‘Get out.’
‘We are willing to turn a blind eye to the manner in which that plate came into your possession, Herr Koch, provided you return it immediately.’
Koch was incensed. ‘Get out of my apartment. If you want the plate, go get a court order for it. Without an order, you’re not coming in. Noone takes the plate.’
So it came in the mail. Criminal proceedings were issued against him. The indictment charged him with theft of GDR property. Still Koch did nothing.
Not long afterwards there was another knock at the door. It was the same men again. ‘Excuse us, Herr Koch. I am pleased to inform you that the allegation of theft has been withdrawn.’
‘Mmmhh.’
‘In the first place on account of triviality: the plate was worth only sixteen eastern marks. In the second place because of the Statute of Limitations for such crimes: the allegations concerned an act which took place eight years ago and are therefore barred.’
Koch looks at me closely.
‘However,’ the officer said, ‘new proceedings have been issued against you.’
‘Oh?’
‘For perjury.’
‘Get out.’
The official put his foot in the door. ‘I’m afraid, Herr Koch, that it is alleged that on 14 June 1985 you swore in an affidavit to the Ministry of State Security of the former German Democratic Republic that you did not know the whereabouts of the plate in question. That is an offence against the law then in force in the GDR, and it is the responsibility of the new Germany to ensure prosecution of crimes which occurred in the former GDR.’
I am laughing by now. Koch goes on.
‘I said, “Bravo. Terrific. Well done. Can’t you people make up your minds? Do you want to see me punished because I worked for the Firm, or do you want to see me punished because I worked against the Firm? What is it, exactly, you want?”’ He’s laughing now too. This is his moment. The man who drew the line, and who sat on the fence, pulls some righteousness from the post-Wall rubble.
‘Did the trial come about?’ I ask him.
‘No. But all these allegations did quite a bit of damage. My wife lost her job because of them. The rumours were pretty bad, and they took on a life of their own—you know, Koch is a thief, a liar, a perjurer.’ He pauses, and leans towards me. I can smell him again, warm and piny. He says, ‘You know though, it was worth it. All the courage I had is in that plate. The whole shitty little skerrick of it. That’s all I had. That plate,’ he says pointing behind him, ‘stays there.’
Beep. ‘Hi Miriam, it’s Anna.’ I’m keeping this upbeat. ‘Just thought I’d call to say hello. I’d love to catch up. I’ve been having some odd adventures in your old country! Curiouser and curiouser—I’ve a lot to tell. Anyway, I’ll call, or you can reach me.’ I leave my number. ‘See you.’
Herr Koch gave me Stasi diagrams and photographs of the ‘border installation’ at Bornholmer Strasse. ‘Top Secret!’ he cried gleefully, as he made copies of them on the machine in his hallway.
A day or two later I have them rolled in my pocket as I walk from my apartment to where Miriam climbed over. I also have the sketch she drew; the place where she was caught is marked with a gash of blue ink. I want to see what it looked like to her; I want to place these pictures over what’s there now, as if to bring the past into some kind of focus.
It is muggy today. Everyone has been burning their heaters without pause for weeks and the clouds are low and tinted with coal dust. I take breaths of this orange sky as I walk.
The first thing I reach is the garden colony. A path leads through the plots, each one fenced off from its neighbour with cyclone mesh. There are small huts on them—for garden tools and seeds, for barbecue grills and folding chairs and ladders. There are a few larger trees, but mostly there is just sodden black earth arranged into rectangles, waiting for a lick of sun to bring up vegetables and flowers. These are squared-off places for contained fantasies—in one plot I find Snow White and her dwarves, two fawns and two portly gnomes all cohabiting peacefully with an almost life-size sow and her three fat piglets.
Between the garden plots and where the Wall was there’s a wider stretch of grass and then an embankment. I climb up to another cyclone fence and look through at the mess of railway lines and small walls. This fence is old and rusted. I wonder whether it was the same one Miriam climbed. To my left is the bridge where she thought the guards were watching her, and where, twenty years later, ten thousand people thronged on a single night to get through to the west.
