Wieland Förster (born 12 February 1930) is a German sculptor, artist and writer. A recurring theme of his work is victimhood, reflecting his own youthful experiences during the incineration of Dresden in February 1945 and of the Soviet justice system between 1946 and 1950.
His life has been documented in unusual detail, not least by himself. By 2015 it was reported that the daily diary which he has kept since 1953 had reached its 150th unpublished "volume".
Life
Childhood and youth
Wieland Förster was born, the youngest of his parents' four children, in Laubegast, a suburb of Dresden. His father was employed in the transport and commercial sectors. In 1935 his father died as a result of wounds sustained during the First World War, leaving his mother to raise the children under conditions of financial hardship.She succeeded in distancing them from Nazi indoctrination. As a school boy, between 1936 and 1944, Wieland rejected the Nazi system and pressures to take part in government sponsored uniformed organisations. In 1944 he took an apprenticeship as a trainee technical draftsman at the Dresden municipal waterworks. Towards the end of 1944, still aged only 14, he was sent for four weeks to a Hitler Youth detention camp. On his release he volunteered for fire-watch duties in order to avoid further unwelcome interruptions to his training and education.
It is reported that he was such a quick learner as an apprentice technical draftsmen that after a year he was "promoted" to a preparatory year for a degree course at the Engineering Academy. He was also conscripted into the local branch of the newly launched German Home Guard ("Volksturm"), and it was as a member of the Home Guard that he experienced the English and American air attacks that destroyed the central districts of city one day after his fifteenth birthday, on the night of 13 February 1945. In the chaos following the attacks he was able to escape from the Home Guard, remaining in his home district till war ended, formally on 8 May 1945, after which Dresden and the surrounding region of central Germany were administered as the Soviet occupation. Technical draftsmanship was officially designated as women's work, and Wieland was required to undertake hands-on work ("als Rohrleger") in industrial engineering.
On 17 September 1946 he found himself taken in by the police and handed over to the NKVD after a neighbour denounced him on grounds of suspected possession of weapons. The background to the affair was an attempt to make the Förster family exchange their home for rented accommodation, after the German police had blocked an attempt by the Communist authorities to make them pay rent for living in their own home. Wieland was initially sentenced to ten years of forced labour in Siberia, but after three months of nightly interrogation, a Soviet military tribunal reduced the term to 7½ years. On 28 December 1946 he was interned at NKVD "Special Camp" IV, a concentration camp which the authorities had constructed next to the jail at Bautzen. As the camp commanders set about sorting out the prisoners fit for work to be transported to Siberia, a Soviet military doctor determined that Wieland Förster was unfit for work. He was therefore left behind in NKVD "Special Camp" IV. In the aftermath of war the authorities refused to discuss or even to acknowledge the continuing existence of concentration camps in the Soviet part of occupied Germany, but their all too physical presence never became increasingly hard to dispute. By 1950 Förster was in poor general health dangerously ill with Tuberculosis and on 21 January 1950, following a threatened investigation by the International Red Cross, he was the beneficiary of a "backdoor" release, emerging from the camp without identity papers and without any formal pardon or other explanation. Official acknowledgment that he had been a victim of Stalinist persecution followed in 1991.