By Oskar Rausch, Omar’s former cabin mate and sauna buddy
This is a work of satire and fiction.
Fifty years ago today, Wolf Biermann sang for seven thousand people in Cologne. Three days later the German Democratic Republic informed him, by way of the evening news, that he need not bother coming home.
My former cabin mate, a doctor in Michigan, heard about this on German public radio at six in the morning and telephoned me at once to announce that he, too, is an East German dissident.
I reminded him that he has never lived in East Germany, that East Germany no longer exists, and that he owns a dishwasher. He said the parallels were obvious. I said I would look into it, mostly because the sauna takes forty minutes to heat and I had nothing else on.
I regret to report that I looked into it.
The Plan
The DDR ran on the Plan. So many tons of steel, so many left shoes. A brigade that overfulfilled the Plan by four percent got a pennant and its picture in the paper.
My friend’s hospital runs on something called the RVU, which as far as I can tell is a ton of steel that has been to business school. A doctor who sees thirty patients in a day has overfulfilled. A doctor who spends forty minutes with one patient because she is dying has, for planning purposes, produced a single left shoe.
The File
The Stasi kept forty thousand pages on Biermann. To do this it employed some ninety thousand people full time, plus a small nation of informants who sat in parked cars writing down when he ate.
My friend’s file is longer, and he wrote it himself. Every click is timestamped. The system knows he opened a chart at 11:47 at night, and it has a name for this, which is “pajama time,” and it sends his supervisor a graph of it.
Consider what Erich Mielke would have given for this. A surveillance state in which the subject types up his own dossier, at home, unpaid, and then apologizes for being behind on it.
The Informants
In the DDR your neighbor reported on you. In American medicine it is the patient, and they have improved the form. On a scale of one to five, how likely are you to recommend this dissident to friends and family?
There is also an anonymous compliance hotline. I asked my friend what it was for. He said it was for reporting concerns. I asked whose. He changed the subject.
The Vocabulary
The Stasi had a term for people like Biermann: feindlich-negative Elemente, hostile-negative elements. I had assumed no bureaucracy would ever top it. Then my friend told me about the “disruptive physician,” who is “not a team player,” and about whom leadership has “concerns regarding wellness.”
The DDR sent its difficult people to the brown-coal mines. The hospital sends them a forty-minute online module on resilience, due Friday. I am not certain which I would choose. The coal, at least, did not end with a quiz.
The Wall
“Nobody has any intention of building a wall,” said Walter Ulbricht in June of 1961, two months before building a wall.
My friend’s colleagues have a wall. It is called a non-compete, it has a radius of thirty miles, and it stands for two years. Nobody is shot crossing it. You are simply sued, slowly, which several East Germans I consulted described as “also not nothing.”
Human Resources, I am told, has its own version of the Ulbricht line. It goes: “Nobody has any intention of restructuring your department.”
The Petition
An unhappy East German could file an Eingabe, a formal petition, and by law the authorities had to reply within four weeks. People filed them by the hundred thousand. The apartment had no heat, the roof had left, the Trabant ordered in 1974 was now expected in 1988. The reply thanked the citizen for his continued confidence in socialism.
My friend, in his capacity as a patient, has filed the American equivalent. The reply said his feedback was important and that the organization cares.
I have now read a good deal of both genres. The East German replies are better. They were written by a person, and you can tell, because the person is clearly afraid.
Wandlitz
The leaders of the Workers’ and Peasants’ State lived in a walled forest settlement at Wandlitz, where there were bananas. The leaders of the health system work on a floor that my friend’s badge does not open, where there is, he says, the good coffee. He has seen it once. Someone was carrying it into an elevator.
The Expulsion
Doctors are not expatriated. That would be barbaric. Their contracts are “not renewed,” ideally while they are at a conference, so that they find out when the badge stops working at the parking gate.
The announcement is not read on the evening news. It arrives as an email to all staff: Dr. So-and-so is pursuing other opportunities. We thank him for his years of service and wish him well. In Stasi German this was called a Maßnahme, a measure. In English it is called a transition.
Frau Petzold
Pleased with my research, I presented it at the sauna to Frau Petzold, who is eighty-one and from Karl-Marx-Stadt, a city that had the decency to change its name back.
She listened to all of it. Then she asked whether my friend had been to prison.
He had not.
She asked whether his writings were banned.
I said he has a blog, and that he posts on it daily, sometimes twice.
“And no one stops him?”
“No one has managed to.”
“Then he is not a dissident,” said Frau Petzold. “He is a columnist.”
She ladled water on the stones and let me sit with that.
“But I will tell you one thing,” she said. “I waited fourteen years for a car and six for a telephone. The doctor, I saw on Tuesday. Your friend’s country has done what Honecker only dreamed of. You have the queues of socialism at the prices of capitalism.”
I called my friend to deliver the verdict. He took it well. He said Biermann had it easy in one respect: the Politburo banned him, and a ban is the best publicity there is. The tragedy of the American doctor is that nobody will ban him. He has to find his readers the hard way, like the rest of us.
Then he said he had to go. He had eleven charts to close before midnight.
The file, he explained, does not write itself. It is the one thing the Stasi got wrong.
Sources and credit. This piece was prompted by “Liedermacher Wolf Biermann – Wie seine Ausbürgerung die DDR erschütterte,” written by Joachim Meißner for Das Wissen on SWR Kultur (broadcast 13 November 2026; editor Lukas Meyer-Blankenburg, director Günter Maurer). The Biermann history here, including the Cologne concert, the Stasi files and the expulsion, comes from that programme. The title borrows from Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s film Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others, 2006). Walter Ulbricht’s remark about the wall is from his press conference of 15 June 1961. Frau Petzold, and everything else, is invented.
This work. “The Lives of Others’ Charts” is an original satire of omarmetwally.blog. © 2026 Omar Nabil Metwally, MD. All rights reserved. It is independent of SWR and of the programme’s makers, who did not review or endorse it, and no part of their broadcast or manuscript is reproduced here.