In the television film “Seven hours”, which was shown this Wednesday in the ARD and the ARD-Mediathek is available, says Director Christian Görlitz is the story of a therapist Hanna diamond mountain (played by Bibiana Beglau), a social-therapeutic prison station, the victim of an appalling fact. The story is based on the case, the Prison psychologist Susanne after dinner – “a story inspired by their memories,” the Director – which was taken nine years ago in the JVA Straubing from a patient for hours as a hostage, and repeatedly raped. Her experiences, published after dinner two years later in a book. Their work had, you need to give up, she worked as a dog trainer, and author. After dinner had accompanied Görlitz’ movie project, until she committed suicide in February 2018 suicide.
Immediately before you had received the star editor Dominik Stawski to a long conversation. Due to recent events, we publish his story (star no. 16, 12. April 2018) at this point.
Eight days before Susanne after dinner came voluntarily from her life around, she stood in her kitchen, a smile on your face, a Cup of coffee in Hand, her dog Emmi was raging, the sun shone through the old window. “With milk or without?”, she asked.
we Were blind, because we saw in these moments only Harmless, only Good? We, a colleague and I, had come to the interview with Susanne after dinner for an article about guilt and punishment. We saw an attractive woman, friendly, funny, admirable. She looked far younger than 58. I need to feel that they really wanted to, couldn’t it? Or you wanted to?
Werther effect
It was a Monday in early February. On the train journey to see her I had read her book. “Seven hours in April”. On the back
Überlebensmut
status: your story went through all the media. The Prison psychologist Susanne after dinner is raped in your workplace, the high security prison in Straubing, Germany, a detained sex offender locked up for seven hours, several times and threatened with death. Without makeup and with narrative precision and Susanne after dinner portrays the Unimaginable, the fear of death, but also how it has managed to survive after the martyrdom.
they had survived. For nine years.
And now? Why would she take her life? Because she could no longer endure the emotional pain that had caused the offender to her? This rape was in fact a murder? With a time space of 7. April 2009 to 13. February 2018?
The family, her husband Wolfram and their son, David, does not want to comment for obvious reasons, open to the public. A few weeks after the suicide make it clear to you in a letter and an E-Mail, only two things: Yes, it was the action of the time. And Yes, you should report it.
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In the Straubing prison Susanne after dinner headed the social-therapeutic Station. Her rapist had you there for four years, until the day that he is in your office overwhelmed
©Soeren Stache/DDP
As a Journalist, you should carefully consider whether and how to get over a suicide, writes, because studies have shown that a so-called Werther effect, i.e. the risk of imitation of actions, exists. After the media had reported in the fall of 2009 over the suicide of national goalkeeper Robert Enke, increased the number of suicides dramatically.
In this Text, it is not a self-murder of Susanne after dinner, but their lives, their two lives, as she herself said, the before and the after. Two lives, one of which everyone should learn, because it can happen to even like you. In the dedication of your book you wrote: “For those who suddenly find themselves unintentionally in another life. For tungsten and for David. And for me.”
The question that led us, in February to her, on the occasion of another crime, the Gladbeck hostage crisis of 1988. Dieter Degowski, one of the two main perpetrators, stood before his release, and the question was: what is debt?
The scent of coffee placed on the kitchen table, bitch Emmi had calmed down, the voice recorder.
How are you today, Mrs after dinner?
“I’ve set up relatively successfully in this new life. I think I can say that I made something Good out of it. I write one book after the other, this is my new Job. Of course, I miss my old life. But it no longer hurts as it has hurt.”
“I like people”
What do you miss?
“Very basic things to like in the morning at half past nine, somewhere. Writing books is a beautiful thing, but a deeply lonely.”
