Ralph Hänel tells some unique, strange and funny short stories about childhood and youth in East Germany. 

We talk about the experiences of his parents in the closing stages of World War 2, his schooling, and how he became a DJ, winning a trip to the Soviet Union.

Ralph is a great raconteur with virtually endless stories about his life in East Germany. Hear how he saw Fidel Castro, met the first German astronaut in space and had a girlfriend, whose father was in the people’s police or was it the Stasi...?

Ralph had a passion for martial arts, but in East Germany that wasn’t easy to pursue. Listen as Ralph tells how he found secret clubs and smuggled books into the country. 

However, his interest in martial arts brought him under suspicion and don’t miss subsequent episodes where Ralph’s life takes a turn for the worst when he is arrested by the Stasi and sentenced to 3 and half years in prison.

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I am delighted to welcome Ralph to our Cold War conversation…

There’s further information on this episode in our episode notes which can also be found here. https://coldwarconversations.com/episode177/ 

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And the father from my girlfriend, he just pulled this ID out of his jacket, said, I'm on the job.

And then with screeching tires, we drove up to the train station.

If you're new here, you've come to the right place to listen to first hand Cold War history accounts.

Do make sure you subscribe in your podcast app so that you don't miss out on future episodes.

Ralph Hainal tells some unique, strange and funny short stories about childhood and youth in East Germany.

We talk about the experiences of his parents in the closing stages of World War II, his schooling and how he became a DJ winning a trip to the Soviet Union.

Ralph is a great raconteur with virtually endless stories about his life in East Germany.

Hear how he saw Fidel Castro, met the first German astronaut in space and had a girlfriend whose father was in the people's police.

Ralph had a passion for martial arts but in East Germany that wasn't easy to pursue.

Listen as Ralph tells us how he found secret clubs and smuggled books into the country.

However, his interest in martial arts brought him under suspicion and don't miss subsequent episodes where Ralph's life takes a turn for the worst when he's arrested by the Stasi and sentenced to 3 and a half years in prison.

Now I could really use your support to help me to continue producing these episodes.

A simple monthly donation via Patreon and you will get the sought-after Cold War Conversations drinks coaster as a thank you and bask in the warm glow of knowing you are helping to preserve Cold War history.

Listen to 1 of our Patreons tell you why they donated to the podcast.

I'm Tim from Cambridge, Massachusetts, and I support the Cold War Conversations podcast financially because of the great research and the quality of the storytelling.

So back to today's episode, I'm delighted to welcome Ralf to our Cold War Conversation.

It was about 2 years after I was born that my parents, I guess for a better job at the time, moved from Dresden to Rostock, so directly at the Baltic Sea.

That, yeah, this is always so, there are 2 sides to it in a way.

I see it now online, especially on Facebook, so many groups where many East Germans who are, let's say, between 50 and 60, right?

We had a great childhood and it wasn't all bad and we didn't have the many things, the people out of a job and companies shutting down and people living on the streets.

We didn't have any of this which is true.

I had every summer during school years, I was at least 3 to 4 weeks in a vacation camp.

And my parents for 3 to 4 weeks vacation, me getting 3 meals a day, all the activities.

Where people say what today what for a day?

I said no no no it cost between 10 and 20 bucks so for 3 or 4 weeks because most was all supported by the government so for children it was amazing.

Looking back today what I also heard about my great-grandparents, I have to say, dictatorships always take care of their children, because those are the future workers, those are the future soldiers.

So when my parents said, say hi to this uncle, I had my hands behind my back looking down.

I could barely look somebody else in the eyes, let alone tell some stories.

So I thought at 1 point which guy would not want to be a DJ to put on the music, to have all the girls in front of the stage look up to you.

So felt almost like an opera singer with all the me-mo-ma, all the different exercises.

We had to produce a concept for a disco for an evening topic and how to talk on the microphone in between and so I became the first junior disc jockey with a friend at the time and we were so good we even became a prize from the youth organization and guess where we went in 1980 into the Soviet Union.

4 weeks all expenses paid trip from the youth organization And for the first time in the Soviet Union, as East Germans, we were the kings.

