Walter Janka


Walter Janka was a German communist, political activist and writer who became a publisher.
Janka is notable for having spent time incarcerated as a political prisoner under the rule of the Nazis and later imprisoned under suspicion of counter-revolutionary activities by the Supreme Court of East Germany, in both cases serving most of his sentence at Bautzen prison.

Biography

Early years

Walter Janka was one of six children born to a Tool and die maker called Adalbert Janka. He attended junior school from 1920 till 1928. Between 1928 and 1932 he undertook a type setting apprenticeship.
In 1930 Walter Janka became an Organisation Leader, and then a Political leader of the Young Communists for the Chemnitz sub-region. After his elder brother, :de:Albert Janka|Albert, had been murdered by the Nazis, Walter himself was imprisoned by the Gestapo. He was remanded in custody in Chemnitz and in Freiberg before being convicted of preparing to commit high treason. After 1½ years of imprisonment in Bautzen prison, he spent a six-month term in Sachsenburg concentration camp. Finally, in 1935 he was deported to Czechoslovakia.

Civil war in Spain, internment in France, exile in Mexico

In 1936 Janka went to Spain to join the Thälmann Battalion and fight in the Spanish Civil War. In 1937 he became a Captain, and shortly after that, in the Karl Marx Division, he became the youngest Major, and then a Battalion Commander, in the Spanish People's Army. During the second part of 1938 he was badly wounded in the Battle of the Ebro.
After the Nationalists won the war, Janka fled to France, where between 1939 and 1941 he was interned in Camp Vernet, by now a concentration camp. He then fled again this time via Casablanca in November 1941, and ending up in exile in Mexico, where together with Paul Merker and Alexander Abusch he founded the "Free Germany" movement.
In Mexico he ran the publishing business "El Libro Libre", which also employed the exiled German writer Anna Seghers. In 1946 Janka took on the leadership of the Mexican section of the German Communist party.

Back in Germany

After the end of the Second World War Janka returned, in April 1947, to what was Soviet occupation zone, later to become German Democratic Republic in 1949. In 1947 he married his long-standing partner, a translator called Charlotte Scholz. The couples' two children, André and Yvonne, were born in 1948 and 1950.
After a brief period working with the leadership of the SED he joined the board of DEFA, the state-owned film studio. He was appointed managing director on 6 October 1948. He was replaced in the top job in 1949, but remained on the executive board till 1950.
In February 1950 he became Deputy Director of the Berlin-based Aufbau-Verlag, then the country's leading publishing house, moving up to the top job in 1953. During this time he planned a project to make a film based Thomas Mann's novel of dynastic decline, Buddenbrooks, which was to be a collaboration between East Germany's DEFA and West German film companies. Another ambition, in pursuit of which he met Charlie Chaplin near the latter's home at Vevey in May 1954, was a DEFA film with Charlie Chaplin as the leading star.

Trial and imprisonment

On 6 December 1956 Walter Janka was arrested on a charge of Counter-revolutionary conspiracy and held in the Berlin-Hohenschönhausen Remand Prison. By March 1957 he had become one of six men arrested and held in respect of the alleged conspiracy. Janka remained in the Berlin-Hohenschönhausen prison for more than half a year before being charged in the Supreme Court, on 26 July 1957, with "being directly behind, and participating in, a counter-revolutionary group", He was sentenced to a further five years in prison, with "enhanced solitary confinement".
The trial took place under conditions of tight security. The Justice Minister Hilde Benjamin herself appeared as a prosecution witness. No defense witnesses were permitted. State prosecutor, Ernst Melsheimer successfully threatened Janka's friend, Paul Merker who had himself only recently been "rehabilitated" in respect of an earlier matter, and who was now called upon to testify against Janka, with the words:
Wolfgang Harich had already been convicted, and sentenced to a ten-year jail term in March 1957, in respect of the same alleged conspiracy as Janka. The two had previously worked together at the Aufbau publishing house. Harich was brought into the July show-trial by :de:Walter Ziegler |Judge Walter Ziegler as a leading prosecution witness: his testimony now heavily implicated Janka. The two former friends would remain estranged from one another for the rest of their lives.
Janka served the first part of his sentence in Berlin-Hohenschönhausen prison where he had been held on remand, but in 1958 he was transferred to Bautzen prison where he fell seriously ill. He later wrote of this time how his mind wandered back to the Nazi years when he had been incarcerated in the same place. As the authorities refused to repair the heater in his cell, he recalled sitting here more than twenty years earlier, in the big prison complex on the edge of the city which the townsfolk nicknamed "the yellow misery", because all the buildings were built with the same cheap yellow stone.

Rehabilitation

On 23 December 1960 Janka was released from prison before completing the original term of his sentence, following international protests. An initial period of unemployment lasted till 1962, after which he was worked again in film with the DEFA film studio as a dramaturge based in Kleinmachnow on the southern fringe Berlin where he had had a home since the 1950s.
During the 1960s, working with other writers, Janke developed scenarios and screen-plays for the DEFA. He was heavily involved with the much acclaimed film, Goya or the Hard Way to Enlightenment . However, out of regard for his record of "political activism", recognition that came his way remained unpublicized.
In 1972 his official recognition as a :de:Verfolgter des Naziregimes|Victim of the Nazi regime was reinstated, and he was accepted back into the ruling SED. However, his autobiographical coloured scenes from his "Journey to Gandesa" about his experiences of the Battle of the Ebro during the Spanish Civil War remained unfilmed, and he terminated his contract with DEFA in 1973, having retired from it in 1972.
During the 1980s Janka wrote articles, traveled several times to West Germany and gave lectures about his experiences in the Spanish Civil War. Finally, barely more than six months before the fall of the Berlin wall, on 1 May 1989 he was awarded the Patriotic Order of Merit "in recognition of outstanding services to the creation and development of socialist society in the German Democratic Republic".

1989

As the end of the German Democratic Republic approached, Janka's memoir of his 1956 arrest and subsequent imprisonment was published, in October 1989, by Rowohlt Verlag under the wry title "Difficulties with the truth". Walter Janka suddenly found himself very popular. As German reunification appeared unstoppable, on 4 and 5 January 1990 the Supreme Court met in open session and annulled their 1957 judgement against him. At the same time a legal and journalistic dispute flared between Janka and Wolfgang Harich about the details of those 1957 show trials.
Janka's contribution to dramaturgy received recognition in the form of the Heinrich Greif Prize in 1990.
On 16 December 1989 Janka was a member of the presidium at the :de:Parteitag der SED|Special Party Congress of the SED held in Berlin at the Dynamo Sports Hall.
In 1990 he was a member of the "Council of Elders" of the new PDS, but he soon became disappointed with this, and quit.

Death

Walter Janka died in March 1994 in Kleinmachnow and is buried there in the Waldfriedhof.

Publications