Trude Richter

Trude Richter (born Erna Johanna Marie Barnick in Magdeburg 19 November 1899 – died Leipzig 4 January 1989 ) was a writer, literary scholar and teacher who became a political activist. She spent many years detained in labour camps in the Soviet Union, but she remained a committed Communist throughout her life.

She received the name by which she is known, Trude Richter, neither by birth or marriage. The name Trude Richter was conferred on her, originally as a cover name, in January 1931 when she joined the Association of Proletarian-Revolutionary Authors ("Bund Proletarisch-Revolutionärer Schriftsteller"), an organisation with close connections to the German Communist Party, of which Richter was also a member. and a wide-ranging German studies course that included history of art. In fact, she had been expelled from the Communist Party in January 1937, a couple of months after her initial detention. and then in the "Teka" "Ispravitel'no-trudovoj" Dalstroy Rehabilitation Camp. Richter's partner, Hans Günther, also found himself taken to the Kolyma region, but died from Typhus on 10 November 1938 in a transit camp at Vladivostok. Trude Richter: Some published works Das Volksbuch von Barbarossa und Geschichten von Kaiser Friedrich dem Anderen, Jena 1925 Kaiser Friedrich Barbarossa in der Geschichte, Jena 1926 Die bildende Kunst im Rahmen der Deutschkunde, Berlin 1927 Gerhart Hauptmanns Erzähltechnik, Bamberg ohne Jahresangabe Literaturgeschichtliches Lesebuch, Charkow 1934 Über den sozialistischen Realismus, Referentenmaterial, Sektion Kunst und Literatur, 1958 Das Glück des Bitteren, Halle (Saale) 1969 Die Plakette, Halle (Saale) 1972 Totgesagt, Gesamtausgabe, 1990 (postum) Trude Richter was released from her detention on 14 September 1946 but she would remain in the eastern part of the Soviet Union till 1953. Between 1946 and 1949 she was employed as a cloakroom attendant at the Gorki Theatre in Magadan where she was also able to help out with the stage sets and in the orchestra.

On 23 August 1949 she was rearrested, her party membership ban was again invoked, and she was deported to Ust-Omchug which was the Gulag administrative centre for the Tenka rehabilitation camps. Here she was assigned to the mining administration division. It was around this time that Trude Richter attempted to hang herself but survived because the rope snapped. Between 1950 and 1953 she was given work playing the piano in the culture club and taught foreign languages as part of an adult education programme. In 1953 she was released from Ust-Omchug. She was able to move back to Magadan where she returned to work at the theatre. Her formal political rehabilitation by the Soviet Supreme Court was completed in 1956/57 after the well-regarded German writers Anna Seghers and Johannes Becher had intervened on her behalf. It was also with the help of Ann Seghers that she was permitted to leave Magadan and, after an absence of more than twenty years, return to what had been central Germany and had by now become the German Democratic Republic where she started a new life in the south of the new country, in Leipzig.

Between 1957 and 1966 she taught at the city's Johannes R. Becher Institute for Literature (as it was known at that time). Here she would later be remembered as a mentor for a younger generation of writers including Hans Weber (1937–1987) and Horst Salomon (1929–1972). She published contributions to the socialist literary canon on her own and had already begun, in the 1960s, to write down her experiences in the Soviet prison camps. In 1972 she published the first volume of her memoirs under the title "The Badge" ("Die Plakette"). However, publication of her complete memoirs, including her periods in detention, was not initially permitted in East Germany. Her full autobiography appeared posthumously under the title "Said to be dead" ("Totgesagt") in 1990.

In 1987 Trude Richter became a member of the East German Writers' Association.