ANTI-CYCLICAL THINKING - WHEN A DECISION CHANGES EVERYTHING
A true story about freedom, the path into a GDR prison and the power of the Stasi
3. Volume of the trilogy “DON’T ASK FOR SUGAR“
The darkest chapter of this autobiographical travel story.
No more adventure.
No youthful recklessness.
Only a decision with consequences.
For a year, Christoph has been living in West Berlin. Early shifts, late shifts and overtime at a CNC lathe. He saves everything he can for one goal: to see Suzanne again in New Zealand.
It is still not enough.
Meanwhile, his brother Ralf earns in a single smuggling run from India what others work a year for. Then, during a lunch break, a colleague makes a casual remark: fly from East Berlin. They don’t check for drugs there. After all, the East Germans want to poison the West.
An absurd idea.
Unfortunately, not absurd enough.
Christoph rents out his flat, buys a ticket from East Berlin to Delhi and eventually travels with a small group through Nepal and into the Himalayas. In a remote mountain village, they find the farmer they have been looking for and buy pure hash oil.
On the return journey, with home almost within reach, the plan ends at East Berlin Airport.
Arrest. Interrogation. Pre-trial detention in the Keibelstraße police prison.
After sentencing, Christoph is transferred to Rummelsburg, a GDR labour prison with its own hierarchy, rules and language. Hunger, violence, humiliation and constant vigilance become part of everyday life.
Then the Stasi offers him a way to make things easier.
Christoph refuses.
The system has ways of expressing disappointment.
The first consequence is the Tiger Cage: weeks of isolation, less food, thinner clothing, concrete, cold and almost nothing to occupy the mind. Afterwards, Christoph is transferred to another cell block and eventually assigned to one of the most dangerous jobs in the prison: fitting asbestos lids at a workbench where the air itself seems to consist of dust.
He refuses again. Back to isolation.
This time, however, something unexpected happens. After two weeks, the cell door opens. Christoph is moved to a brighter cell, where another prisoner casually gives him a word he has hardly dared to imagine:
Amnesty.
In the so-called Grotewohl prisoner transport, Christoph is moved west with other prisoners. Almost a year after his arrest, on Friday the 13th, he is finally handed over to West German authorities.
Freedom.
Although freedom looks rather different after a year behind bars.
ANTI-CYCLICAL THINKING is the third part of DON’T ASK FOR SUGAR and tells the true story of a decision that begins with longing, crosses India and the Himalayas and ends inside the machinery of an East German prison. It is about friendship and freedom, guilt and consequences, forced labour, isolation and the stubborn refusal to surrender completely – told with self-irony and black humour. The kind that sometimes makes you laugh when, strictly speaking, there has long been nothing left to laugh about.
Bernhard Christoph Lichtinger writes from lived experience – from setbacks, detours, new beginnings and encounters that never needed to be invented. His texts begin where real life leaves its mark.
AT THE END OF THE BOOK, YOU WILL FIND CORRESPONDING PHOTOS
If you are interested in my novels, you can find the links to the titles here.
ALMOST NORMAL – 16 SHORT STORIES
NOTHING REMAINS AS IT IS – VOLUME 2