Otherwise, when I went as a kid with my parents to Czechoslovakia or Poland, we were always asked on the street, speaking German, you want to exchange money?

But in the Soviet Union, we were, for the first time, the kings.

And then I had kind of like a cowboy hat, cool sunglasses.

And so they tried to buy the jeans of our behinds.

They tried to buy the sunglasses they had.

I was in, back then it was still Leningrad in St.

I was doing a disco during the whole evening.

Oh my gosh, we had so many fans there in front of us at the stage.

It was, this is how the big bands must feel how it is.

In all the travels that I did during the East German times, so pre-fall of the Berlin Wall, I must say that East Germany had the highest standard of living.

There were other countries like then Czechoslovakia, they were allowed, I think every 5, 6 or 7 years, they were allowed to travel to Austria and things like this.

This was of course for the majority of East Germans impossible.

So some of them lived a little bit more free, but East Germany had after all, due to the German-German history, the highest standard of living.

Especially in the Soviet Union, I felt it the most.

We had a wonderful time in Riga and in Leningrad.

There at the time, We saw the Palace of the Tsar, we were in the Hermitage, this huge world wide known museum.

It was amazing but when it comes to the everyday things, it was in East Germany quite a little bit better, even though we had to wait a long time for a car or similar things.

I mean, you presumably were taught about Marxism, Leninism and exciting subjects like that.

Of course, a teacher, those were the red light lessons as we called them, that were supposed to turn you red communist, where the teacher was telling us about how amazing communism is, socialism already and communism is going to be better.

And we then always said, okay, so if this is the inferior lawfully dying capitalism on the other side, How come they can buy everything and we have to get into line?

Yes, this is because the capitalists have drained our country until we build the wall to protect us from the human traders that have pulled all the doctors and so on into the West.

Since then we had to build up our country and it is the future when money doesn't exist anymore, when we can live a life free of anybody who owns factories and tells us that we get a minimum wage and So it was always the future and we thought, okay, now it's 1975, 1976 and so on.

And it was always said, yes, it's just around the corner.

And then where of course many who due to the German history got from relatives out of the West.

Easter, Christmas, birthdays, the big packages with all this colorful stuff and the nice smell of coffee from the West, the perfumes, the deodorant, the chocolate was different.

We thought, how come the chocolate you buy in the West costs there 95 cent and we had a store, it was called Daily Card, where you get all the delicate things.

How come a chocolate bar from Austria or West Germany costs here 10 marks and over there it costs 95 fennig?

So there's something out of whack, A can of pineapple for New Year's Eve.

Everybody wanted to have it nice in those days in the 70s.

They put a little bit pineapple into the glass of champagne at New Year's Eve.

So 1 can of slices of pineapple was 18 marks, and in the West it was 80 cents, 18 pfennig, so 80.

So it was so completely out of whack that we were always questioning it, but you began to have 2 phases.

In school days, even in kindergarten, sometimes the really the convinced teachers that were read, as we said, They are sometimes the children.

When your parents watch TV in the evening, how does this clock on TV when the news come look like?

Does it have dots or does it have little lines?

And then they knew if the parents watched Western TV or Eastern TV.

But the majority that I know too, later it was said that it was an organized mass, basically travel in the evening into the West.

Nobody, or at least people who I knew, watched the Eastern movies or the Eastern news in the evening because if when you heard already those phrases, the General Secretary Erich Honecker, head of this and head of this and head of that and you think, oh my gosh, get on with it, say what you want.

And every company was always fulfilling their plan, 110%, 120%.

How come every company is over-fulfilling their plan but you can't buy anything in the store?

So you very early were sometimes taught, sometimes you grew up into it to have 2 faces.

The 1 that when there was a meeting at work or before that when at the school, who will be victorious?

Yes, our communist bloc will be victorious and 1 day everybody on earth will speak Russian.

And then the reality when you were trading matchbox cars with somebody else, Mickey Mouse, the latest issues that somebody, grandma had smuggled it under her blouse on the back into the East because you couldn't smuggle magazines or you couldn't send magazines like this into it.

Or the latest tape from somebody who was big in the 70s, a lot of British groups too.

In East Berlin there was even a black market for records.

