Plauen, 1990/1992/1994 From Schoolmarm to Revolutionary: Annaliese Saupe, Old “New Teacher” and Local Heroine

“Oma der Revolution,” a neighborhood child calls her. “Grandmother of the Revolution.” And that she is: a revolutionary in love with the past, a revolutionary in love with a bygone Germany. When I first met Annaliese Saupe in 1987, I had no idea that she had been such a hell-raiser: blacklisted by the Nazis, vocal critic of SED educational policies, fired for insubordination by SED school authorities. Nor could I have guessed what would lay ahead for her only two years in the future, when she would be lionized by neighbors for her derring-do against the SED during the Revolution of the Candles. With her hair coiled into a huge white bun on top of her head, her large brown eyes and quick smile, her slight limp and walking cane, her encyclopedic knowledge of grocery prices past and present, her antiquarian’s passion for the history of her native region, her enduring love affair with Goethe and Schiller: Annaliese Saupe seems much like a Hausfrau and history schoolmarm—which is also just what she has been. I met Frau Saupe in 1987 at a Goethe Institute talk near Freiburg, where she gave a presentation on Goethe’s daily routine in Weimar. Struck by Frau Saupe’s vibrance and energy, I struck up an acquaintance with her. Already 75 years old, she was a dynamo who could easily pass for a woman in her early 60s. She invited me to visit her in her hometown of Plauen, a small Saxony city of 85,000 in the old German region of Vogtland. But the paperwork for my tourist visa to East Germany dragged on beyond my six-week visit in West Germany, and I returned to the United States disappointed. Nonetheless, we wrote each other, and in early December 1990, during the week of the first free elections in eastern Germany since 1933—in which Frau Saupe voted, now as then, for the Social Democrats—I finally had an opportunity to visit Plauen. “Please don’t leave Germany this time without coming to see me!” she had written me.