WELCOME TO MY WEBSITE

During a Christmas visit to my mother in December 1979, I happened to find one of her diaries with entries about her escape from Breslau, the early death of her mother, her first son and her fiancé, the separation from her siblings and the many strokes of fate in the Soviet occupation zone. After the first trusting conversations about the loss of her Silesian homeland and the breaking of the silence of the generation of refugees, rape victims and displaced persons, I made a decision that would change my life forever.

In July 2021, I had to flee my house in Massaca and spent a year in hiding in Mozambique – several months of which were spent in a village without electricity or running water. When it got too hot at night in the small round hut without windows, I slept outside without a mosquito net. Separated from my children and grandchildren for four years, I will now report for the first time on my escape from the country where I have lived since the end of 1990 and on the reasons for exchanging my house with air conditioning, a swimming pool and a tropical garden with bananas, mangoes and passion fruit for a time of deprivation in the wilderness.

Nothing has had such a profound impact on my life since the fall of the Berlin Wall as the deportation and failed reintegration of former contract workers from Mozambique. I will now document my experiences, starting with the only advice centre for foreigners in the GDR, which I ran, the 'occupation' of my flat and the association's office in Leipzig Connewitz by the extreme left-wing Antifa, the founding of our returnee association ADECOMA in Mozambique, the 'disappearance' of the 300 million US dollars promised by Germany to finance reintegration programmes and small loans for business start-ups, the Chekist methods of subversion and the life-threatening frontal attack against me and the safety of my children and grandchildren.

From the mid-1990s onwards, despite surveillance by the SISE state security service and restrictive measures imposed by the cultural authorities, I invested in the first private music studio in Mozambique. This created a censorship-free space for artists critical of the government, such as Azagaia, Salimo Muhamed and Jeremias Nguenha. Until its state-ordered closure in 2005, the Mozambique Recording studio produced more than 100 albums for the national music market and the only albums produced in Mozambique for international record companies. I organised almost 200 concert appearances worldwide for the groups Mabulu and Eyuphuro, including at renowned festivals such as the Montreux Jazz Festival, Glastonbury, Musiques Métissses, Afro-Pfingsten, Womad, Sfinks, Festival Músicas do Mundo Sines, Africa Oyé Liverpool and the Perth Festival Australia.