I hold up a black and white photograph with one hand and the Stasi diagram with the other, ‘Technical Improvements on the National Border to Berlin (West)’. I want to see where the second fence, the sand strip, the tank traps, the guard towers, the light-pylons, the dog run and the trip-wires were. They are all gone. Then I remember that they were in front of the railway lines—they must have been in the stretch of grass I walked over between the garden plots and where I am now standing.
I take out Miriam’s sketch. It is a few lines on a page—for walls, for the kink in the wall where she stopped to breathe and lock eyes with the dog, for the trip-wire where she was caught. My hands are blue as I hold the paper up to the rusted diamonds of wire. I wonder if I am in the right place. Miriam said the bridge was about one hundred and fifty metres away from where she crossed. I move to my right till I think I’m in the same spot. Two trains cross; the rhythm of their wheels fuses and then parts again. When they are gone I peer at the railway lines. There are at least six of them, shunting trains from north to south and back. Then there’s an earth retaining wall, not particularly high, but the ground behind it is at another level. Is this where she climbed? I look for a kink, and I find one. Was that where she crouched?
It starts to get dark. The streetlights on the bridge glow their sick yellow light. I roll up the photo and the diagram and Miriam’s drawing and crumple them into my pocket. I put my fingers through the wire, and hang onto the fence for a while.
19
Klaus
‘Can I come over?’
‘Wuffor?’
I think I’ve woken him up. It’s one o’clock in the afternoon. ‘A visit, Klaus, I need to get out of the house.’ What I need, in fact, is becoming a habit: an act of hops-and-malt chemistry. I need to feel good, temporarily, about plates and walls, old men and rules, bakeries and rug-work and corridor after corridor of rooms sealed with secret purpose. I need to see a survivor.
‘OK,’ he says, ‘not now though. Later.’
‘All right, see you later then.’
We’re onto our third beer and it’s only 6 pm. Klaus’s tremor has stopped, and he’s changed out of the dressing gown he was in when I arrived, to black jeans and a black windcheater. His hair is motley on his head, and motley in his beard. He has a crumpled face with brown teeth and squinty, smiley eyes. His hands are large and purplish, the hands of a dedicated smoker. He is grumpy and friendly at the same time, just warming up.
Like most people, I know a little about his life, but I wouldn’t mind hearing it from him, a night-time story. He grumbles at first—what self-respecting icon needs to say how they got that way? But we crack open more cans and he obliges me, relaxing into it. He sits soft-bodied in the chair; he assumes the shape of the furniture.
We face a coffee table with matches and tins on it and ashtrays already full of butts and papers and clumps of tobacco like hair. Behind that there’s a massive television set with stereo speakers. This room is also Klaus’s bedroom and office—there’s a mattress on the mezzanine to my left, and underneath it a fax machine, a computer and synthesizer.
The walls are lined with photographs and posters, and Klaus’s dark oil paintings. The one nearest my eyeline has a series of pictures etched into it; it’s the evolution of the breast, from pointy to pendulous. This room is Klaus’s life; it’s the inside of his head.
The early photographs show Klaus Jentzsch, before he took his mother’s maiden name
as a stage-name: a clean-cut young man in 1958 wearing a suit and pencil tie, looking down modestly at his double bass. They track his development into a long-haired star with a sheepskin coat and a bass guitar. The most recent ones are tour posters: a group of six middle-aged men in an assortment of headbands, beards and sunglasses, with raised fists and sweat on their chests. Klaus, though, seems to have become, if anything, more himself: no headband, no glasses, just jeans and a T-shirt and a guitar.
Klaus Renft is the bad boy of East German rock’n’roll. The Klaus Renft Combo became the wildest and the most popular rock band in the GDR.
Klaus started off playing Chuck Berry and Bill Haley covers in the fifties, and then moved on in the sixties to the Animals, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, and in the seventies to Steppenwolf, Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd. Often these records were banned outright so Klaus and his friends listened illegally to western RIAS radio, and recorded the songs on huge tape decks in order to work out the music. They sang, screaming, ‘A ken’t get nö, zetizfektion.’
