he get it from? “I collected it.” What an effort to insulate the old buildings, to panel, to turn them into real gems. The barn houses the huge book store and the second-hand bookshop with volumes that are for sale. You can research the holdings on the Internet and buy something if necessary. The “sanctuary”, however, is the unsaleable library in the former cowshed. Long, long rows of shelves: “You don’t have to go through to the end,” says Peter Sodann. “I will,” I reply. “You even have free space to sort something.”
Everything that was published in eastern Germany between May 9, 1945 and October 2, 1989 is collected, works by GDR authors, but not only those. The holdings are arranged according to publishers, of which there were no fewer than 260 in the GDR. There is the “Library of German Classics” from the Aufbau-Verlag Berlin, there the legendary Insel-Ribbons, as they were, true to the historical design, published in Leipzig before the Insel-Verlag in Frankfurt (Main) became the only one again . The range of international authors from the Volk & Welt publishing house, which, separated from the Treuhand and its publishing house, did not live very long after 1990, is impressive. You could spend hours, days here browsing. “And take a look, the Radebeul Indian Museum has had something printed too.” When Peter Sodann picks up the books, you can feel that they are, as it were, his children. He’s probably delighted with the shiny chandeliers above the shelves. “Bauhaus lamps from the Leipzig Congress Hall.” Without him, they would have ended up on the rubbish back then.
“Those who changed over overnight, profess to every state, these are the practitioners of the world; you could also call them rags ”- the Heine quote, written on wood, comes from the cellar of the house in Berlin, Alt-Marzahn 64, where the small bookstore was once. Proverbs everywhere: Words by Erich Kästner on green paper: “Remembrance is a mysterious power and transforms people. Anyone who forgets what was beautiful becomes angry. Anyone who forgets what was bad becomes stupid. ”Then his favorite poem hangs in his little office under the roof: Goethe’s Prometheus. “Who helped me against the titans’ arrogance / Who saved me from death. / From slavery? / Didn’t you complete everything yourself, / Holy glowing heart?”
What he has achieved with a glowing heart since 1990: set up a theater in a cinema in Halle, 21 crime scene– Followed as Kommissar Ehrlicher and starred in numerous other successful films, twice running for Die Linke without success. As an ambassador for the Central German Children’s Hospice Foundation, he is still committed to helping terminally ill children and their families. In Staucha he had set up a court theater and a café, which Corona dealt the fatal blow. And over all these efforts the years passed. What should become of his book collection? The Peter Sodann cooperative with almost 130 members was founded in order to shift responsibility onto many shoulders. Four permanent employees work by the hour at the minimum wage. Around 30 people volunteer in Staucha, at times; every now and then a book lover comes from Bavaria. Anyone who has seen the antiquarian bookshop and library can understand such enthusiasm.
There are around the same number of volunteers in Magdeburg, where last year the Peter Sodann book box was opened in a prominent place, a combination of reading café and antiquarian bookshop. After all, the collected books should come back to the readers. There are around 1,500 volumes on the shelves there, and many more are still in the warehouse. And there are always some added, because of course people also put things that have been sorted out in the book box.
Devaluation of things as a hallmark of our time, also due to the movement towards a digital society. “The true collector is the opposite of the consumer,” writes the philosopher Byung-Chul Han. The book saver Peter Sodann is a man of sorrows because he has to see the general disregard for what is valuable to him: the GDR heritage, which should be swept away on the rubbish heap of history after joining the FRG, and the books that he had from childhood were in a great good, especially since the working-class household in which he grew up had only a few of them. “Don’t you want to save this for your grandchildren,” he asks people his age when they bring him books. “Oh, they don’t read at all.” This answer hurts him.
Politicians do not react
Shops in Berlin, Leipzig, Halle – that would be nice and necessary, but where to get it from. The cooperative could not pay the rents. I want to know whether there might not be book lovers in the West too, for whom the preservation of this treasure is a heartfelt need. How do you find such patrons? “My whole life consists of begging,” says Peter Sodann quietly. Except for Rainer Haseloff (CDU), who, because he loves books, is said to have come personally to the opening of the book box in Magdeburg, none of the East German Prime Ministers seriously responded to requests for support.
Maybe it was too short-sighted, too narrow-minded, just to turn to her. Whatever one might think of the vanished state in the east, what has been collected here must be preserved. The GDR is no longer opposed to the FRG, but must be understood as a part of Germany. Peter Sodann’s library in Staucha is an all-German cultural asset.
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