Since me being a junior DJ as a teenager already, I went always to East Berlin, had gotten from my grandma quite a bit of money and she said, yeah, buy yourself a few new records.

So you went to East Berlin and Alexander Place where the big TV tower is still towering the city.

So there were certain doors of those buildings and then there were people standing there with a huge bag over the shoulders.

So you came close, looked left, looked right.

And then at the time Pink Floyd, Sweet, Genesis, whatever it was, and then they looked left and right.

And then you went back into the parking lot or into a house, into a hallway, and then you looked into the back and I can still feel my fingers shaking today.

There's the sticky fingers from the Rolling Stones original edition with the zipper on it.

And then you took the train home and had this Rolling Stones record and everybody, can I borrow it and put it on cassette?

Or we still had reel-to-reel tape recorders and so can I make a copy?

Yeah I have this latest double album from Kiss or so and then wow, so those were huge events.

Did you have those 2 personalities with different sets of friends?

Were you friends with people whose parents were in the party as well?

I just since I was long gone from Germany just in the past couple of years I looked at some of the old places.

I had a girlfriend at 1 point and her father was in the crime squad.

He once had showed me in his basement, just imagine East Germany in America or so wouldn't be a big deal, but when East Germany showed me he had a safe in his basement with semi-automatic weapons in there so I'm still not sure until this day if it was really the crime squad he was in or not and he had TV on and on the weekends when I came, so I was 16.

So he moved, removed a few books in the living room, put his arm behind and then you could hear a switch and suddenly there were the 3 programs from West Germany.

I said, wow, you have better picture than I have in my apartment.

So, but the moment the doorbell rang, there was a run into the living room books out switch.

And if somebody would have checked, there would have nothing but East German 1 and East German 2.

So I asked him then, so how do you receive the programs?

He said, okay, there is a line going out of my, not out of my window, out of somebody else's window, past the next apartment building and at the very next apartment their building there goes to the roof and to an antenna that cannot be traced back to him.

So that somebody from his work who could have checked him.

This is not what I experienced, I just heard it from others.

In the 1960s, there were still troops, especially after the wall was built, troops from the youth organization that went onto the roofs and broke the antennas that were designed to receive West German television so that you are not exposed to the lies of the enemy.

And all that we watched with my girlfriend at the time was Sunday morning Captain Future was back then the cartoon that was the thing.

He must have had at least the ID from the crime squad because I was already in job education in East Berlin.

So and then Sunday evening I had to make it in time to the train station to get the train back to East Berlin to next morning go to the job school or to work.

And 1 day, 1 Sunday evening, I had cut it so short and he said just wait I'll drive you to the train station.

And then he was with his East German car pulling out of the street with screeching tires.

I thought, holy moly, I hope this will go well.

And then at 1 point, just before the train station, there you saw the guy from the traffic police with his stick drive to the right.

And then he came and introduced himself, lieutenant so and so.

And then with screeching tires, we drove up off to the train station.

I can imagine that would be really cool in the West, let alone in the East.

So I was telling this story at every time I could because that was something that doesn't happen every day.

I understand that you saw some famous people while you were at school?

Yes, my grandma was still alive and she was living along a street that was out of Rostock leading to Warnemünde, that's a little city directly at the Baltic Sea coast, there were a famous hotel, it's now today called the Hotel of the Spies, directly at the beach where every single hotel room is directed at the Baltic Sea so you see nothing but the water and the beach and by the way in East Germany but who built it?

So the Communist Party had some West German cash somewhere ready and had the Swedes build this amazing hotel.

And so sometimes guests of the government who visited Rostock, which was officially named the port to the world.

Yeah, you can imagine how this felt for us.

Yeah, the port for the world who can leave this port because we couldn't.

And so 1 day I was looking out of my grandma's apartment from the kitchen and there the first cars came the police with the flashing lights and then I saw already the black cars a Chayka I don't know if you've ever seen those Soviet limousines built after the American street cruisers a Soviet Chayka if you don't know it Google it later it's still even today a super cool car.

And they were the first couple of security personnel, whoever, members of...

I didn't know who it was yet and suddenly there was 1 open Chaika there and who was in there you could see it right away in his uniform, Fidel Castro.

