It is hard to say how much protection that gave them, if any. Renft records disappeared from the shops overnight. The band ceased to be written about or played on the radio. The recording company AMIGA reprinted its entire catalogue so it could leave them out. ‘In the end it was as they had said: we simply did not exist any more,’ he says, ‘just like in Orwell.’
Rumours were put about by the state that the band had split up, that it was in difficulties. It was: it couldn’t play. Some members wanted to stay in the GDR, others knew they’d have to leave. Pannach and Kunert were arrested and imprisoned until August 1977 when they were bought free by the west. The other two, ‘the more unpolitical ones’, Klaus says, stayed in the east with their manager. He shifts in his chair. ‘Have you heard of the group Karussell?’ he asks.
‘No.’
Klaus explains that the manager who stayed with the pliable members turned out to be a Stasi man. Under him, Renft regrouped as Karussell and went on to record Renft songs, ‘note for note’. ‘They copied us so exactly you can’t tell,’ Klaus says, ‘whether it’s Renft, or it’s Karussell.’ The Stasi were satisfying the needs of the people, but with a band it could control.
‘Weren’t you furious?’
He shrugs. Someone else might have found this a betrayal, reason to dwell on this part of their life. After all it marked, for Klaus, the beginning of a fifteen-year hiatus. But he has the gift of taking things easy. Cushioned by alcohol, his landings are soft. He seems incapable of regret, and anger evaporates off him like sweat.
From the end of 1975, Klaus was left with nothing to do, no-one to do it with. After the usual chicanery from the authorities, he was let out with his girlfriend into West Berlin. It was hard to go from money and fame to nothing. Renft’s cachet did not translate over the Wall. He was bewildered. His fans were rebels, and they were not here. Klaus worked for years in the west as a sound-man in the theatre. After the Wall came down, he found out that ‘we’d become a cult band in the GDR—our records were more expensive than a Pink Floyd album’. Since then the band members have been getting back together, but the line-up has changed and Pannach, their wordsmith, died.
I’ve been reading about Pannach’s death lately. He died prematurely of an unusual kind of cancer, as did Jürgen Fuchs and Rudolf Bahro, both dissidents and writers. All of them had been in Stasi prisons at around the same time. When a radiation machine was found in one of these prisons, the Stasi File Authority began to investigate the possible use of radiation against dissidents. What it uncovered shocked a people used to bad news.
The Stasi had used radiation to mark people and objects it wanted to track. It developed a range of radioactive tags including irradiated pins it could surreptitiously insert into a person’s clothing, radioactive magnets to place on cars, and radioactive pellets to shoot into tyres. It developed hand-pump sprays so Stasi operatives could approach people in a crowd and impregnate them with radiation or secretly spray their floor at home so they would leave radioactive footprints everywhere they went. Rudolf Bahro’s manuscript was irradiated so it could be traced to recipients, even in the west. To detect the marked person or object, the Stasi developed personal geiger counters that could be strapped to the body, and would silently vibrate if the officer got a reading. And in the prison and remand centres, the Stasi sometimes used radiation machines as well as cameras where the prisoners’ mug shots were taken. The File Authority report was cautious. It found no evidence that radiation was used to kill off marked men and women. But it did find that it was used with reckless disregard for people’s health. And it recommended that former prisoners of the Stasi get regular medical check-ups.
Although Pannach died, Kuno is well, and he is now fronting the reformed Klaus Renft Combo. They are on tour again through the old GDR, playing to sell-out crowds hungry for something that was theirs, that was untainted, and that was good. They play a mixture of old and new songs. Their latest album is called As If Nothing Had Happened. The cover is a picture of a full ashtray, emtpy beer cans and an open bottle of whisky. Part joke, part revenge, and part explanation for the lost years, the last item on the CD is the authentic 1975 recording of the Oelschlägel interchange, declaring them to no longer exist.
