‘That’s where I’m off to now,’ he yells. ‘My teacher lives in Mitte like you. Speaking of which, did you follow up any of those Ossi stories you were talking about?’ He doesn’t ask this as if I need to redeem myself from my outburst with Scheller. He seems genuinely curious. And he turns the music down.
‘Yes, I did,’ I say. ‘I’ve been having Adventures in Stasiland.’ He laughs, so I go on. ‘I’ve been in a place where what was said was not real, and what was real was not allowed, where people disappeared behind doors and were never heard from again, or were smuggled into other realms.’
‘Really? How did you find these people?’
‘They’re all around us, Uwe. This was the east, after all. And I’ve gone looking. I advertised for Stasi men—’
‘You did what?’ He looks at me and I wish he’d look back at the road.
‘I put an ad in the paper, Uwe, it was no big deal. And other people I’ve just stumbled across. My landlady, for instance,’ I say, and I tell him briefly about Julia’s expulsion from life until the Stasi offered to redeem her if she would inform for them. ‘And this was as late as the 1980s,’ I finish.
‘No shit,’ Uwe says, and I can see that Julia’s story is as strange and awful for him as it is for me. He slows to a stop. We have reached my place, intact. He turns to me. ‘Two things,’ he says, in his serious journalist’s voice. ‘There’s a man around who as a young Stasi officer drew the line along the street where the Wall would be built, and he’s prepared to talk about the whole thing. His name is Hagen Koch—we had him on a program once about Checkpoint Charlie. And what you said about turning one world into another made me think of someone else. There is a fellow called Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler—he was the chief propagandist for the regime. He might be interesting for you too.’
‘Julia mentioned von Schnitzler. He’s still alive then?’
‘Yep. And fierce, from what I hear.’
‘How can I find them?’
‘I’ll see whether we’ve got any contact details at work.’ Uwe leans across me to open my door, which is sort of gentlemanly, but also unnecessary. He takes the opportunity to look up and check out my building.
‘Thanks for the lift,’ I say. ‘And thanks for the tips.’ He smells of smoke and fake pineapple, like a seedy Hawaiian.
‘No problem.’ He’s still leaning across me, so I follow his gaze. In the bare tree outside my living room two white things float in the branches. One is a plastic bag, and the other, as we both stare up at it, reveals itself to be a pair of men’s underpants. I shrug. I can tell Uwe would never live in a place like this. He leans back into his seat. ‘Good luck in Stasiland,’ he says. ‘Take care there.’
A few days later Uwe does find me a number for von Schnitzler, but it’s wrong. ‘Lady,’ the man who answers tells me, ‘people like that don’t want to be found.’ Herr von Schnitzler is unlisted. I decide to call Herr Winz, to see if he can help. Herr Winz is chuffed to think I need him, and says he’ll see what he can do. In the meantime, I decide to watch some of von Schnitzler’s programs, ‘The Black Channel’.
‘The Black Channel’ was broadcast in the east from 1960. It was intended as a countermeasure to the western program ‘Das Rote Optik’ (The Red View), a critique of socialism being broadcast into the east from West Germany. On Monday nights Deutsche Fernsehfunk, then the single East German television station, screened beloved old movies from the heyday of the pre-war studios, and the Party decided that these, as well as the western programs, required commentary. Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler was given the job.
For a long time, workers in the power stations were on alert every Monday night. First, everyone tuned in at once to the movie, so they went into overdrive. Then, when ‘The Black Channel’ came on, the workers had to struggle to stop the power supply from collapsing under a back-surge as everyone, simultaneously, switched off their sets.
Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler became a one-man institution and the most hated face of the regime. At the end of 1989 when the demonstrators called out, ‘We are the people!’ and ‘Free elections!’ they also shouted, ‘Say Sorry, Schnitzler!’ and ‘Schnitzler to the Muppet Show!’ That was exactly what he was: a grumpy old puppet throwing scorn on proceedings from on high.
