I went home to Australia, but now I am back in Berlin. I could not get Miriam’s story, the strange second-hand tale of a woman I had never met, out of my mind. I found a part-time job in television, and set about looking for some of the stories from this land gone wrong.
2
Miriam
I work at the overseas television service in what was West Berlin. The service was set up by the government after the war to beam benign Germanness around the globe. My job is to answer letters from viewers who’ve been beamed at and have some queries.
At Viewer Post I am a cross between an agony aunt, a free research assistant and a receptacle for messages in bottles. ‘Dear Viewer Post, I am looking for the address of the clinic of Dr Manfred von Ardenne to try his new ultra-high temperature cancer treatment for advanced stages as featured in your program…’; ‘Dear Viewer Post, Many thanks for your interesting program on asylum seekers in your country. I am sixteen years old and living in Akra. Could you please send me informations on asylum…’ The occasional neo-Nazi from Missouri or Liverpool writes wanting information on ‘mother groups’ in East Germany. A man from Birmingham, Alabama sent me a photograph of himself in uniform at the liberation of Bergen Belsen concentration camp in 1945 standing behind corpses. He wrote, ‘Thank you for your program on the fiftieth anniversary of the peace. I would like you to know that I recall with great fondness the welcome we Americans received from the ordinary German people. In the villages they had nothing, but when we came they shared it with us like family…’ I write contained and appropriate responses. Sometimes, I wonder what it would be like to be German.
Alexander Scheller is my boss. He’s a tall man just on forty who has a picture of a tight-faced blonde wife, a glass ashtray and a permanent cup of coffee on his vast and otherwise empty desk. He taps incessantly, fidgety with caffeine and nicotine. To his credit, he does me the honour of behaving as if my work answering viewer correspondence is as important as that of the journalists and professional people here. A month ago I sat on the other side of that desk because he had made time for a meeting I called myself.
Scheller’s off-sider Uwe Schmidt was there too. Uwe’s main job as adjutant is to make Scheller seem important enough to have an adjutant. The other part of his job is to appear busy and time-short, which is more difficult because he has hardly anything to do. Scheller and Uwe are both westerners.
Uwe has a similar amount of TV-journo energy to Scheller, only Uwe’s is sexual not chemical. Uwe’s girlfriends are always leaving him and he is, therefore, at most times of day and in almost any company, deeply distracted by desire.
I like Uwe and feel sorry for him because I know that in looking for the reason why his girlfriends leave him he has started to wear himself out from the inside. I recently saw him singing ‘You’re once, twice, three times a layayadeee’ in English in his car at the lights with tears on his face. Now, over the other side of the desk, he caught himself looking at me like food, and I knew he hadn’t heard what I was saying.
‘Pardon?’ he said.
I decided to start from the beginning. ‘We’ve had a letter from a German living in Argentina in response to the item on the puzzle women.’
‘Puzzle women? Puzzle women?’ Uwe said, trying to remember the story.
‘They sit in Nuremberg puzzling together the shredded files the Stasi couldn’t burn or pulp.’
‘Right. I’m with you,’ Scheller said. He was tapping the eraser end of a pencil on the desk.
‘This man says he left Dresden after the war. He asks whether we might do an item on what things are actually like now for the East German people instead, as he says, of “always broadcasting what is being done for the poor cousins”.’
‘Puzzle women,’ Uwe muttered.
I took a deep breath. ‘And I agree with him—we’re always talking about the things that Germany is doing for people in the former GDR. It would be great to do an item from the eastern point of view. For instance, to find out what it’s like to wait for part of your file to be pieced together.’
‘You know we don’t broadcast domestically,’ Scheller said, ‘so there’s no point us doing items on the Ossis for their gratification.’
I looked to Uwe, off to one side with his feet up on Scheller’s acreage of desk. He was rolling a fountain pen over his knuckles, lost in a reverie. Puzzling over women.
‘I know, I know,’ I said to Scheller. ‘But East Germany—I just think we should show some of the stories from there. From here, I mean.’
‘What sort of stories?’ Scheller asked. Behind him the computer gave off a glockenspiel beep signalling new email.
‘I don’t know,’ I said, because I really didn’t know. ‘There must be people who stood up to the regime somehow, or who were wrongfully imprisoned.’ I felt myself warming up, a little dangerous. ‘I mean, after World War II people searched high and low for the smallest signs of resistance to Hitler—as if a tiny piece of national pride could be salvaged and tied onto a couple of student pacifists and a bunch of old Prussian aristocrats. What about here? There must have been some resistance to the dictatorship?’
‘They aren’t a nation.’ Scheller was tetchy now.
‘I know, but it was a nation.’
‘Look,’ he said, ‘they are just Germans who had Communism for forty years and went backwards, and all they want now is the money to have big TV sets and holidays in Majorca like everyone else. It was an experiment and it failed.’
‘Well, what do you suggest I write to this guy?’ I could hear my voice getting higher. ‘Should I tell him that no-one here is interested in East Germans and their stories, because they don’t form part of our overseas image?’