Susanne after dinner a Prison psychologist. After graduating from the Hildesheim Gymnasium Himmelsthür you had studied psychology in Osnabrück. She began her career in a psychiatric clinic and later moved into the penitentiary. “I like people,” she said. “I wanted to know how you tick.” After dinner worked in hospitals in Celle, Alfeld, Hannover, Germany, Bützow and finally, in Straubing, where it was initiated, the therapeutic unit for male sex offenders. She made a career, became a sought-after consultant and lecturer. With the beginning of 30 she had with her first husband a son, and she loved to death. After dinner was small, but David grew so fast that he towered over you already as a teenager. Preuskers new Partner was his stepfather, the three grew together as a family. In the last days of your “life before” planned for after dinner and your Partner will just your wedding.
In a previous life you have had a lot of luck, said after dinner in our conversation, “so much so that I had the feeling, now I have to give back something. That’s why I entered in 2008, in the Church. I wanted to give something back, and it was the Church tax.”
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Seven hours the offender held her in his power. After dinner was afraid to die. She knew that he had already gagged once a woman to death
©Soeren Stache/DDP
Between a life before and a life after that, you may be seconds or years. Seconds, in which someone takes a the right-of-way and the family. Or years in which to defeat a disease that changes you. In these seconds, or years can something and start. Can Think, for example, the tonic and salutary, that in the end everything’s kind of good. And the nagging and destructive to begin at the end of fear that it could always get worse.
The accidents, crimes, diseases, all the dreamemblematic experiences, separating the Before and the After, are different. “Other people have other stories”, and wrote after dinner. Your is perhaps particularly bad. But they said again and again: “You’re not the navel of the world.” You once described himself as a “luxury victim”, because she’s better than many of the other, eventually you will be equipped with a family, the best support, and a man who was on top of everything to love, also a lawyer.
Susanne after dinner were between the Before and After seven hours, whose cruelty exceeds the Imaginable. To her, it was important that there be a clear, named, what was done to her. “With shame, the victims do themselves no favors,” she said, and added, full of bitter irony: “of the victims. How I love this expression.” In your book you wrote: “I have nothing to hide. I don’t have to hide. The truth hurts and triggers dismay. That’s the hallmark of the truth. It is rarely pretty, but always necessary.”
It was a Tuesday afternoon, 2009 in Straubing, shortly after five, and after dinner Packed up in your office watching your stuff because you had an appointment with a beautician. The wedding was imminent, Yes. The day before she had sent the invitations. Suddenly, Roland K. came into your office, one for the murder and rape of a condemned man, and after dinner treated in four years. The prisoners were allowed to move within the therapy station. K. asked if after dinner to have time for him. You consoled him in the coming days, but K. remained standing just in the door. You must now really go, and pushed. He has not responded. She stood up and walked up to him. Since he attacked you. She resisted, but K. pulled out a knife that he pressed her neck, he forced you, your key, locked the door and barricaded it with furniture. He took off his sweaty clothes. Several times he raped her. After dinner not more, fought back, and obeyed him. She knew that she would survive, if at all, only in this way. His last victim, which she had read in the acts, was choking on his gag – he had not been able to endure the screaming. Susanne after dinner wanted to survive. With all the force she pushed the stimulus to vomit, because she was afraid that he might interpret this as a sign of her disgust towards him. He had superglue your mouth, he threatened her. After seven hours in which K. on the phone with police and prison staff had negotiated, he gave up. He left you your clothes back to wear.
And then Susanne after dinner from your office, the police, the SWAT team, her colleagues stepped in, all staring at you. She grabbed the hands of foreign people, they almost fell to the ground, screamed, cried. They were in a different room, where a doctor treated you. There were wounds in her face, but not what was done to her. The most Important thing was: she lived.
In the back of an ambulance, you drove her to a clinic. There, in the hospital of the merciful brothers, in the middle of Bavaria, they had no “morning after” pill. A pastor took her to a pharmacy.
Nine years later, at her kitchen table, she spoke barely above these Details of the seven hours. We asked afterwards, we wanted to spare her and said that we would use when Writing to their portrayals in the book. You might have seen the actually as a consideration. Or as a lack of recognition of their suffering. In between, namely the ridge, on which everyone who speaks with Traumatized about their fight.