The East German television station was at Adlershof, an eastern suburb of Berlin. The complex is now being touted as a hot new multimedia centre but remains a cluster of cold grey buildings set in an expanse of gravel, like an industrial park. One of them houses the archive of programs broadcast in the GDR.
This place isn’t really open to the public, and Uwe has made some calls to get me in. I enter what seems to be a back door and then walk along a grimy glass-sided gangway linking this building to the next. There are no people around. I come to double doors with an old security intercom. I ring in and they open for me. Ahead, there’s a counter. In either direction, right and left, a long linoleum corridor stretches out, strewn with ancient editing equipment and piles of film reels.
Behind the counter I find the first signs of life. Two men in what look like matching brown cardigans are drinking coffee. They take a look at me and turn back immediately to one another.
‘Good morning,’ I say.
‘Have you come for a parcel?’ Cardigan One asks, staring straight at Cardigan Two.
‘No,’ I say. ‘I’ve come to look at some tapes.’
‘We wouldn’t know anything about that,’ Cardigan One says. He still doesn’t look at me. There’s a silence.
‘Is Frau Anderson about?’ I ask.
‘She’d have to see Frau Anderson about that, wouldn’t she?’ One says to his silent companion. Two takes a sip. One reads this as agreement.
‘Yes,’ One repeats, ‘she’d have to see Frau Anderson about that.’
I glance up and down the empty corridor.
‘It’s getting on for time,’ he adds. ‘We leave here at 4.25, you know.’
‘Right,’ I say.
Cardigan Two speaks. ‘We’re on a break,’ he says to One.
‘Right,’ I say again. There’s another silence. What is this, Beckett? I remember what the German absurdist poet Kurt Tucholsky said about his countrymen and counters: they all grovel in front of them, and aspire to sit behind them. I am tossing up whether to grovel like a native or to make a scene, foreign-style, when I am saved by footsteps coming along the corridor: Frau Anderson.
‘There you are then,’ Cardigan One says to Cardigan Two, as if this whole little episode had been a private bet between them, ‘Frau Anderson.’
Frau Anderson is a woman in her mid-fifties. It is hard to tell what she really looks like because she is wearing makeup to disguise. Perhaps she used to be on the stage, or in television. She has shiny skin the consistency of cheesecake and lips painted on in a shape that departs, boldly and theatrically, from nature.
‘Ach, Herr von Schnitzler,’ she says as she leads me down the corridor. ‘He was a one. You’ve got to give it to him: at least he has stuck with what he said back then. Not a damn turncoat like the rest of them these days.’ Her bitterness and nostalgia shock me. It is part of the nostalgia for the east (ost) which has given rise to a new sticklebrick word: Ostalgie. Clearly only those demonstrably loyal to the state worked here, and Frau Anderson is still one of them.
The corridor is fluorescent-lit, without a chink of natural light. The linoleum is beige, and either mottled or marbled. The walls are a peeling bilious yellow. There’s a stale smell. It is like being inside some old beast. We walk the length of the corridor and I count, from habit or obsession or just not wanting to get lost, fifteen steel doors on each side before we get to the last one. Frau Anderson opens it and turns to me. ‘I leave at 4.25,’ she says, ‘do you think you’ll be done by then?’
‘I hope so,’ I say.
‘It would be terrible,’ she jokes, ‘to leave you locked up here overnight.’
It sure would. This place seems to have been designed on the same one-size-fit
s-all architectural principle as everything else: the Runden Ecke in Leipzig and Stasi HQ at Normannenstrasse; the same as prisons and hospitals and schools and administrative buildings all over this country, and probably the same as inside the brown Palast der Republik only it’s behind bars and I can’t get in. From here to Vladivostok this was Communism’s gift to the built environment—linoleum and grey cement, asbestos and prefabricated concrete and, always, long long corridors with all-purpose rooms. Behind these doors anything could be happening: interrogations, imprisonment, examinations, education, administration, hiding out from nuclear catastrophe or, in this case, propaganda.
