We depart from the kerb. The plane trees along the streets are bare, with mottled trunks and limbs ending in clotted stumps. They make spirit patterns of light and dark over the bonnet. Herr Christian is chatty and at ease. He has a sense of fun about what he did with the Stasi. He talks to me like a co-conspirator. ‘I was never very ideological,’ he says. We leave Potsdam city behind us, and sail down a freeway. We are gaining on a frog-green Trabi, with black-tinted windows and a smoking exhaust. Written across the boot in crinkle-cut neon-pink letters is the message, ‘I am your worst nightmare.’ We laugh as we pass it.
When Herr Christian was nineteen and doing his military service, he was summoned to a special room for an interview. ‘I wondered what I’d done wrong,’ he says. The man inside was wearing a suit and smoking western cigarettes, and he asked Herr Christian what he wanted to do with his life.
‘Box with the Club Dynamo,’ Herr Christian said. Dynamo was the sporting club of the armed forces, and the Stasi. The man got him to sign an undertaking to work for the Stasi. ‘It wasn’t a problem for me,’ he says. ‘I thought it might lead to a bit of adventure.’ A car accident later ended his boxing career, but he stayed with the Firm. ‘I’ve always had an acute sense of duty to obey the law,’ he says, ‘and I thought it was the right thing to do.’
We pull off the freeway, down a disused road. The forest on either side is tall dark pines, all the same height and planted in rows. The car dips up and over the road like a boat, until we reach a fence with a ‘Keep Out’ sign on it. Herr Christian drives straight in. We come to what looks like a mound of earth. There are outbuildings scattered around.
He turns to me and his leather jacket makes a sticky noise on the leather seats. ‘This was the bunker for the leading cadre of the Potsdam Stasi in the event of a nuclear catastrophe,’ he says. ‘I guarded it for a while. The entrance was in one of those buildings’—he points to a grey fibro-cement hut—‘and you walked down steps to a huge concrete complex under the ground. When they built it, they had to move tonnes and tonnes of earth in trucks disguised as animal transports, and dump it far away. The bunker had everything you can imagine inside it—food and medicine and sleeping quarters, communications equipment, table tennis, the lot.’ There were many bunkers in the GDR, for the Stasi to save themselves in and repopulate the earth—if they remembered to take any women with them.
A policeman in green uniform comes towards us. He is young and clean-shaven and has an alsatian dog on a lead. ‘What business do you have here?’ he asks.
Herr Christian tells him he used to guard this place when it was a Stasi bunker.
‘I wouldn’t know anything about that,’ he says. ‘This is federal property and I must ask you to leave.’
In the car Herr Christian asks, ‘I wonder what they are using it for now?’
Instead of going back the way we came to the freeway, he manoeuvres the car along a series of muddy tracks through the pines. At several points there’s a break in the trees and I see where the Wall used to be, a strip which is now a sandy gash in the forest with earth-moving equipment on it, and old guard towers covered in graffiti. I ask him what he does for a living these days.
‘I’m a, uh, private detective,’ he says self-consciously. ‘Yep. I’m pretty much doing the same job as I did back then. In this, my second life.’
‘How’s business?’
‘Not so great actually,’ he says. ‘The jobs don’t come in as regularly as I’d like, and many of them are the kinds of jobs,’ he coughs a little, ‘that I don’t take.’ He looks across at me under his eyebrows.
‘What kind is that?’
‘Marriage work,’ he says, turning back to the track. ‘I won’t touch it. Where one spouse suspects another of having an affair and wants them tailed.’ He lights a cigarette from a softpack of Stuyvesants and drags deeply. ‘When I was first with the Stasi I was married, but we weren’t happy, and I fell in love with one of my son’s teachers. We began an affair. I confided in my best friend, but he turned out to have what you might call an overdeveloped sense of loyalty—and he told them at work. They locked me up in solitary for three days. Then they demoted me to working on a building site for a year. My supervisor said, “Anyone can have an affair, but everything must be reported.”’
