Lendle

Tangled in Gray is the story of a young man who lived the life of an outsider in communist East Germany. The reason: he wasn't white.
The protagonist, Andre Schneider, was born in Berlin-Mitte just before the construction of the wall in 1961. The mother was German; the father was an African who trained under the program "socialist fraternal help" in East Germany. The little boy never got to know him because the parents' relationship didn't last long. Later, the mother married a German who adopted Andre and gave him his last name Baganz.
When the boy was five, the family, who had grown in the meantime with the birth of two more sons, moved to a village in the county of Eisenhüttenstadt. Biracial Andre grew up in an ordinary East German family experiencing absolutely no discrimination in his rural community. This changed when he left his safe haven.
Starting an apprenticeship in the county capital, Andre entered a whole new world: people didn't miss a chance to let him know that he was not one of them. Insults like Nigger and Kanake became daily fare as well as assaults. The fit young man, however, fought back taking advantage of his physical superiority. Getting into trouble with the police came with the territory.
At the age of seventeen, Andre was sentenced to youth custody for battery and obstructing an officer in the performance of his duties. When he was released from juvenile prison after nine months, his decision was written in stone: he couldn't live in East Germany and would get out of there no matter what.
Since his application to leave the country wasn't processed, he tried to leave illegally. Two attempts to escape failed and he managed to talk his way out of it both times, but getting arrested at the third attempt, he could no longer make excuses and was remanded in custody.
His overwhelming desire to escape from oppressive East Germany was so strong that he teamed up with three like-minded contemporaries in the holding center. The four of them broke out, took two guards hostage and with them as leverage tried to obtain their exit to West Berlin. One policeman was shot dead and another one badly injured during the course of the jailbreak. The four youngsters, however, didn't make it out of town. They were busted by a SWAT in a high-rise in the center of Frankfurt/Oder after they entrenched themselves there for several hours.
The reprisal of the communist state was draconian. The four twenty-year-olds were sentenced in speedy trials, which were closed to the public: the one who had shot the policeman escaped the death penalty by the skin of his teeth. Andre was considered the ringleader and also got a life sentence.
Right after the passing of the sentence, he was taken to the notorious Stasi prison Bautzen II and put into isolation and solitary confinement for five years. In his second year in Bautzen II, he received regular visits from two Stasi agents. They had unlimited access to the prison and among other things attempted to poison him systematically. After the last attempt, Andre almost died. He spent two months in a prison hospital and suffered for years from the after-effects.
Andre Baganz was released in May 1991–one and a half years after the Turnaround–one day before his 30th birthday. His life sentence lasted nine years and nine months.
This story is an honest first-hand account on how human rights were violated in East Germany or interpreted to suit the communist angle. But this chapter is history. More interesting in relation to the present is the description of xenophobia in East German society. It was deeply ingrained, and the communists who never tired of declaring that they were against anti-foreignism didn't take honest and effective measures to solve this problem. It's safe to say that present day right-wing-extremism in the Länder on the soil of former East Germany can be attributed to the dishonest policy of forty years of Soviet style communism.