The political and very personal reflection of a peaceful revolutionary. A key figure in recent German history remembers: Joachim Gauck, a committed opponent of the system during the peaceful revolution in East Germany and a prominent protagonist in the process of reunification as the first Federal Commissioner for the Stasi Records. Joachim Gauck spent his childhood in a village on the Baltic Sea coast. He later studied theology in Rostock and found his way into the church in Mecklenburg. His distance from the East German system shaped his work from the very beginning. Naturally, he became part of a critical movement and ultimately became a symbol during the upheaval of 1989. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Gauck took on political responsibility, becoming a member of the first freely elected parliament of East Germany and the first Federal Commissioner for the Stasi Records. The fight against forgetting and...