As her new life began, had to after dinner to tell what was happening behind her office door. No matter how hard it fell. Because they would have been silent, no one would have know that it has given her Trauma at all. Because you knew through your career, how important her portrayal would be before the court, wrote a few days after the fact, everything. She told it to the police and people who were close to her. But otherwise she kept to herself. Many believe today that you’ve been looking for the Public, because you wanted to sell your book. After dinner received after the publication of the book correspondence, in which it was said that she wanted to Profit from their fate. “Even today, I would prefer it, I would never have to write to”, began the Preface to the second edition.
In truth, fled after dinner, first, before the Public. The Doctors wrote you sick. “It wasn’t my mother, as I remembered,” said her son later about this time in a television documentary. “It was sort of a ruined woman. Totally broken. Like a different person almost.”
More than a reference
after dinner her husband went back to the apartment in Magdeburg, almost 500 km away from Straubing. From the kitchen window you look out onto a small courtyard, surrounded by several buildings. The balconies are so close together that the neighbors can chat. It was spring, and after dinner wanted to go to the air, you sat on the balcony and looked as so often, into the Void. The neighbors wondered. “Hey, Suse, are so much here!” was such a set, you still had years later in the ear. “What do you say? I’m out sick? Then: Oh, what is it? And then just babble,” she said.
you don’t have the stomach for it. It felt as if you’d be lying. And so the more neighbors know to and to know.
The court process before. Alone the thought of it tortured her. As a victim, as the most important witness, she had to testify, even if she was scared. But you should also participate as a plaintiff in the process? Her husband, in spite of the fact ten days later, had married (“Now only right”, he had said), and her son were. “You wanted to, that Fenomenbet I am more than a file number. But I was terrified. And just before the hearing I said: Okay, I’ll do it Under one condition: that I not in the public statement. I’ll do that.”
With sunglasses, she entered the courtroom. Her heart was racing. In her Hand she held tranquilizers. “And then, the defendant requested that the Public be excluded from the entire process, because it is in the process of his intimate sphere. I thought I was crazy. His Intimate Sphere? I couldn’t believe it. And someone then said that the application would be rejected if I public statement.”
What now? It is only a brief recess remained. In these two minutes, the course for the coming years, even if you did not see it. “You’re probably that asshole does not give the right to a protected peaceful and PRhäre,” said her son, then 17. “You think it’s because if I tell all of them?” she asked him. He nodded.
“With my public statement are broken the dams. Suddenly, the cameras were in front of my nose. For the full program.” Preuskers first step in Public was not voluntary.
But he felt right.
exposure therapy
The process had transformed her, she remembered in her kitchen. This Moment in which she saw the perpetrator in the eyes. “And then he peeped. He couldn’t stand up. That was an important feeling.”
Was the process of therapy?
“sort of. Me that the court saw. I’ve managed to do it. And it was important for me that he was punished. This sentence: He is guilty. Of the was important. The sentence not so much.” K. was sentenced to 13 years and nine months in prison followed by preventive detention. Its prospects of ever being free again, are bad.
Also through the process, learned after dinner that the crime and all the feelings belonged to her. From the beginning, she knew she would need professional help to be able to with this part of your life.
a therapy easier, if you yourself are a therapist?
“It does not help necessarily,” she replied. “Because of this Diagnose, to Apply the methodology, how it has been learned that a itself is not how it works.”
after dinner visited several therapists. Her first goal was to be able to the happened to think, without losing the nerve. In hour-long sessions she endured her martyrdom in one’s thoughts again and again. “This is like a stone,” she said in her kitchen, “you let the water run. At some point he is around.” Eventually, you could even write the book. Even if it sounds absurd, she wanted to gain distance, because you could put your story then literally in a drawer.