Our conversation is sliding back and forward. Klaus is still thinking about my question of whether it took courage to turn down the initial offers to leave, or to play along with the Stasi. ‘I don’t know whether it was courage,’ he says. ‘More like some kind of naivety, that protected me, I think.’ I think he’s right here, but it is a naivety that is carefully nurtured and maintained, an innocence that he did not let them damage. ‘I mean, we didn’t all get huge villas on the Mugglesee like the Puhdys, but I can look at myself in the mirror in the morning and say, “Klaus, you did all right.” Material things are not what matter to me.’
He leans back. The smoke leaving his mouth obscures it in a haze of grey, and grey beard. ‘I think the Stasi people have been punished enough.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Well, if they’ve got any conscience at all…’
‘And if not?’ I think of Herr Winz and Herr Christian and Herr Koch and the different kinds of conscience there are.
‘I’m not that interested,’ he says. ‘I didn’t let them get to me.’
This, I think, is his victory. This is what stops him being bound to the past and carrying it around like a wound. If there was ‘internal emigration’ in the GDR, there was also, perhaps, internal victory.
He looks at me. Over the evening he seems to have become more insightful and nimble-minded while I am inert as a sponge. ‘Do you want to hear something beautiful?’ he asks. I nod. He puts on a video of the band performing a song Pannach wrote shortly before he died. Kuno looks now like a butcher or a bikie, but his voice is mellow and grand, fine as it ever was.
I sing my blues for a man
Who could tell you
How red the dreams were in the ruins
Where the concrete towers are now
And do you want to know what’s left
Of that man’s dreams? Then ask the walls
Of Cell 307 in Hohenschönhausen
I sing the blues in red
For one who can’t hear me
As a child in the dark
Sings a song to himself…
For this moment the song soars and nothing else exists; I have no body, and time stops passing. Klaus stretches in his chair. When it finishes he says, ‘You can’t let it eat you up, you know, make you bitter. You’ve got to laugh where you can.’ He’s right, of course. And to drink. By my reckoning, I am pacing him at about 1:3 but I am not so sure of my counting. He picks up a guitar and starts to stroke it absent-mindedly, lovingly across its curved wooden body. I see through the bottom of my glass—the table, the ashtray and the cans of beer. They look weirdly small and far away. I take my face out of the glass in a hurry and realise it’s the CD cover I’m looking at. But the table is covered in ashtrays and beer cans—the same scene in two different sizes. It’s time to go.
I don’t feel the cold, I don’t feel much. Rolling stone. Stone rolling home. The cobbles are wet, and the streetlamps make puddles of yellow light on the ground. I think of my friend in his room, singing himself happy.
20
Herr Bock of Golm
The phone calls keep coming.
‘Bock.’ A quiet voice, an old man’s heavy breath on the receiver. ‘In response to your notice.’
‘Ah. Yes. Herr Bock. Thank you for calling me.’ Before I can explain what I’m doing he says, ‘I can tell you all there is to know about the Ministry of State Security. Everything you need, young woman, I can give you, because I was a professor at the training academy of the ministry. In fact, I taught Spezialdisziplin.’
‘Oh,’ I say. ‘Ja?’
‘Spezialdisziplin,’ he repeats. ‘Do you know what that means?’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘Spezialdisziplin is the science of r
ecruiting informers. Spezialdisziplin is the art,’ he says, ‘of the handler.’ He pauses. ‘You should come to my house. It is directly opposite the academy at Golm. Do you know where that is?’
‘No, I don’t.’ He gives me train and bus directions.
The more prone to getting lost one is, the more one tries to compensate. My grandmother has a small spirex notepad bound discreetly to an undergarment as an aide memoire, and I have a lot of maps. I have a 1986 map of Potsdam in which the areas where there were Stasi buildings—anything from bunkers to multi-storey edifices to shooting ranges—are left blank. On another, a 1984 map of East Berlin, entire city blocks and streets in Stasi areas are simply not represented: they are pale orange gaps in the map. Out of curiosity I look up Golm, and find that it is a gap on the map, on the outskirts of Potsdam.
