Ingeborg Rapoport was an internationally recognized Pediatrician practicing at the famous Charité Hospital in Berlin, German Democratic Republic. She was born in 1912 and died in 2017. Because she had a Jewish mother, her finished doctoral dissertation in medicine was rejected by the University of Hamburg. At age 102, she became the oldest recipient of a doctoral degree at the same university. She was already more than 80 years old when she decided to write an autobiography in the form of a long report to an unborn child, Joshua. The three lives referred to in the title cover the years 1912 to her emigration to the USA in 1938, her life in the USA from 1938 to 1950, and her return to Europe due to persecution during the McCarthy era. She and her husband, Sam (Mitja) Rapoport, a world-renowned Biochemist, were life-long Communists.

            They settled in the German Democratic Republic, becoming members of the privileged elite there. The demise of that country thus hit her hard. She grapples with the dissonant assessments between West German and East German viewpoints about that former state. It prompts her to ask, “War ich ein ‘Täter’?”, meaning whether she had been part of the repressive state apparatus governing Communist Germany. She is particularly scathing of former Lutheran pastor Joachim Gauck, a civil rights activist in the GDR, who later became the Federal Republic’s president (2012-2017). Rapoport calls him the “Grand Inquisitor of the GDR.” She describes a meeting at the Charité where Gauck was the keynote speaker. According to her, he spoke full of hatred about the renewal of the hospital, demanding that all its professorial staff had to be removed, because they had gained their positions based on the promotion by the Communist Party, thereby preventing better qualified people to assume those positions (p. 351). Calling him a “Grand Inquisitor” might stem from the fact that he also used to be the head of the West German office hunting down members of the Stasi, the GDR’s much-hated secret police.

            Rapoport ends her account with a section headlined “Confession to Nostalgia” (p. 402). In leading to this section, she writes, “A revolution without victims surely is unrealistic, and the creation of a new order necessarily includes injustice. … History will preserve the true and pure seeds of our ideas, and sometime in the future they will germinate again” (p. 401). The final section, then, starts with, “It is like this, my Joshua, I confess to a much reviled and despised nostalgia, to a painful feeling about the perished GDR, which had just begun to become my third home” (p. 402).

            Rapoport’s insistence on the superior value of the GDR’s socio-political system, compared to the Federal Republic’s democracy, can be irritating. However, she does try to reflect on her views. In any case, this autobiography spanning the years 1912 to 1997 and three countries, reflecting the course of time from the pre-Nazi period, through McCarthy’s Communist paranoia in the USA, to her life in the German Democratic Republic, and finally in the Federal Republic of Germany is a valuable personal reflection of the course of (not only) German history in the twentieth century.

MHN

Nonthaburi/Thailand

8 December 2023