The Stasi could not bear it that one of their own had something in his life that they didn’t know about. But Herr Christian, it seems, has always known that some things are private. He exhales two streams of smoke from his nostrils into the blackness of the car. ‘I was scared, you know, when I worked on that building site. I knew so much from having been in the coding centre that I thought they’d come after me. I was scared I’d suffer some traffic accident or a mishap at work or that in some other way a sentence would be carried out.’ He shakes his head. ‘I just won’t do marriage work. It’s beneath my dignity.’
After his stint on the building site, and after he had married his new love, Herr Christian was accepted back into the fold and put on duty as a covert security officer on Stasi buildings. ‘Now we should be right near where I did most of my work,’ he says, ‘the Rest Stop Michendorf.’ We emerge from the neat sad forest, and travel along the freeway to an ordinary-looking truck stop. The main building is two storeys of grey concrete, with a café underneath. It was the last stop on the freeway before cars from the west entered West Berlin. It is still in use, the old bowsers standing bent-elbowed out the front, beside two new pink phone-boxes from Deutsche Telekom.
We get out and walk around on the gravel. Herr Christian pushes his glasses on top of his head and lights another cigarette. ‘In my day, we had this place completely under surveillance. That room over the top there,’ he says, pointing to some dark dormer windows, ‘was occupied day and night. And from it we had an overview of everything that happened here—of all the vehicles passing from east to west. It was top secret. The petrol-station attendants were mainly informers, but not even they knew what went on up there.
‘We always had at least two people in civilian clothes around, for observations on the ground. That was my job. I’d have a recording device in my pocket, or if I was in a car, it would have cameras in the headlights. We had eavesdropping equipment that could catch the conversations in the vehicles. There was a camera in that bowser there,’ he points to the petrol pump, ‘which I could operate remotely to get a close-up shot of someone if I was standing in the background. We had it pretty much covered.’
Herr Christian’s job here was to hunt out the cars which might have stowaway East Germans in them trying to escape. We walk around the rest stop to the other side. The sky is the same colour as the concrete; we are sandwiched in grey. The tip of my nose and my earlobes are starting to pulse with cold. ‘People-smuggling to the west was a business, run by criminals really—they’d take huge sums of money from the poor souls they were smuggling after they got them through, something like 20,000 westmarks. Or, they’d make them pay earlier, with family heirlooms or stamp collections. The western car would pull off at a spot along the transit route and the easterners would meet it, pay over and get in. I saw some terrible things. People would drug their children and put them in the boot. I opened a boot once and found a woman with her child inside. Because I was in civilian clothes they thought that I was with the smuggling organ-isation. I remember the joy on their faces for the instant they thought they were in freedom.’ He stubs out his cigarette and puts his hands in the pockets of his jacket, shoulders hunched against the grey air. ‘I have to say that was bitter, because I am a sensitive man. But I am also a stickler for the law, and I thought that what they were doing was wrong, and I’d been brought up to think that from my earliest kindergarten days.’
‘What would have happened to them?’
‘We took them to remand at Potsdam. Then they would have been convicted. They usually got one and a half to two years. That was the law.
‘There were parts of it that were fun though,’ he says, his breath like more smoke i
n this cold. ‘I think I had the only job in the world where I got to go into a warehouse each morning and decide, “Who will I be today?”’ He laughs. ‘I got to choose a disguise. Sometimes I’d be a park ranger—that was a green uniform, sometimes a garbage collector in overalls, or someone come to repair the wiring. I really liked being a western tourist because the clothes were much better quality—real leather gloves—and I got to drive a Mercedes, or at least a VW Golf.’
We walk back to the BMW and he clicks it awake. ‘But do you know what was best?’ he asks, turning to me. ‘Best of all’—he gives me a mock punch on the shoulder—‘was when I’d dress up as a blind man: I’d have the cane, the glasses, the armband with three dots. Sometimes I’d even get a girl as a guide on my arm. I’d have to remember to take my watch off though!’ He looks around this barren place, enjoying the memory of work well done. A car passes; we are just two small figures climbing into a large car at a petrol station. ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘being a blind man is the best way to observe people.’ He chortles, pushes his dark glasses over his eyes and starts the engine of his huge black machine.