The second goal was to be able to their daily life, to drive into a dark underground garage, without panicking due to the feeling, to be trapped, and can barely escape. Together with her therapist, she ventured again and again in situations like this. Exposure therapy they call it. The Problem is the countless triggers that were planted in her consciousness. At the time, in your office, your brain had switched into a type of emergency mode and the body with stress hormones flooded. The brain may associate the traumatic experiences with sensory perceptions. Survivors of the Ramstein disaster, described, for example, that the smell of freshly mown Grass, combined with many years later on panic attacks. The lawn had been mowed prior to the air show. For some Syrian refugees have come to Germany, is the Pop of the new year’s eve firecrackers mental torture. And some patients who can hardly remember their struggle for Survival in an intensive care unit, experience by the smell of disinfectant a Flashback. Intrusion is what psychologists call such recollections. And odors are the most powerful anchor.
Training in a disused prison
after dinner, there was little worse than stinky sweaty white undershirts. The offender was wearing one, and her blood left a stain on it. Locked doors could put you in a panic. Also, the Tape that had your son for setting his Football injuries at home. She saw it, she got heart palpitations, because K. had you tied up with duct tape. In the kitchen, she yelled once her husband Wolfram. “Put the knife down, put the knife away!” He had just cut a slice of bread. “Because this feeling was for a long time,” she said once in a television documentary, “what if you’re in tungsten is also wrong?”
The trauma expert Sybille Jatzko, who has served in collaboration with her husband hundreds of crime and disaster victims, compared in an essay on the Survivors of the Ramstein disaster, the life of the Affected record. A vinyl record, get a scratch on it. The scratch is an accident, a crime, whatever. He never goes away. The needle of the record player touched the spot, she jumps up and a pain sound. Never again, the panel will sound the way you sound once.
after dinner found its way back into everyday life. Learned to be in closed spaces. Or with your son to shop. The panic attacks they met from year to year rare. In a disused prison in Magdeburg, she trained even, long, bald prison corridors with bars in the Windows, along. Piece by piece she reclaimed her courage.
The fly, Locked up in a plane, fell to her still hard, which is why the prospect that her son, now mid 20’s, could soon move to Canada, prepared your last grief. “Oh, somehow I’ll figure it out,” she said, almost defiantly, in the kitchen. “Not for the time I’ve been screaming just a little bit.” She laughed. And we laughed.
In her new life, she was busy with the Events of the time. Every day was a struggle against the Trigger. Constantly had sessions of therapy. In addition, the process they focused on for years before a court order to your Pension, because, as a psychologist, she could no longer work.
Other subjects she had to struggle. She wrote a guidebook about dogs, and several thrillers. Psychologists speak of a new “thought tracks”, you are not important, you grid always on the same motorway in the head. In spite of her trauma, to her, is not known, and many succeeded: it kept the interest in others and their problems. Her last book was all about two women whose deep friendship sent out by the cancer death of a.
which she did, in the Public Association with the fact, in April 2009. Again and again we have been asked to take readings. At conferences you discussed asked about victims ‘ rights, offers of assistance need to be strengthened. She gave the other, left by the Trauma of silence, a voice. Who creates it to be a fact, and its consequences to the public in such honest words?
“anger is better than fear,”
Every appearance it cost. But to have coped with it gave her strength.
what is debt?, the question that we brought.
“Even if it would sit forever, the debt he could not repay, so long life is,” she said. “He has my life … ‘destroyed’ I don’t want to say. But he has changed my life significantly, against my will. And he has, and that makes the guilt even people who are close to me and those I love, hurt. To always on. My Son. No 17-Year-old should have to experience something. He has him a piece of youth.”
morality and law 30 years after the hostage-taking of Gladbeck: when passes the blame?
Could you ever forgive him?
“Never ever. Never!”
Preuskers anger was still there. “Anger is better than fear,” she said. She called the offenders in our conversation, never by name, but either “Idiot” or “type”. His face you’ll never forget. “If I had to draw it now, I could.” And the expression on his face? “Yes, Yes, Yes. You will not forget. Sometimes in the city I see people who look like him, and then I cringe. And I think it is hard when people speak in his Franconian dialect.”
in Order to take revenge, had formulated after dinner many years ago, a letter to K.. From the therapy sessions with him in the prison, she knew about the wounds in his family and his Childhood know. You wrote a statement that would only understand it because it was so intimate.