Inside, the room has the proportions of a prison cell, but is decorated like a trailer-home from the 1960s. There are brown curtains for the small high-up window, and brown wallpaper on the walls in a flower pattern. There’s an ancient reel-to-reel film-cutting machine, an office chair, and a tourist poster for the Gobi Desert with text in Russian and German. In the corner there’s a television set and a video player.
Frau Anderson leaves me with some tapes they found. I put one in the machine and turn the lights out. It’s von Schnitzler’s first program from March 1960. The titles come on: a mean-looking cartoon eagle, the West German emblem, wearing the red-white-and-black of fascism alights onto a television antenna. Then the words come up: THE BLACK CHANNEL. Suddenly, a man in a suit with boxy black glasses fills the screen. He addresses me directly, as if he were sitting here in the room:
The Black Channel, my dear ladies and gentlemen, carries filth and sewage. But instead of carrying it to a sewage farm as it ought, it pours, day after day, into hundreds of thousands of West German and West Berlin homes. This channel is the channel broadcasting West German television programs: The Black Channel. And every Monday at this time, we are going to devote ourselves to, as you might say, a hygiene operation.
The next tape was from 1965 after two people had been shot trying to flee over the Wall.
Dear viewers
You all know why I’m here today, returned from my holiday especially to appear before you tonight. Our border guards have, in accordance with their duty, had to shoot at two men. They were breaking the law and seeking to breach our national border. They stopped neither when called, nor when warning shots were fired. One of them was fatally wounded...
People should listen to us when we say, again and again: we determine the order at our border! And we ensure that it is maintained, for good reasons. Whosoever wants to traverse the GDR border needs permission. Otherwise: stay away from our border! He who puts himself in danger will die. I know, ladies and gentlemen, it sounds hard. And will perhaps even be interpreted by some of you as ‘inhumane’… But what is ‘humane’ and what is ‘inhumane’?
Humane it is, to make peace for all men on earth. That is not done by prayer! It is done by fighting. And if, as history teaches us, wars are made by man and not God, then peace too, is a work of man. And for the first time on German soil, here in the German Democratic Republic, peace has been elevated to a governing principle of the state. Whoever seeks to weaken or damage the GDR, whether consciously or unconsciously, weakens or damages the prospects of peace in Germany. It is humane to have created and built this state! It is humane to strengthen and protect it! It is humane to guard the German Democratic Republic against these people who would most like to eat it for breakfast…
He goes on and on, but I wind the tape back and take notes. I want to be able to see exactly how this man turned inhumanity into humanity, these deaths into symbols of salvation. I want more urgently to meet him, and see what he thinks now that the bulwark is down and his world is gone.
It’s nearly 4 pm, and I’m doing well for time. I’m not going to be locked up in here, no way. I start packing my things together. The tape is still running. It switches to another program called ‘In the Mood’ (Gut Aufgelegt) with cheery introductory music. A beautiful blue-eyed brunette in a 1960s pinched-waisted dress is in a record shop. She approaches the camera.
‘Record sellers have been getting strange requests from customers lately,’ she says, ‘for “Lipsi” music. I have a question: just what is “Lipsi”? Brockhaus [the music encyclopaedist] would say, “I have no idea and if it isn’t in any of my twenty volumes, it doesn’t exist.” But the record seller would tell you, “Lipsi—that’s all my customers are asking for! It’s an epidemic!” A young couple might say, “Lipsi—it’s the simplest thing. The dance itself is in 6/4 time and you just take her in your left arm like this”’—she extends her arm—‘well…it’s easy, look.’ She pretends to get stuck for words, and then finds her slogan:
If you really want to know, simply dance away,
All the young people dance the Lipsi today!
I’m curious and stop packing. The screen shows a couple in a dance hall: he clean-cut in a suit, and she in a dress and stilettos. And, together, they do the strangest dance that I have ever seen.
