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Heinrich George | Helmut Kind | Karl Heinrich | Ewald Ernst | Kurt Müller | Alfred Weiland | Arno Wend | Helmut Brandt | Georg Dertinger | Max Fechner | Karl Wilhelm Fricke | Wolfgang Harich | Walter Janka | Walter Linse | Paul Merker | Sigrid Paul | Rudolf Bahro | Heinz Brandt | Jürgen Fuchs | Gerulf Pannach | Michael Sallmann | Hans-Joachim Helwig-Wilson | Bärbel Bohley | Freya Klier | Stephan Krawczyk | Vera Lengsfeld | Ulrike Poppe
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 Walter Janka, is one of the most prominent reformist intellectuals, who demanded the democratization of the GDR after the Twentieth Party Congress in Moscow (February 1956). Born in 1914 in Chemnitz, he first learned the trade of typesetter. After the Nazis seized power in 1933, he was detained at the Bautzen prison and concentration camp in Sachsenhausen because of his membership in the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). After his expulsion from Germany, he did illegal work in East Prussia (1935/36) and participated in the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War in 1936-39. From 1939-41 he was interned in France, from where he finally fled with the Communist Party functionary Paul Merker to Mexico. There he co-founded the movement and the magazine "Free Germany". Janka returned to Germany in 1947, where he was an employee at the party headquarters of the Socialist Unity Party (SED) from 1948-50 and Director General of the ((East)) German Film AG (DEFA). In 1951 he joined the Aufbau Verlag and became the director there in1952. In this position he had contact with leading German intellectuals like Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht and Anna Seghers. As part of the "thaw" in the Soviet Union, Janka was involved in the so-called “Sunday Circle” involving discussions about a fundamental reform of socialism in the GDR. At the end of 1956, he was arrested by the Ministry for State Security (Stasi) and was taken to the so-called U-boat in Berlin-Hohenschönhausen. He was interrogated there for over half a year. He was finally condemned to five years in prison by the Supreme Court of the GDR in the summer of 1957 for "organizing a counterrevolutionary group,". He was then transferred to the prison Bautzen II, where he became seriously ill. International protests in 1960 brought about his early release. After two years of unemployment, he worked as the artistic director at the DEFA studios from 1962 to1972. Despite his readmission to the SED, he was still observed by the Stasi. In October 1989 he published parts of his memoirs in the West Germany. A public reading in East Berlin was the signal for the peaceful revolution in East Germany. Shortly thereafter, Janka was rehabilitated. In 1990 he was a member of the Council of Elders (“Rat der Alten”) of the PDS party, which he soon left disappointedly. Janka died in Kleinmachnow near Berlin in 1994. |
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