“I have in the past year, often to their grandparents think,” it says. “And the story of the boy in the coat of a dog crying. You have disappointed many people and lied to … But you have not destroyed me, K.”
The letter was delivered, the management of the institution, in the K. it was replaced, had concerns. “The thought that it would do him some good. But I rode in court, that the letter is handed to him,” said after dinner. “Every sentence in it hits to the heart.”
you’ve never get an answer, but she didn’t want to, “I’d lie”. With the letter she put the old power relationship, again – that was her most important.
In her book, the word suicide is a one Time, at one point, she tells of a therapy session. The therapist had asked: “or you have thoughts of suicide?”
And after dinner wrote: “I lie and say no, and he does so, as if he believed me.”
In the Innermost of one’s own body
We have not addressed in these lines. During the hours in her apartment, she was strengthened. So, as you would have realized the words with which your book had ended: “And my other plans? Life.” Goodbye you led us once more across the hall, the room in which she wrote lonely on her books, from the Desk you can look out on the Cathedral of Magdeburg.
I went in the Faith, that they survived. That you can live with and want.
But as a Journalist it is time only for the Surface inspectors, with a couple of questions in the Block and only a couple of hours. Not A Friend. Not A Therapist. Certainly not a Confidant.
And what do you mean “survived”? Can you survive such a thing? Where is the point where you know: “Now is good”? There may be the point at all, if every day carries with it the risk that a crash is a smell in a Flashback?
psychologists have found in studies that victims of rape have a lot to fight more often (in about 50 percent of cases) with a Trauma as, for example, Survivors of a natural disaster (4.5 percent). Suffered rape also increases the risk of suicide dramatically. A rape you can’t push to a higher Power. It is not a stroke of fate, some may say that a God had it planned that way. After a rape, there is no community of fate, because it was alone when it happened. The fact, happens in the Innermost of one’s own body. In view of Susanne after dinner has survived a lot more than. Has fought back, a new job found, together with husband and son kept their family together, as a campaigner for victims ‘ rights, she was a role model.
“We would call you again if any questions arise,” I said on the way to the door. “And a photographer will contact you, if you agree.”
“Yeah, right,” she replied.
The photographer rang ten days later at your door. A friend of the family opened. It was difficult, he said. Then he’ll just come back later, suggested the photographer. No, it is in General difficult.
So, we learned that she had died two days earlier.
Why? Why now? There was a trigger? Psychologists speak of episodes in the lives of the Traumatized. Light and dark. The darkness often comes at a year. Or, if life with all of the non-erasable memories is exhausting. If the Fight-a more and more exhausted. And the certainty of a growing that the fight will never stop.
more Open to dealing with their Fears
hours after the death reached the news, I heard me the audio recording of our conversation. I could have something to remember? ? Their voice sound, not brittle. You can hear how you are reminded of your dog, as you raves from Hamburg, where the film’s Director Christian Görlitz had showed her the just-finished screen adaptation of your book, which will be broadcast in the summer on Arte and in the autumn in the ARD. It felt weird to see your own story in a movie theater, she said. In some scenes you’ve weggeguckt. However, the Film did please her very well. Of panic or trigger language. Even in our interview passages about her Trauma, her voice sounded sure, many of our questions may have been new to you. None of you hesitated to answer. They spoke openly about their Fears. She left for the us only even more. She knew her soul. You knew how vulnerable you are vulnerable still.
Susanne after dinner died on the 13. February 2018.
you have suicidal thoughts? Help the phone offers pastoral care. It is anonymous, free-of-charge and round-the-clock 0 800 / 111 0 111 and 0 800 / 111 0 222 accessible. A consultation via E-Mail. A list of Federal-aid stations can be found on the page of the German society for suicide prevention.
For children and young people, the number against sorrow from Monday to Saturday from 14 to 20 hours – the number of 116 11.