I’m amazed that the authorities let them get away with the Stones’ ‘Satisfaction’, a song which, if it became an anthem for desire of all kinds in the west, was bound to be a rallying cry against the whole system in the east. ‘Did they know what it meant?’ I ask.
‘We didn’t know what it meant,’ Klaus laughs, prodding down tobacco and small burnt beads of hash into a white-handled pipe. His laugh is deep and innocent, he is a man with the gift of pleasure. His smile heats the room.
Over time, the Klaus Renft Combo played more and more of their own songs, and when Gerulf Pannach joined in 1969 the lyrics suggested rebellion, poignancy and hope, or, as one magazine put it, ‘soul, frailty and pain’. In the ersatz world of the Lipsi, Renft was something authentic and unauthorised. But there was only one record company, AMIGA, and Klaus says that the lyrics to every one of their songs were changed before they could be recorded. Renft took, he says, the ‘holy things’ of the GDR—the army and the Wall—and sang about them, because they wanted to ‘scratch the GDR at its marrow’.
Klaus gets up from the chair, his movements quick as a cat, although maybe I’m starting to see things slower. I’m trying to think what it would mean to have all your experience of rock music brought to you live, but second-hand—wondering: did Jagger, Plant and Daltry know of their doppelgängers in the east?
But as soon as Klaus puts the music on, I am a believer. There is something about good rock that defies thought. It is pure and base at the same time, and it moves you inside in ways you can’t say. The singer, Christian ‘Kuno’ Kunert, was trained in a church choir in Leipzig and his voice hits you like the truth. He sings their famous ‘Die Ketten werden knapper’ (The Chains Are Getting Tighter) and ‘The Ballad of Little Otto’, who longed to reach his brother in the west. Klaus sits down again and puffs happily. When the songs are over, he keeps talking.
Renft were not permitted to play in towns, so they played to enormous crowds which came out to the villages. ‘Woodstock every day.’ He grins. ‘You know for us the GDR wasn’t just Stasi, Stasi, Stasi. It was “Sex und Drugs und Rock’n’Roll”,’ he says in English. By drugs he means alcohol and cigarettes which were all the drugs they had, but they made the most of them. ‘I mean we really lived!’ he says. ‘And it was fun.’
‘Some towns we went to, the main street would have its buildings painted only halfway up! The top part would be bare grey concrete.’ He looks at me as if he has posed a riddle, which he has. ‘It was because when Honecker came through, that was the level he could see to from the back seat of the limousine. They didn’t have enough paint to go further up!’ I know about this, and about the butchers’ shops full of smallgoods for the drive-by, which would vanish again after Honecker or other officials had been through. Klaus finds all this hysterically funny. Then he says, ‘This society, it was built on lies—lie after lie after lie.’
The emperor has no clothes! The buildings are half-naked! Renft might have started off with borrowed western rock songs, but there were so many lies that singing the truth guaranteed them both hero and criminal status. By the mid-seventies the band embodied a lethal combination of rock, anti-establishment message and mass adoration. They were shaggy men with bellbottoms and attitude, they were hot, they were rich by GDR standards, and they were way too explosive for the regime.
Performers needed a licence to work. In September 1975 Renft were called to play for the Ministry of Culture in Leipzig to have theirs renewed. Klaus gets up again to reach for a folder under the mezzanine. ‘I can look up the details of my life now in the files,’ he smiles, ‘which is just as well.’ He once referred to the state of his brain as ‘dog food’. I like him for his self-knowledge, and smile back. Shortly before the licence-renewal hearing he was offered a passport, hard currency and a smooth ride through life—here or in the west—if he would separate from two of the most politically outspoken band members, Pannach and Kunert. He refused. ‘I knew then, that was a death sentence for us,’ he says.
‘It must have taken guts to turn that down.’
He shrugs. ‘It was much worse under Hitler,’ he says. ‘We would have been whisked off to a concentration camp.’
The smoke is sweet and time is losing its grip on the evening. There is a guilelessness about Klaus, for a rock star; none of his answers come pat. ‘It’s hard to describe,’ he says, ‘on the one hand I suppose it shows character or something. But on the other, if you’re honest you know you were shitting yourself…’ He starts laughing. Then he stops. ‘It looked like we’d all go to prison—that would have been the usual thing,’ he says soberly. ‘And people there were treated worse than animals. Of course we didn’t want that.’
