BERLIN — Sigmund Jähn, whose distinction as the first German to travel into space made him a Cold War symbol of socialist unity at a time when East and West Germany competed for national achievements, died on Saturday in Strausberg, Germany, outside Berlin. He was 82.

The German Aerospace Center confirmed the death but did not specify a cause.

On Aug. 26, 1976, Mr. Jähn and the Russian cosmonaut Valery Bykovsky left Earth aboard the Soyuz 31 and spent seven days, 20 hours and 49 minutes in space, most of it aboard the Salyut 6 space station.

Their mission was to dock and resupply the Salyut 6 and run biological and medical experiments alongside the station’s long-duration crew, Vladimir Kovalyonok and Aleksandr Ivanchenkov. Mr. Jähn and Mr. Bykovsky returned to Earth on the Soyuz 29, the spacecraft the other crew had come up on.

“Dear TV audience of the German Democratic Republic,” Mr. Jähn said in a radio transmission from the space station in 1978. “I’m very happy to be allowed to be the first German to take part in this manned spaceflight.”

Mr. Jähn returned to a hero’s welcome and toured the country. Schools, ships and streets were named after him. Action figures of his likeness became popular. He was given medals and his image featured on postage stamps.

In the Cold War propaganda battle, East Germany had beaten West Germany into space by five years; it wasn’t until 1983 that Ulf Merbold would accomplish the feat with NASA.

“The first German in space, he always understood himself as a bridge builder between East and West in his advocacy for the peaceful use of space,” said Pascale Ehrenfreund, the head of the German Aerospace Center, where Mr. Jähn worked as an adviser after reunification.

Even 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Mr. Jähn retained his celebrity status.

“In East Germany everyone knows Sigmund Jähn,” said Romy Mothes, the director of Deutsche Raumfahrtausstellung Morgenröthe-Rautenkranz, a space exploration museum in Mr. Jähn’s hometown.

Sigmund Werner Paul Jähn was born on Feb. 13, 1937, in Morgenröthe-Rautenkranz, in the Vogtland district, a mountainous region in southeast Germany on the Czechoslovakian border. His father was a sawmill worker, his mother a homemaker. Mr. Jähn trained to be a printer before he joined the East German National People’s Army. He became a pilot and eventually flew the most advanced Soviet fighter jets.

The first airplanes he ever saw as a boy were Allied bombers on their way to drop their payloads on Germany toward the end of World War II, he said in interviews.

He rose through the ranks of the army’s air division, serving as political officer, trainer and crash inspector before being secretly admitted — after a series of grueling physical tests — for Russian cosmonaut training in 1976. Mr. Jähn attributed his success as a cosmonaut to his Russian- language skills and a strong stomach.

“I didn’t get sick even once,” he told the newspaper the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung last year.

After his historic spaceflight, he was said to have been considered for a leadership position in the Communist Party, although in a 2018 interview he said that he was unsuitable for “loud speeches.”

By the time Germany reunified in October 1990, Mr. Jähn had earned the rank of major general in the people’s army. After the army was dissolved upon reunification, he was unemployed briefly before signing up with the German Aerospace Center and later the European Space Agency as a consultant. He moved to Star City, the center of Russian cosmonaut training, outside Moscow, to instruct recruits.

His survivors include his wife, Erika, and two daughters.

Mr. Bykovsky died this year.

On their mission together in 1978, Mr. Jähn had taken with him a toy figurine of Sandmännchen, a well-known character on an East German children’s television show, only to learn that Mr. Bykovsky had also brought a toy, of the Russian character Masha.

“I was supposed to shoot footage for a children’s program while in orbit,” Mr. Jähn explained to Spiegel Online in a 2011 interview. “To that end, the Sandmännchen even wore his own spacesuit, specially made.”

In an unplanned show of unity, the men filmed the characters having a pretend marriage celebration, but the footage could not be shown on East German television, Mr. Jähn said. Sandmännchen, it turned out, was supposed to remain single.

Follow Christopher F. Schuetze on Twitter: @CFSchuetze.

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