‘For God’s sake!’ Scheller said. ‘You won’t find the great story of human courage you are looking for—it would have come out years ago, straight after 1989. They are just a bunch of downtrodden whingers, with a couple of mild-mannered civil rights activists among them, and only a couple at that. They just had the rotten luck to end up behind the Iron Curtain.’ He tilted his head. ‘What has gotten into you?’
Uwe put his feet down. ‘Are you all right?’
Uwe walked back to my desk with me, solicitous as a doctor with a patient who’s had bad news. That he did this made me realise I had gone over the top. He said, ‘He’s simply not interested.’
‘No-one is interested in these people.’
‘Look.’ Uwe touched my forearm gently, turning me towards him like a dance partner. His eyes were green and slanted up, his teeth short and neat, little pearls. ‘You’re probably right. No-one here is interested—they were backward and they were broke, and the whole Stasi thing…’ He trailed off. His breath was minty. ‘It’s sort of…embarrassing.’
I replied to the Argentinian thanking him for his suggestion but telling him that ‘regrettably the station’s remit is only for current affairs and news, and we are therefore unable to investigate more personal, “point-of-view” stories.’
A week ago he wrote back. He was angry, telling me that history is made of personal stories. He said that issues were being swept under the carpet in East Germany, and people along with them. It took twenty years after the war, he said, for the Nazi regime even to begin to be discussed in Germany, and that that process is repeating itself now. ‘Will it be 2010 or 2020 before what happened there is remembered?’ he wrote. And, ‘Why are some things easier to remember the more time has passed since they occurred?’
The woman opposite me wakes up as the train pulls into Leipzig. Because there is something intimate about watching another person sleep, she now acknowledges my existence. ‘Wiedersehen,’ she says as she leaves the compartment.
Miriam Weber stands at the end of the platform, a small still woman in the stream of alighting passengers. She holds a single rose in front of her body so I will know who she is. We shake hands, not looking too closely at first, talking about trains, trips, rain. It feels like a blind date, because we have described our
selves to each other. I know she has not told her story to a stranger before.
We drive through Leipzig. The city has been transformed into a building site, a work in progress with some new goal. Cranes are picking over holes open as wounds. People ignore them, weaving head-down along footpaths and alleyways. On one of the concrete towers a large Mercedes emblem rotates, waltzing to the new tune here.
Miriam’s apartment is in the roof of her building. There are five flights of stairs, broad sweeping stairs with a graceful dark balustrade. I try not to puff too loudly. I try not to think about my damaged head. I try to remember when elevators were invented. When we reach it, the apartment is one big light space under the eaves, full of plants and lamps, with views over all of Leipzig. From here you could see anyone coming.
We sit in large cane chairs. Miriam, when I look at her straight, is a woman in her mid-forties with a cute short haircut, the bits on the crown sticking out like a cartoon boy, and small round glasses. She wears a long black sweater and pants, and curls her legs under her. She has a surprisingly big nicotine-stained voice. She is so slight that the voice comes from nowhere and everywhere at once: it is not immediately evident that it is hers; it fills the room, and it wraps us up.
‘I became, officially, an Enemy of the State at sixteen. At six-teen.’ Miriam looks at me through her glasses, and her eyes are wide and blue. In her voice is a combination of pride in how she became such a fiend, and disbelief that this country created enemies of its own children. ‘You know, at sixteen you have this sort of itch.’
In 1968 the old University Church in Leipzig was demolished suddenly, without any public consultation. Two hundred and fifty kilometres away the Prague Spring was in full swing, and the Russians had not yet brought the tanks into the streets to crush the demonstrators for democracy. The demolition of the church in Leipzig provided a focus for the expression of a widespread malaise the Leipzigers had caught from their Czech cousins. Twenty-three years after the end of World War II, the next generation was asking questions about the way their parents had implemented Communist ideals.
The Leipzig demonstrations were interpreted by the East German regime as a sign of the times, a cinder likely to ignite. The police doused people with fire hoses and made many arrests. Miriam and her friend Ursula thought this was not right. ‘At sixteen you have an idea of justice, and we just thought it was wrong. We weren’t seriously against the state—we hadn’t given it that much thought. We just thought it wasn’t fair to rough people up and bring in horses and so on.’
The two of them decided to do something about it. At a stationer’s they bought a child’s stamp set with ink, small rubber letters and a rail to put them in.
‘You could buy that sort of thing?’ I ask. I know that roneo printers, typewriters and later photocopiers were strictly (if not particularly effectively) controlled by licence in the GDR.
‘Not after what we did,’ she smiles. ‘The Stasi had them taken off the shelves.’
Miriam and Ursula made leaflets (‘Consultation, not water cannon!’ and ‘People of the People’s Republic speak up!’) They stuck them up around town one night. The girls wore gloves so as not to leave fingerprints. ‘We had read as many novels as the next person,’ she says, laughing. Miriam had the posters tucked in her jacket; Ursula had a tub of paste and a brush hidden in a milk crate. They were clever—they slapped the leaflets up in telephone booths over the instructions and at tramstops over the timetables. ‘We wanted to make sure people read them.’ They made a circle around the town, and then they went straight through it.