Back then I knew very little as a student still I was maybe...

So I was waving automatically out of the window and as you have it, Fidel looked up, saw me there.

Maybe he thought that's 1 of the meet points, so he waved his hand, so hello, yes.

Later, when I worked in the hotel business in the 1980s, I heard from colleagues whenever Fidel Castro visited Warnemünde and stayed in this hotel, the Neptune Hotel, he always made sure or they made sure to fulfill his wishes in the nightstand there had to be 2 bottles of American whiskey and for this favor he handed out his Cuban cigars to others but it had to be American whiskey but of course it couldn't be out there in the open so it had to be hidden that Fidel drank in East Germany American whiskey.

That's a great story and there's another famous person you met as well.

Yeah it was publicized as the first German in space, Sigmund Jahn back then.

There of course it was suddenly the first German, that was an East or West, but of course East Germany took all the credit for it and Sigmund Jahn, as soon as he had landed, I heard later the story from him in a public interview, he said for him they were waiting with the message, with somebody from his family, a child was born, a grandchild, They were waiting with this message for him and the Russian guy, somebody was waiting with a lit cigarette for him because as he stepped out of the capsule still in his suit, He first had to take the cigarette and a couple of deep puffs from his cigarette.

So Sigmund Jahn was coming to Rostock And so they were looking for people who were basically on the sidelines to make sure he can walk through there.

And since I was in this disco club as junior DJ, so we were also employed to man the sidelines and there he came and he was so, how to put it, such a nice pleasant man, quiet man.

You could see that he felt uncomfortable with all the trouble that was made around him.

He didn't want it, but he knew he had to present.

And then he came up to our corner there, it was a big conference center.

And I was just nodding, saying hello, and he came up and said, hello, and shook my hand and said, so you're feeling good, welcome to Rostock.

That's really nice here and glad to see you.

And then he kept on walking and thought, wow, I just shook the hand of a dude who was in space.

Yeah, I'm very envious of some aspects of your school days, not all of them, but some of them.

When did you become interested in martial arts?

There must have been almost two-sided in me.

I think it was also my daughter who at 1 point said, so could I say you possibly sucked?

I couldn't do the simplest things and on the other hand just the images in the history books in school of gladiators of the knights with their shields and their swords and their pikes and so I thought maybe in another life I was some kind of warrior so I had this enormous interest.

And then it was 1977, I think, and with a friend we found out, oh, there's this judo club.

Of course, karate and all of this was just earlier, 1972, I think, when Bruce Lee had really become this worldwide hero with his movies.

Kung Fu, the series with David Carradine, had put Kung Fu onto the map.

So I was still away from that, but I knew I wanted to do martial arts.

So in 1977, I went with a friend to this judo club.

And I still remember the very first day when we arrived, there were those dudes in those white pajamas and with those belts and 1 was pulling on the sleeve and suddenly, bam, there was 1 on the floor.

You barely touch a guy who says hey I will punch in the face and then I do this trick and BAM he's down on the floor yeah baby I want that so we trained there for a while and with bloody elbows and of course if you bleed then it's even more interesting because you can show to the girls and say yeah it hurts quite a bit but doesn't do anything to me that's just how you train as a man you know the 13 you're already the coolest dude there is.

Yeah, I mean DJing into judo, god, dear, you must have been irresistible.

so that's at least what I tell myself when I think back.

So then somebody told us there's this secret club, there's a really old dude, back then I didn't think about it, but today I think really old dude is just like in a Kung Fu movie, there's this wise master in the mountains with long white hair and this white beard.

So, and by the time I had already found out anything that was not an Olympic sport and that you did not participate in direction of winning medals was not necessarily liked.

So any sports, everything was directed to build future athletes.

So for me, looking for a hobby, it was a pretty slim chance to find something.

So we went to this guy and then I found out, or maybe it was years later, that I really understood why he could do it.

It was really an old dude, I arrived there.

So that was 1978, and I was 14 years old.

Now imagine, with 14, you see somebody who has white hair, who has white hair and who's 70 years old.

I still remember the jokes when we saw old people as a teenager who are pretty slow.

