Lauter vs. Undercover
摘要
Not yet 50 years old, one of the rare shooting stars of GDR science becomes director of an Institute for Solar-Terrestrial Physics that he himself has established, and shortly afterwards Secretary general and vice president of the Academy of Sciences. Ernst-August Lauter’s maxims sound like they were taken from the protest papers at the end of the GDR: science without the SED, cooperation without borders, the primacy of science over politics. The extremely agitated Stasi exploited the potential envy of high-ranking colleagues and “friends” to drive Lauter out of all his offices. Scientific authorities from East Berlin and Potsdam were banned from speaking at his funeral.