Letters from East Germany: The Postwar Journey of Christoph Haufe

From a batch of letters he found in his father’s files, Larry Roth has put together a first-hand glimpse of what life was like for a young man in postwar East Germany. From the ruins of firebombed Dresden to the University of Leipzig, we follow Christoph Haufe (1925–1992) as he describes to his American benefactors what it takes to navigate the many changes he encounters from 1948 to 1959, when the letters end abruptly. We see Haufe, the son of a Lutheran pastor, through a failed romance, a life-changing alliance with Emil Fuchs, the noted philosopher and pacifist and the father of the atomic spy Klaus Fuchs. Roth was then able to track Haufe’s career after the letters end and f inds Haufe became successful in one sense—he was appointed chair of the Institute for New Testament Studies at the University of Leipzig. T hat success came at a cost, however, and with the help of the East German government, evidently in return for his work with the secret police or “Stasi.”Did Haufe, in the words of the Apostle Mark, “gain the whole world and lose his own soul?”Larry Roth earned a BA in history in 1970. He took a detour into corporate America and returned after many years to study history, his first love. He has done research into his family history shortly after the revolution in Romania and traveled in Eastern Europe, including Russia, where he stayed with families in Moscow and St. Petersburg. He has written books on simplicity and personal finance and is a senior program student at the University of Missouri-Kansas City