So and he with a young really muscular guy in his 20s, he touched him and also had him on the mats.

So there we learned arm locks, finger locks, wrist locks, and all the forbidden stuff that we were not allowed to train in judo.

He, a lot of the story I found out years later, he was a World War II veteran who was in the 1920s stuck as a sailor with his ship in Yokohama.

The engine was broken, and I guess in those days, you couldn't just quickly order something.

It took over 2 years that the ship was in the port, and At the time, some of the port workers there, 1 or several were actual descendants of an old samurai family.

This in itself is already the plot for a movie.

And so for the 2 years that he was stuck in the port he was every single day he was there learning Jiu Jitsu from them and at the end when the engine was repaired and the ship was going back to Germany he got a black belt from them.

You didn't have yellow, orange, green, blue, brown or any of this.

You trained, trained, trained and if you had the stuff, you wear a black belt and bam, a hero.

Then many years later, he was in a communist family, a workers family.

World War II happened, he went to Moscow and was from Moscow then sent as a single fighter, he being born German, who was behind the lines killing in single hand-to-hand combats particular Nazis.

You cross again the line and your German get your Nazi uniform and then you can kill this dude.

He was also then captured at 1 point, was in a concentration camp, had his fingers broken and so on.

And that's why he was a veteran of World War II, a combat veteran, had all the medals you could get from the Soviet Union and that's why he could teach Jiu Jitsu there and nobody would have said anything against it.

And so I learned there until 1982 and at the time I heard, I saw an ad which I luckily found again.

This ad from 1982, I found in my secret service files now, where somebody else was looking for a, back then, martial artist, a judo fighter who would teach with him a club that is supposed to be initiated.

So at this old man, my sensei, basically, Treble, We didn't have anything.

So I went to him, I said, here for the East German Sports and Gymnastics Association in order to teach in a club, I need a certificate.

He said, well, I know you, you have trained this much, so right away we can make you a brown belt.

The 1 who fought behind enemy lines, who had really used what he has learned, he thought, I'm a brown belt.

So he said, have somebody come up with a certificate.

So 1 of my friends was into drawing and they drew up a certificate And I had him then sign it where he signed his name, Johannes Triebull, teacher for special forces, army and police in East Germany.

And strangely enough, 2 of his grandchildren who were also in his club.

When 1 of them turned 50 they found this certificate from me from 1982 on the internet and since this is the only certificate in existence 1 of them for the other printed this certificate out and gave it to him in memory of his grandfather.

Johannes's story would make a much better movie than Karate Kid.

Yes, although Cobra Kai now on Netflix, I must say, it is pretty cool.

So yeah, I was of course honored to receive the certificate for him and then I could start this club and so I got a passport.

So I got from the East German Sports and Gymnastics Association a passport as a teacher for judo self-defense and Jiu-Jitsu.

I've later asked, they always said no, they were only allowed to write judo in it, but this person who was at the day filling out this passport for me, knew the old man and due to his service to the country, she wrote into my sports teacher passport, teacher for Jiu Jitsu, another only a single thing out of East German times that nobody else has.

I also read in your book about you trying to get hold of books in like

And you had a pen pal in West Germany who was trying to help you.

Since I was naturally interested in music, when my mum will hear this podcast, so I was supposed to be in bed already in 1977 and under the blanket...

Under the blanket I was on a little transistor radio.

I was listening to Radio Luxembourg and Radio Luxembourg for radio fans.

There are enormously many, many radio friends today again, as I found out on the internet.

So I was listening to an evening show on Radio Luxembourg, the first private station in Europe, that was called the Super Club, with real jingles as I had not even known it from regular West German radio stations, so it was really cool.

And there they published pen pal mailing addresses and I thought, wow, cool, I must write to a girl in the West.

So I wasn't thinking about what I was thinking in the 80s that I tried to establish a contact to the West to maybe buy marriages so I can be able to cross the border.

And back then it was just the excitement, possibly exchanging letters with somebody from the other side and getting further.

So I wrote to this address from that evening on the Super Club and I think it took a couple of months then I got the first letter.

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Ralph - DJing and Kung Fu in East Germany (177)