In the dying days of the German Democratic Republic, a group of peace activists gather in a church in Dresden to discuss the more bottom-up, less authoritarian country they would like to see emerge out of the crumbling socialist state.
A mixed-race man on one of the back rows speaks up. “You have no idea of the rage that’s out there”, he says. “If you lock people up in a cage for life then at some point they will find someone to blame for that. Someone who’s different. And you want to abolish this state? The last bit that keeps people from going crazy?”
The scene, from the opening episode of Sam: A Saxon, a seven-part mini-series that premieres on Disney+ on Wednesday, is designed to explain what could have motivated the young man on the back row to do what he did next.
Samuel Meffire, the real-life inspiration for the character played by the German actor Malick Bauer, went on to join the police, becoming the first officer of African descent in the former East Germany, which at the time was notorious for racist violence, and the face of a poster campaign to show a different side to the former GDR. He would soon grow frustrated with his employer’s sluggish bureaucracy, switch sides and end up on Germany’s most wanted list for armed robbery.
The series – Disney’s first original series produced in Germany – does not aspire to challenge storytelling conventions, but it manages in unexpected ways to cut across the often told story of the “peaceful revolution” of 1989 – as well as contemporary debates about law enforcement’s treatment of black people.
“The GDR was not colour-blind,” Meffire, 52, said in an interview with the Guardian. “But it made public spaces colour-blind enough that I could move safely in them. No one would have dared do me harm in public because they would have known that the men with the iron brooms would have swept them up if they did.”
“Of course, that’s an incredibly fine line, to sing a hymn to law enforcement in a dictatorship,” he added. “I don’t mean to sing the praises of a dictatorship, but of the fact that it was safe for me. And I want our democratic state to make us equally safe, wherever we go.”
Now living in Bonn, in the western Ruhr valley, he said he would not take his two children on a holiday to the eastern state where he grew up.
About 95,000 migrant workers from socialist “brother states” such as Mozambique, Angola, Cuba and Vietnam were registered as living in East Germany in the year that the Berlin Wall fell, though their stay was strictly limited and social mixing with the local population was discouraged by the regime.
Meffire’s father, a Cameroonian engineering student, died two hours before he was born in July 1970, in circumstances that remain unclear: one theory proposed by his mother is that he was poisoned by officials who tried to chemically castrate him.
For “Ossis [East Germans] of colour” such as Meffire, the end of the old regime nonetheless brought a dramatic loss of personal safety. In his memoir, Me, a Saxon, published in English translation by the British publisher Dialogue Books this spring and co-written by the playwright Lothar Kittstein, Meffire, a self-described “fantasy nerd”, describes the outbreak of racist violence in starker, quasi-apocalyptic terms.
“The neo-something is now part of the normal cityscape during the day, too,” he writes. “The vampires are bound to the night no longer. They have acquitted themselves from this spell. And the well-behaved, demoralised citizens applauded them.”
A string of racist attacks in the old eastern states made the east’s problem with the radical right hard for the reunified country to ignore. In September 1991, neo-Nazis rioted for five days in the Saxon town of Hoyerswerda, their attacks on an apartment block housing asylum seekers cheered on by some of the locals.
A western German PR company hired to improve Saxony’s image after these attacks seized on Meffire: a photograph of the shaven-headed police officer in a black rollneck underneath the words “A Saxon” was printed on billboards around Dresden and in newspapers across the entire country.
A friendship with Saxony’s reformist interior minister Heinz Eggert further boosted Meffire’s status as the poster boy for Saxony’s police force, but also made him new enemies among his colleagues. Two years after the publicity campaign, he left to set up his own private security agency but struggled to make the business pay.
In 1995, Meffire was involved in a string of armed robberies and went on the run in France and what was then Zaire – now the Democratic Republic of the Congo – where he was caught up in the first Congo war and eventually extradited to Germany. After serving seven years in prison, he now works as a social worker, security contractor and author.
Both the written and the filmic treatment of Meffire’s story explain his rapid disillusionment with the police by hinting at old political networks that held a protecting hand over the neo-Nazi scene. His verdict on his former colleagues, however, is surprisingly positive. “Hate stories and racism?” he writes. “Not towards me.” One officer who made abusive remarks about his skin colour was quickly reprimanded by his colleagues.
The Disney series, which Meffire and the film-maker Jörg Winger unsuccessfully pitched to Germany’s public broadcasters in 2006, achieves two rare feats for a German production, telling a story with a mainly afrodeutsch set of main characters, without presenting their experiences in a one-dimensional way.
In the third episode, Meffire falls in with a group of black East German men who have little time for black political activists from the west, who they dismiss as “beaten-down dogs”. That division, Meffire says, still runs through Germany’s black communities.
“When it comes to the police, there are two perspectives,” he said. “I am a victim – of state despotism, of racial profiling, or at the very least of an … ignorance towards things that shouldn’t take place.
“And then there’s the other view, which is absolutely a minority, that says if we want a diverse police force then we have to step up and shape that police force. And that doesn’t just apply to the police, but also the intelligence community, the military, the judiciary. Because speaking for myself, I don’t know a single black German public prosecutor and not a single black German judge.”