I follow Herr Bock’s instructions. I take the train from Berlin to the end of the line, and then I take two buses. His house is one in a street of identical semi-detached dwellings, each with a patch of lawn and a wire gate in front of it. It seems to be the only street that exists here, as though a town planner had an idea for a settlement that was begun before he thought better of it. The houses are covered in rough grey concrete, knobbly all over as if from cold. None of them, including Herr Bock’s, looks inhabited.
It is late afternoon. Herr Bock’s living room is, overwhelmingly, beige and brown: brown linoleum and dark veneer wall units, a brown couch and Herr Bock sitting camouflaged in it in a beige-and-brown diamond pattern acrylic cardigan. He has thick square glasses that give him underwater eyes, and an overbite. A moustache hangs on his upper lip. His voice is so soft I have to lean in to him.
‘You must not use my name,’ he says as an opener.
I agree.
He relaxes back into the couch and starts to hold forth. He says that the ministry was divided into two main sections: internal (called ‘Defence’) and external (‘Counter-espionage’). He taught a course for Stasi officers destined to work in Defence. This title is euphemistic. The internal service of the Stasi was designed to spy on and control the citizens of the GDR. The only way to make sense of its name is to understand the Stasi as defending the government against the people. I take notes like a student. Herr Bock outlines each department of the Defence. I write:
Main Departments:
Economy
State Apparatus
Church
Sport
Culture
Counter-terrorism
East Germany was a small country of only seventeen million people, but these Stasi divisions and sub-departments were replicated throughout its territory no fewer than fifteen times. In every corner of the nation, every aspect of your life had its mirror nemesis in a department.
‘Let us take,’ says Herr Bock, ‘as a specific instance the department of the church.’ The church—pastors and people—was the only area of society in the GDR where oppositional thought could find a structure and could coalesce into something real. Consequently, theological colleges attracted bright, independent-minded students. ‘All our people had to have theological training themselves so they’d pass for members of the churches they infiltrated.’ He crosses an ankle onto his knee. ‘How did we do it you might ask?’ He snaps his fingers. ‘Answer: we went into the theological colleges and recruited the students themselves!’ He rubs his hands together. They make a papery sound. ‘You know,’ he says, ‘we were supremely effective. It is not widely known that in the end, 65 per cent of the church leaders were informers for us, and the rest of them were under surveillance anyhow.’
I once saw a note on a Stasi file from early 1989 that I would never forget. In it a young lieutenant alerted his superiors to the fact that there were so many informers in church opposition groups at demonstrations that they were making these groups appear stronger than they really were. In one of the most beautiful ironies I have ever seen, he dutifully noted that, by having swelled the ranks of the opposition, the Stasi was giving the people heart to keep demonstrating against them.
Herr Bock uncrosses his legs and spreads his knees. His feet, in socks and sandals, barely touch the floor. Outside, the light is leaving us. He is on a roll. ‘Now to our working methods. These were set out in Directives. There were four main areas.’ I write:
Working Methods:
Exposing of Moles (Enttarnung)
Recruitment of Informers
Operational Control of Persons (Surveillance)
Security Checks
Herr Bock’s passion is for recruitment. ‘Directive 1/79!’ he cries. ‘One seventy-nine! On the Conversion of and Collaboration with Informers!’ He takes out a handkerchief and wipes the corners of his mouth. ‘There was nothing willy-nilly about it. We had to decide where in society, on objective principles, there was a need for an informer. For example, we might need one in an apartment block, a factory, or a supermarket. Then a rational evaluation would be made: what sort of person do we need here? What qualities should they have? We would find three or four people who fitted the bill. Without their knowledge, they would be comprehensively observed and evaluated in order to determine whether they could be approached or not.
‘Most often,’ he says, ‘people we approached would inform for us. It was very rare that they would not. However, sometimes we felt that we might need to know where their weak points were, just in case. For instance, if we wanted a pastor, we’d find out if he’d had an affair, or had a drinking problem—things that we could use as leverage. Mostly though, people just said yes.’