16
Socialist Man
In August 1961, a fresh Stasi recruit named Hagen Koch walked the streets of Berlin with a tin of paint and a brush, and painted the line where the Wall would go. He was twenty-one years old, and he was Secretary-General Honecker’s personal cartographer. Unlike most heads of state, Honecker needed a personal cartographer, because he was redrawing the limits of the free world.
Koch’s apartment is a cell in a honeycomb of high-rises where a lot of other former Stasi officers and their families lived before the Wall fell, and live still. The balconies have all been painted a pinkish colour. On some of them sun umbrellas are furled in hibernation.
The man who opens the door has a sort of glow about him—a bright face, receding hair and soft brown eyes. Koch smiles broadly, and shakes my hand. He gestures around himself exuberantly, like a ringmaster. ‘Welcome to the Wall Archive,’ he says.
All along the corridor hang framed colour photocopies of what were once top secret Stasi maps. They show various parts of the Wall in aerial view, with a colour-coded key for the guard towers, mine traps, dogs and trip-wires. Black-yellow-red East German pennants are pinned on the walls and the bodice of a uniform of the leaders’ elite guard, the Felix Dzerzhinski regiment, hangs from hooks, deflated as a scarecrow. More obscure mementos of the regime sit in glass-fronted cupboards. As we walk along the corridor, I think I see a crocheted doily in the national colours.
Koch talks as we walk, and by the time we reach his study he is listing off on his fingers the VIPs who have been to see him and his archive. Behind his desk a large gold plate bearing the East German hammer and compass shines out from just above head height. The room is lined with framed newspaper articles. The pictures show Koch with his visitors. He looks straight into the camera, clean-featured and moon-faced and beaming: Koch with the Queen of Sweden, Koch with an actor from ‘Star Trek’, Koch with Christo the wrap artist.
He is more than comfortable with the tiny microphone on my tape recorder. When I ask if I might clip it to his shirt he takes it from me and wields it like a rock star. His forearms are honey-brown and lightly haired.
I ask him how he had applied to join the Stasi.
‘No, no, no, no. It didn’t work like that. You had to be chosen.’ Apparently this was one of the fundamentals of the system: don’t call us, we’ll call you.
‘Who chose you then?’
‘Just a moment,’ he says. ‘It is hard for you to understand. Without understanding my childhood, you can’t see why anyone would want to join the Stasi.’
This isn’t quite true. I have given a lot of thought to why people would want to join. In a society riven into ‘us’ and ‘them’, an ambitious young person might well want to be one of the group in the know, one of the unmolested. If there was never going to be an end to your country, and you could never leave, why wouldn’t you opt for a peaceful life and a satisfying career? What interests me is the process of dealing with that decision now that it is all over. Can you rework your past, the grit that rubs in you, until it is shiny and smooth as a pearl?
‘My upbringing was so…’ he searches for the words, ‘so… GDR.’ His eyebrows move up and down. ‘Everything that was GDR-positive, that was me.’ Koch turns to a large cardboard box on the floor beside his desk. ‘My father put me on this track.’ He reaches into the box and pulls out a brownish photograph of his father in army uniform, with the expression men in armed services pictures often have, as if they are already elsewhere. Then he goes back to the box and produces a school report. He flashes it at me and I see the old-style gothic handwriting. Koch starts to read: ‘Hagen was a diligent and orderly pupil…’ And then he reads on through the report. We are right back at the beginning of his life. I look at the box, and the box is deep. It seems this afternoon we are going to go through it piece by plastic-wrapped piece.
