After the forced eviction from their house, the family of six from Dresden waited eleven weeks at a crossroads in front of their former home. The ten-year-old daughter was also there. Now father Michael “Rednik” Paul has been placed in a psychiatric clinic. Numerous police officers and government employees were on site when he was picked up on Friday morning, reports the “Ostdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung”.
The fate of the family has been affecting the public for weeks: the 57-year-old wanted to force the return of his foreclosed house with a dry hunger strike. During a dry hunger strike, the person refuses not only solid food, but also any liquid. A judge has now decided to initially hospitalize Paul for six weeks.
An adult daughter of the family documented the scene and posted several videos on YouTube. You can see Paul and his wife Annette getting into police vehicles without resistance. The parents had previously missed a previously scheduled appointment for a psychiatric assessment. According to her account, the names on the documents were incorrect. The Pauls call themselves “Rednik” (“children” read backwards) and fundamentally reject the state and its institutions. They therefore do not accept their registered names.
In another video, the 57-year-old explains that he was admitted to psychiatric care in 2017 and 2018. There, psychiatrists diagnosed him with “delusional disorders” and schizophrenia. Paul stated that a corresponding diagnosis had now led to “imprisoning me in a psychiatric institution”.
He ended his current hunger strike on the same day. According to his own account, he ate three pieces of cake and drank two cups of coffee. That was “delicious”, “you can’t complain about it,” he told the “Tag24” portal. In the video, he can also be seen doing push-ups to prove that he is fine.
At the same time, Paul declared his family's fight for the house over. They tried to defend themselves with a hunger strike “as a last resort” and thus exhausted all options to get the building back. However, a return was considered hardly possible anyway: after the foreclosure auction, the property has long since belonged to a new owner who is already registered in the land register.
It is not known where the mother Annette and her four children will be accommodated after the hunger strike ends.
The background to the conflict with the authorities was unpaid property taxes from 2015 and 2016 amounting to 1,500 euros. In the following years, further debts accumulated. Eventually the house was foreclosed on and the family was evicted. She rejected both state and private offers of help to find accommodation elsewhere. When asked, the city of Dresden did not tell WELT how high the debt was recently, citing data protection reasons.
The case is also so explosive because it shows how difficult it is to deal with people who break with the system and reject all state institutions. Consequently, according to their own statements, they do not claim any state benefits such as basic security or child benefit. Instead, they lived self-sufficiently on their property. They do not have identification documents and, according to their own statements, do not have health insurance.
The family is therefore partly attributed to the Reich Citizens' Movement, but rejects this classification. She describes herself as a socially critical “free family”. The Pauls therefore consider, among other things, the property tax to be unconstitutional and are of the opinion that they should not have to pay state claims. According to their own statements, they do not want to support the system they reject with their money.
The conflict with state authorities dates back to at least 2012. At that time, the parents took their three older daughters out of school to teach them at home. Since school attendance is compulsory in Germany, the authorities intervened and took the girls, who were underage at the time, into care. They lived in different homes for eight months. Ultimately, it was not possible to prove that there was a risk to the child's well-being. The children returned to their parents.
The three older daughters are now of age. The court appointed a legal guardian for the ten-year-old daughter to represent her interests. According to her father, the girl does not have a birth certificate.