Now that he has the documents from his file he can see the sequence of events from the other side. He flicks through the folder, then stops. ‘This is funny,’ he says. ‘This was from Honecker to Mielke.’ He reads: ‘Dear Erich, Please attend to the case of Jentzsch, Klaus, as speedily as possible. Regards, Erich.’ He laughs, ‘Get that? From one Erich to another.’ But it could have quickly stopped being funny. At one point Mielke asked his officers in Leipzig, ‘Why can’t you just grab them? Why aren’t they liquidated?’ But Renft members were too famous to handle so directly.
Klaus turns more pages and finds a formal complaint from the administration of the ‘Klubhaus Marx Engels’ where Renft had performed a fortnight before. It is to Comrade Ruth Oelschlägel, chairperson of the licensing committee they were about to face.
‘You’ll like this one,’ he says, and reads it out. Klaus is the only person I know who gets such distinct pleasure from the story-telling in their file. The clubhouse administration complained about the group’s drinking: ‘After the end of the concert, approx. forty bottles of wine were found…it is incomprehensible to us that a musical ensemble should require the consumption of such a quantity of alcohol to attain the right mood.’ It complained about ‘belching into the microphone, use of words such as “shit”’. I start to laugh, harder than this is probably worth, but who cares? Klaus is swinging a leg over the side of the chair and laughing too. He continues, ‘We protest the use of inflammatory calls from the stage such as, “It’s the society that’s decadent, we are the opposite,” “Today, I feel free,” “There are people sitting in this room reporting on us,” or “You are the audience that will experience the group Renft for the last time, because we are about to be banned.”’ Klaus’s laugh moves down to his chest and turns into a cough. He takes a long draught of beer, and then starts rolling a joint.
‘I had some western money,’ he says, ‘so before the licensing hearing I bought a small cassette recorder from an Intershop.’ When performing, Klaus holds his guitar idiosyncratically upright, more like a double bass player. He runs the strap over his left shoulder, down his back and between his legs, encircling his body. While they were setting up to play for the committee he turned the cassette recorder on and hid it between his guitar and his groin,
held up by the strap.
But they didn’t get to play. Comrade Oelschlägel asked them to approach the desk. She said the committee would not be listening to ‘the musical version of what you have seen fit to put to us in writing’ because ‘the lyrics have absolutely nothing to do with our socialist reality…the working class is insulted and the state and defence organisations are defamed’.
Klaus leans in and picks up his tin of tobacco. ‘And then she said to us, “We are here to inform you today, that you don’t exist any more.”’
There was silence. One of the band members signalled to a roadie to stop setting up. Kuno asked, ‘Does that mean we’re banned?’
‘We didn’t say you were banned,’ Comrade Oelschlägel said. ‘We said you don’t exist.’
Klaus is flicking his Zippo trying to get the flame to lick his spliff. He sucks and looks over it at me and starts exhaling, laughing. ‘Then I said, “But…we’re…still…here.” She looked me straight in the face. “As a combo,” she said, “you no longer exist.”’
They were dismissed. Klaus managed to pass the tape to his girlfriend Angelika. ‘She didn’t know what it was,’ he says, ‘but she knew it was important.’ Angelika hid it in her scarf and took it back to their flat. When he got home after drinking all afternoon in the Ratskeller, Klaus wrote ‘Fats Domino’ in big letters on the cassette and put it up on the shelf.
Angelika had a Greek passport, which meant she could travel to the west. The next day Klaus asked her to go over to West Berlin for a day trip, ‘to get toothpaste or whatever’. He couldn’t be sure she wouldn’t be strip-searched at the border so she didn’t take the tape, but he wanted the authorities to see she’d been over and back. Then he let it be known in Leipzig that he had made a recording of the decree of the licensing committee, that it was now at the RIAS (Radio in the American Sector) radio station in West Berlin, and that if anything happened to them it would be broadcast immediately.