‘You have to understand,’ he says, ‘in the context of my father, and of the propaganda of the Cold War—the GDR was like a religion. It was something I was brought up to believe in…’
He speaks passionately and loudly, although I am sitting close to him and the room is small. I watch him waving his arms and my microphone. He brings out more photographs and more documents and I hear him say, ‘You can see here after the war we had no mattresses, holes in our socks…’
But I am mulling over the idea of the GDR as an article of faith. Communism, at least of the East German variety, was a closed system of belief. It was a universe in a vacuum, complete with its own self-created hells and heavens, its punishments and redemptions meted out right here on earth. Many of the punishments were simply for lack of belief, or even suspected lack of belief. Disloyalty was calibrated in the minutest of signs: the antenna turned to receive western television, the red flag not hung out on May Day, someone telling an off-colour joke about Honecker just to stay sane.
I remember Sister Eugenia at school, with her tight sausage-fingers, explaining the ‘leap of faith’ that was required before the closed universe of Catholicism would make any sense. Her fingers made the leap, pink and unlikely, as we children drew the ‘fruits of the holy spirit’—a banana for redemption, as I recall—and all I could think of was a sausage-person walking off a clifftop, believing all the time the hand of God would scoop him up. The sense of having someone examine your inner worth, the violence of the idea that it can in fact be measured, was the same. God could see inside you to reckon whether your faith was enough to save you. The Stasi could see inside your life too, only they had a lot more sons on earth to help.
The GDR, in its forty years, tried strenuously both to create Socialist German Man and to get the people to believe in him. Socialist German Man was to be different from Nazi German Man, and different from western (Capitalist Imperialist) German Man. History was taught as a series of inevitable evolutionary leaps towards Communism: from a feudal state through capitalism and then—in the greatest leap forward to date—socialism. The Communist nirvana was the world to come. Darwinian diagrams flash into my mind showing man on a scale of increasing uprightness and lack of body hair: from monkey to Neanderthal to Cro-Magnon to Modern. Here now in front of me is Socialist Man, smooth and keen and very, very verbal.
As Koch dips into the carton once more, I wonder whether he ever wished he had been a disruptive and disorderly pupil, instead of a diligent and orderly one; whether it would have saved him from carrying his explanatory box through life.
‘My story comes directly out of my father’s story.’ Hagen Koch passes me the photograph of his father again, and Heinz Koch looks out from early in the century. He had the same brown eyes as his son, but in a narrower, more doubtful face.
Heinz Koch was born in a village in Saxony on 5 August 1912, and was brought up as the son of the village tailor. One day when he was sixteen years old he ran home from school, distraught, with his report card in h
is hand. In the space for ‘Name’ was written: ‘Koch, Heinz, Grandson of the Master Tailor.’ Koch pulls a yellowing report from the box. ‘This occurred on the twenty-third of the third, 1929,’ he says, shaking the document. ‘On that day my father learnt of his illegitimacy—his big sister was his mother!’ Heinz was stunned by the realisation that everyone had lied to him: You all hid this from me for so long?
‘Who was his real father?’ I ask.
‘I’ll get to that,’ Hagen says.
‘According to the German moral code of that time, illegitimacy was terrible, shameful.’ Heinz was immediately ostracised by his friends and left school. He decided to join the army, hoping that a uniform would hide the stigma of his birth. In September 1929 he signed up for a twelve-year term of duty.
Heinz Koch got more than he bargained for. By the time his term was due to expire in October 1941, he found himself stationed in France as part of the Nazi occupation force and could not be discharged. In May 1945, after Berlin surrendered, Master Sergeant Koch somehow made it back to Dessau, to his wife and two small children. He travelled over a landscape pockmarked with craters, through towns of rubble with pipes and plumbing exposed in the streets. People were crazy with pain and secrets. In the woods and on the roads were refugees, war criminals, rogue bomber groups and Allied forces who had started the Cold War between them before the hot one had ended. In Dresden he thought he smelt rotting flesh. But, one week after the war ended, Heinz Koch was home. At the Potsdam conference, Dessau was given to the Russians. They released him from active duty.