From the Rosary to the Nightingale: Memory as Published and Unpublished Autobiography

Abstract

In September 1968, in a very long letter to Josef Stadler, her colleague at the League for Friendship Among the Peoples, Kuckhoff expressed her frustration at the continued lack of appropriate remembrance of the ‘Red Orchestra’. She began the letter by discussing the exhibition she had just organized and went on to the texts by Martini, von Schramm, Höhne and Perrault. She pointed to the very high circulation figures of Perrault’s book and its impending translation by Rowohlt,¹ which she compared to the lack of work done in the GDR. She wrote: ‘Man überlasst dieses “heisse Eisen” den Feinden, die daraus ihre Waffen schmieden.’ [The ‘hot irons’ are being left for the enemies to make their weapons out of them.] With reference to the information gathering activities of the IML and MfS, she continued:

Ich habe mich sehr bemüht, die gültige Darstellung in Bewegung zu bringen. Dazu gehört zuerst ein Studium der Fakten. Ich weiss, dass jetzt viele befragt wurden — das was ich weiss hat in richtiger Weise noch niemand erfragt. Und ich kann nicht Halbwahrheiten niederlegen. Ich kann die Erfahrungen nicht in das Prokrustesbett vorgefasster historischer Denkschemen einpressen lassen.

I have really tried to set in motion a proper representation. To do so, one must first study the facts. I know that a lot of people have now been questioned, but no one has really yet asked properly about what I know.