Written By: Craig Dahlberg
Narrated By: Kara Lea Kennedy
I stood before a small door, hinged within a massive one—both built from gnarled timber. For centuries, the large door had opened to horse-drawn wagons, heavy with farm tools, fresh vegetables, and weary laborers.
The smaller door groaned as I leaned into it, inching it open.
Inside the cavernous, windowless entry to the farmhouse, I blinked against the darkness. A single, bare bulb hung overhead, its dim light barely breaking the gloom.
I’d spent the night in my one-man tent, pitched just outside the East German border.
As dawn broke the horizon, I packed my tent into my rented Volkswagen. My Bible, wrapped in my underwear, was hidden from view—concealed from the East German guards whose concrete watchtowers loomed ahead.
A truly incoherent situation: A country in collapse, being invaded by the theater of the absurd. Like East Germany, my life’s main road had just washed out; I was searching for a new road, a new career, a new horizon.
Two guards—machine guns slung casually within reach—demanded my documentation. They studied my American passport as if I had just floated down from space. One peered at me and murmured in awe,
“Ein echter (aeshta) Amerikaner!”
A real American!
Then the steel gate clanked open, and they waved me through. I was in East Germany—my bag unchecked for either drugs or Bibles.
East Germany swallowed me whole—its colors drained. I had walked out of Kodachrome into black-and-white. Weeds pushed through cracked concrete on the crumbling Autobahn. East German Trabant cars coughed and sputtered; mopeds with bronchitis.
I was here on a covert operation, my own “Your-mission-Craig, should-you-decide-to-accept-it ...” assignment. A map on my lap, I searched for a town called Rötha (reutah). There, I hoped to find Manfred, a man I’d never met. I was not sure he even existed.
Blacklisted by the regime for being a pastor, his mail was cut off and all contact with the West was forbidden. His friends didn’t know if he was dead or alive.
Having grown up in West Germany, I spoke fluent German. So, as an American searching for Manfred, I drew less suspicion. But alone on those pitted roads, my confidence wavered.
Rötha seemed frozen in time. Bombed-out buildings leaned wearily against one another, survivors of World War II. Bullet holes still marred their bricks, untouched since the war.
Without a person or single street sign to help me, the town felt abandoned. I saw no one.
I pulled my Volkswagen into a small cobblestone square surrounded by centuries-old, thatched farmhouses.
Leaning my forehead against the steering wheel, I groaned a desperate plea: “Have I come all this way for nothing? You’ve got to help me here.” My plea sounded like the only voice in a dark and cold universe.
I stepped out of the car.
Then I saw her—a woman opening a third-floor window in one of the ancient farmhouses.
She was the first person I had seen in Rötha.
Simultaneously panicked and seizing the opportunity, I called up to her, grasping for any thread of hope.
“Kennen Sie Manfred Hoffmann?”
Do you know Manfred Hoffmann?
It was a long shot.
She froze, silent, unmoving, staring down at me, trying to make sense of what I had just asked.
Then, her face lit with shock.
“Das ist (ihst) mein Mann!”
That’s my husband!
“I’ll send him right down!”
I had arrived in a ghost town, without signage or directions, searching for a man I had never met—a nearly impossible task. And the first person I encountered—was his wife.
As my eyes adjusted to the darkness behind the weathered farmhouse door, a man’s face slowly emerged—wet with tears.
Then he stood still; Manfred was rooted to the stone floor, unable to move. He spoke halting German, barely able to speak through his sobs.
“I’m Manfred Hoffmann,” he said, voice catching. “I’ve prayed for someone to find me for a very long time... but I never imagined they’d come all the way from America.”
I stayed with Manfred’s family for many days. Eventually, the crumbling Autobahn led me away from Rötha. But I would never be the same.
Soon, the East German regime collapsed. After the wall fell, many letters passed between Manfred and me.
But the most enduring connection was forged that evening under the glow of a single bare bulb in a shadowed entryway.
“You’ve got to help me here,” I prayed. Or was that too visceral to be prayer? Perhaps God answers raw and audacious prayers ahead of polite and saintly ones.