It is dark now, but Herr Bock seems to be brightening right up. ‘The third method was “Operational Control of Persons”.’
‘What does that mean?’ I ask.
‘Well,’ he says, ‘they were controlled using means and methods, all the means and methods allowable could be used to control them.’ He puts his palms together, then closes them up between his legs. ‘It got pretty tough for some people, you’d have to say,’ he says.
These were the allowable means and methods:
Telephone tapping
Mobilisation of Informers
Shadow surveillance by Observational Forces
Use of Investigative Forces
Use of Technical Forces (including the installation of technology—
bugs—in living quarters of the subject)
Post and parcel interception
That leaves only one thing I can think of. ‘Did you use smell sampling?’
‘Oh, no, no, no,’ he says, ‘that was for criminals.’
‘Well who were the people you were doing the “Operational Control” on?’
‘They were enemies.’
‘Oh. How did you know they were enemies?’
‘Well,’ he says in his soft voice, ‘once an investigation was started into someone, that meant there was suspicion of enemy activity.’ This was perfect dictator-logic: we investigate you, therefore you are an enemy. ‘We searched for enemies in all the areas I mentioned: in the factories, in the state apparatus, the church, the schools and so on. In fact,’ he says, ‘as time went on there was more and more work to do because the definition of “enemy” became wider and wider.’
I put my pen in the crease of my notebook and peer into the gloom in his direction. Herr Bock says other professors at the academy spent their careers expanding the reach of the paragraphs of the law so as to be able to encompass more enemies in them. ‘In fact, their promotions depended on it,’ he says. ‘We talked about it among ourselves up on the sixth floor over there,’ an arm gestures towards the building opposite. ‘And I don’t mind telling you that some of us actually thought the paragraphs became a little too wide.’ I nod. If, by the mere fact of investigating someone you turn them into an Enemy of the State, you could potentially busy yourself with the entire population.
‘Too wide,’ he continues, ‘to be properly carried out. Within available resources I mean.’
‘What qualities did you look for in an informer?’ I ask Her
r Bock.
‘Well,’ he says, leaning back and clasping both hands behind his head, ‘he had to be able to adapt to new situations quickly and make himself belong wherever we put him. And at the same time he had to have a stable enough character to keep it clear in his mind that he was reporting to us. And above all else,’ he says, looking straight at me, his eyes distorted and magnified through the glasses, ‘he needed to be honest, faithful and trustworthy.’
I look back at him. I feel my eyes too, getting wider.
‘I mean only towards the ministry, of course,’ he corrects himself. ‘We weren’t interested if he betrayed anyone else…’ He leans his head to one side, in thought. ‘In point of the fact he had to, didn’t he?’ he says. ‘Perhaps,’ he continues, ‘this ability is not a great quality in a human being. But it was vital for our work. I have to say that it is the same in all secret services.’
But it is not. Few secret services have informers reporting meticulously on activities at kindergartens and dinner parties and sporting events across the nation.
‘What was in it for the informers?’ I want to know how much they were paid.
‘It was pitiful actually,’ Bock admits. ‘They were hardly paid at all. Every week they had to meet with their handlers, and they were not paid for that. Every now and then they might have been given some money as a reward for a specific piece of information. Sometimes they were given a birthday present.’
‘So why did they do it?’
‘Well, some of them were convinced of the cause,’ he says. ‘But I think it was mainly because informers got the feeling that, doing it, they were somebody. You know—someone was listening to them for a couple of hours a week, taking notes. They felt they had it over other people.’
To my mind, there is something warmer and more human about the carnality of other dictatorships, say in Latin America. One can more easily understand a desire for cases stuffed with money and drugs, for women and weapons and blood. These obedient grey men doing it with their underpaid informers on a weekly basis seem at once more stupid and more sinister. Betrayal clearly has its own reward: the small deep human satisfaction of having one up on someone else. It is the psychology of the mistress, and this regime used it as fuel.