At first the man and the woman face the same way like Greek dancers, he behind her, her hand in his. They move from side to side with one another, then raise their forearms and bend apart, alarmingly, like teapots. The camera cuts to their feet, which, without warning, break into the complex footsies of an Irish jig. Then the pair turn to one another in a waltz grip before separating again and giving a little jump in the air. This is followed by a Russian-type movement with hands on hips. All the while they smile huge fixed smiles as if they needn’t give a single thought to what their feet are doing. Then they start with the Greek teapot manoeuvre again. Over the top a Doris Day voice sings to a bossa nova beat:
Today, all young people dance
The Lipsi step, only in lipsistep,
Today, all young people like to learn
The Lipsistep: it is modern!
Rhumba, boogie and Cha cha cha
These dances are all passé
Now out of nowhere and overnight
This new beat is here to stay!
I wind the tape back. I want to pinpoint, in all these movements, what it is that makes the dance so curious. ‘Lipsi’ is colloquial for ‘Leipzig’ but it wasn’t just the regime’s overt attempt to manufacture a trend for the masses, as if it had come from that hip city. I watch the stiff couple closely. The woman seems to be missing an incisor—an odd choice for a dance model. Then I concentrate on their movements, and I get it: in not one of this panoply of gestures do the dancers’ hips move. Their torsos remain straight—neither bending towards one another, nor swivelling from side to side. The makers of this dance had plundered every tradition they could find and painstakingly extracted only the sexless moves. Just as ‘The Black Channel’ was the antidote for western television, the Lipsi step was the East’s answer to Elvis and decadent foreign rock’n’roll. And here it was: a dance invented by a committee, a bizarre hipless camel of a thing.
I throw my things together and hightail it out of the room down the corridor. The fluorescent is still on, but there’s no light coming from the counter. I’m halfway there when I remember I’ve left the video in the machine. I run back to the room and pull it out so I can return it to Frau Anderson, if she’s still here. If anyone’s still here. Running down the corridor for the second time, I wonder if I need to know a code to get out.
My watch says 4.27 and the Cardigans are gone. I stand in front of the counter, my bag in one hand, the tape in the other. To each side of me the corridor stretches to infinity, its doors all shut. I turn and face the exit, and see, to the left of it, an old keypad security system. How many attempts at getting the combination before I’m trapped? Or an alarm goes off? I don’t want a scene. But I don’t want to spend the night here either.
I need to find a phone. As I turn back, I hear a sound. It’s a door opening. Frau Anderson is coming out, in a fake fur hat and carrying a green mock-crocodile handbag.
‘I was just coming to fetch you,’ she says. ‘Thought I’d give you a bit more time.’ She takes the tape from me. I steady my breath. I don’t know
whether she can tell I’ve panicked and is having a bit of fun with me. Perhaps I’ve started to take deadlines, train times and closing hours too seriously in this land of merciless punctuality.
A week later an anonymous man calls me. Herr Winz has told him what I want, and he is ringing to check me out before he calls Herr von Schnitzler. In a few minutes he phones back and says that Frau von Schnitzler will take my call. He gives me the number. Frau von Schnitzler answers, and she tells me their address.
13
Von Schni—
It’s her maiden name, not his on the doorbell. A fine-faced woman in her sixties lets me in. She has bobbed dark hair, red lips and red fingernails. Frau Marta von Schnitzler was an actress.
‘Welcome,’ she says extending a lacquered hand. She shows me through to the living room. The apartment is small but light. The accumulated debris of a lifetime rests on bookcases and shelves, hangs on the walls: books, medal boxes, figurines, and plastic cups full of biros.
In the living room a man with square glasses and a carefully contoured beard sits in an easy chair. His right hand, smooth for a seventy-nine-year-old, holds the top of a walking stick. He greets me, nodding in my direction. On the coffee table there’s a thermos of hot water, a jar of Nescafé and a medicine bottle. In front of him Herr von Schnitzler has a large wineglass of something that looks like red cordial. I sit down opposite. His head is larger and more wizened, the cheekbones more pronounced than on television but it is unmistakably ‘Sudel-Ede’ or ‘Filthy Ed’. Behind his head I notice another row of other heads at the same level on a picture rail: a bust of Marx, a daguerreotype of Lenin, and, as my eye casts along, even a miniature full-body statue of Stalin.