The girls passed the Communist Party Regional Headquarters. Things were going well. ‘We just looked at each other and we couldn’t resist.’ They marched in and told the guard on duty they were there to see Herr Schmidt, on the off-chance that someone by that name was in the building. They didn’t stop to think what they would have done had a Herr Schmidt come out.
The guard made a call. He put the phone down. ‘Uh no, Comrade Schmidt’s not here at the moment.’ The girls said they would come back the next day.
‘On the way out there were these beautiful smooth columns…’
Miriam is convinced, however, that had they left it at that they would have gotten away with it, but on the home stretch they went one step too far. Passing a building where some of their classmates lived, they put leaflets in the letterboxes of two boys they knew. The next day, one of the parents rang the police.
‘Why would you call the police about some junk mail?’ I ask.
‘Because they were silly, or maybe they were in the Party, who knows?’
‘It seems so harmless,’ I say.
Miriam comes back quiet but strong. ‘At that time it was not harmless. It was the crime of sedition.’
In East Germany, information ran in a closed circuit between the government and its press outlets. As the government controlled the newspapers, magazines and television, training as a journalist was effectively training as a government spokesperson. Access to books was restricted. Censorship was a constant pressure on writers, and a given for readers, who learnt to read between the lines. The only mass medium the government couldn’t control was the signal from western television stations, but it tried: until the early 1970s the Stasi used to monitor the angle of people’s antennae hanging out of their apartments, punishing them if they were turned to the west. Later, they gave up: the benefits of soporific commercial programming apparently outweighed the dangers of news bulletins from the free world.
Sedition was handled by the secret police, not the ordinary Volkspolizei. The Stasi were methodical. They questioned all the classmates of the boys who had received the pamphlets. They talked to the principal, teachers, parents. Several days went by. Miriam and Ursula agreed on an arrest and incarceration plan: neither would admit anything. The Stasi arrived at a shortlist of suspects. Men with gloves and dogs combed Miriam’s house.
‘And we thought we had been so careful, thrown everything out and destroyed all the evidence.’
The Stasi found some of the little rubber letters in the carpet. Miriam’s parents told the officers they did not know how such a thing could have happened in their house.
Both girls were placed in solitary confinement for a month. They had no visits from their parents or from lawyers, no books, no newspapers, not a phone call.
In the beginning they stuck to their plan. ‘No sir, I don’t know either how the leaflets got there, no, it couldn’t possibly have been her.’ ‘But eventually,’ Miriam says, ‘they break you. Just like fiction. They used the old trick and told each of us that the other had admitted, so we might as well too. After no visits, no books, nothing, you think: well, she probably did say it.’
The girls were let out to await their trials. When she got home Miriam thought, there’s no way they’re going to put me back in that place. The next morning she got on a train for Berlin. It was New Year’s Eve 1968, and Miriam Weber was going over the Wall.
3
Bornholmer Bridge
It takes less than two hours to get from Leipzig to Berlin but Miriam had never been there in her life. Alone in the big city, she bought herself a map at the station. ‘I wanted to have a look at the border in a few places. I thought: this cannot be for real, somewhere or other you just must be able to get over that thing.’
At the Brandenburg Gate she was amazed that she could walk right up to the Wall. She couldn’t believe the guards let her get that close. But it was too flat and too high to climb. Later she found out that the whole border paraphernalia only started behind the Wall at that spot. ‘Even if I had been able to get up there, I could only have put my head over and waved “Hello” to the eastern guards.’ She waves with both hands, and shrugs her shoulders.
By nightfall the chances were looking slim. ‘I hadn’t found any holes in it,’ Miriam says. She was cold and unhappy. She sat in the suburban train on her way to Alexanderplatz station to catch the regional line home. It was dark and she wa
s going back to prison. The train sluiced between buildings, high up on its stilts. Buildings on both sides, flat concrete render facades with rectangular windows, five storeys high. Some lit, some dark, some with plants, some without. Then the vista changed. It took Miriam a moment to notice it in the dark, but suddenly she was going past high wire-mesh fencing.
‘I thought: if I am travelling along here, and there’s this big wire fence right next to me, then West Berlin would have to be just over there on the other side.’ She got off the train, crossed the platform and caught another train back. It was as she had thought: a tall wire fence. She got off again and went back, this time getting out at Bornholmer Bridge station.
Later, I looked up the Bornholmer Bridge on a street map. I had heard of it, and thought it might have been one of the places East and West Germany used to exchange each other’s spies. Now, I see nothing but this bridge each time I open a street map. It is like once you notice someone has a cast in his eye, that’s all you can see in his face.
A western train line and an eastern train line met rarely in divided Germany. At Bornholmer Bridge the western train line still swoops down from the northwest to the southwest, and the eastern one up from the southeast to the northeast. The shapes they make on the map are like figures in profile doing a Maori nose-kiss.
At Bornholmer Bridge the border ran, in theory, along the space between the tracks. In other places in Berlin the border, and with it the Wall, cut a strange wound through the city. The Wall went through houses, along streets, along waterways, and sliced underground train lines to pieces. Here, instead of cutting the train line, the East Germans built most of the Wall’s fortifications in front of the train line on the eastern side, letting the eastern trains run through to the furthest wall at the end of the death strip.