He continues with some advice. ‘You’ve got to get outdoors,’ he says. ‘You know, television is not good for the eyes. Not healthy.’ I wonder if he was somehow watching over me that winter, seeing the flickering black and white at my window. Maybe these men, stationed in parks and on street corners, at tramstops and in the underground, are the ones who see everything now. A woman walks past on her way to the lights, and he lifts his hand in greeting, or to let her pass.
‘Back in the GDR I was a tailor. Now that’s not good for the eyes either. I wanted to be an actor or a cook, but it didn’t happen.’ I think he has become both, with this performance and his sautéed mushrooms. ‘Until 1990 I was in the voluntary fire brigade, but then it all went to hell in a handcart. This Kapitalismus, you can’t imagine the sort of shit it’s building.’ He sniffs and spits onto the ground. Then he reaches into his pocket and pulls out a comb. ‘It was so much better before. I’m in the same flat—then it cost me 450 marks a month, and now it’s 804! So what if we didn’t have bananas and mandarins! It doesn’t take a banana to turn me on!’ He runs the comb carefully through his coiffure. ‘I used to be able to get five kilos of potatoes for next to nothing, beer was fifty pfennig a can and now what? Transport was thirty pfennig and twenty on Fridays. I mean we had a social state—you didn’t even have to pay for medicine. I tell you I just don’t get it. It’s all stupid now.’ I glimpse past him and see that his friends are nodding in silent, unsteady agreement.
I have heard this kind of thing before, though ex-Stasi men, privileged left-wing intellectuals or former Party members complain more about airfares: ‘What good is freedom to travel when I can’t afford to go to New York/Las Palmas/New Zealand for my holiday?’ Once in Leipzig, an old woman in a pub, drinking her daily schnapps at four in the afternoon, said to me, ‘Well, this is better than the Weimar Republic and better than the Nazis but bring back the Communists, is what I say. The pubs were fuller under Honecker. Cheers.’ I don’t doubt this genuine nostalgia, but I think it has coloured a cheap and nasty world golden; a world where there was nothing to buy, nowhere to go and anyone who wanted to do anything with their lives other than serve the Party risked persecution, or worse.
The morning has come alive now, insects dance over the grass and pollen hangs in the light as people walk through the park to Rosenthaler Platz station. Professor Mushroom is on a roll. ‘Back then when you were drunk the police would just take you under the arms and set you down on a bench. Now, we can’t even sleep here any more or we’d get robbed! It’s terrible the morals these days. Do you know you can get mugged for one cigarette! It’s the Russian mafia and the Romanians and the gypsies. If a gypsy woman came and danced on this bench, I tell you your wallet would be gone in a flash!’
This complaint, too, I have heard before in different versions: an ache for a lost time when things were more secure. In a security state, after all, the least the authorities could do when they were incarcerating so many innocents was to clean up the criminals at the same time.
‘Look, 200 metres over there’—Professor Mushroom extends his arm and I see a swathe of grey chest hair between his braces—‘was the Wall. Before we had that, the Wessis flocked over here and bought up all our stuff! We put up the Wall so we could go shopping in our own shops! In the end though, they pulled the Wall down and bought us all up anyway, those Wessis with their western money—all the factories and businesses and even the pubs. And they won’t let us hold our heads high now—oh no!
‘I’ll tell you honestly about the border.’ He pats my knee again. ‘And I am an honest man. We all knew, every GDR citizen knew, that if you went close to it, you’d be shot! That’s all there was to it! So we stayed here! I mean they should have all sat here on their arses—then they wouldn’t have got them shot full of lead!’
I know this argument as well: if you didn’t buck the system, then it wouldn’t harm you.
But, from what I have seen, it probably would.
The professor shakes my hand. ‘You really should come mushrooming with us,’ he says. The chorus rumbles and nods and I thank them and go, up to my palace of light and air and lino.
26
The Wall
In this soft spring I have taken to walking everywhere. It’s about 10 pm, and the sun has only just set. Cherry trees lining the streets scatter pips and juice stains over the pavement like blood. I walk home past the outdoor cafés at Kollwitzplatz where students, largely from the west, sit eating and laughing. I’m not sure how much they know of what has gone on in this place. I’m dreaming at the kerb as a woman in a jester’s cap and short shorts nearly clips my ear as she cycles past.
By the time I turn into my street the sky is black. A man is hunched unsteadily against my building, banging along it like a fly at a window. In the darkness he is more a shape than a person, an outline with a bottle in his hand. He is drunk—very drunk. When I get closer he reaches towards me and speaks, but it’s not clear whether he’s addressing me or the universe.
‘I don’t want to be German any more!’ he sobs. ‘I don’t want to be German any more!’ His face is tracked with silver tears.
‘Why not?’ I hold out a hand to steady him.
‘We are terrible.’ He has hardly looked at me. He couldn’t know I’m not German. ‘They are terrible. The Germans are terrible.’
He moves off, tapping his way along the buildings.
Which Germans did he mean? Some, or all? For this East German man, long used to thinking the bad Germans were on the other side of the Wall, maybe now it’s hard to tell. Are they really so bad? Or are they worse than he thought? And were his people, now broke or drunk, shamed or fled or imprisoned or dead, any good at all?
A friend of mine who works at the File Authority calls me up.
‘We had an interesting request here for a personal file yesterday,’ he says. ‘I thought I’d let you know.’
‘Who was it?’
‘Mr Mielke.’ My friend chuckles. We both know without saying: Mielke must think the apparatus he created was so thorough, with an administrative impetus all of its own, that somewhere, someone was keeping tabs on him.
A few days later I call Frau Paul. We chat for a while. She is active in an organisation for those persecuted by the regime—taking tours of Hohenschönhausen prison (‘we’re thinking of putting a coffee shop in there,’ she tells me), and campaigning for compensation for victims. Then she says, ‘There’s something else.’
‘Yes?’
‘I was followed home the other evening, from a public meeting on compensation.’
‘What?’
‘It’s true. A car followed me to the underground at walking pace. I was with friends and I didn’t think much about it. But when I got out of the train at Elsterwerdaer Platz I was alone and it was there waiting for me. Then it followed the bus. When I got off the bus it turned its lights off, and drove behind me right to my door.’
‘That’s horrible.’
‘Yes,’ she says, ‘there are a lot of people who don’t want us to raise our voices, to fight for what we deserve.’
‘Do you have any idea who it was?’
‘No. But it was almost certainly an ex-Stasi man.’ She is frightened, but she is steely. ‘It was a Volvo,’ she says. ‘I’m looking for a Volvo driver.’
Mielke died this week. He was ninety-two. The headlines read, ‘Most hated man now dead.’ I think of the other ‘most hated man’ and give him a call. His wife answers the phone and passes me to her husband. Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler tells me he’s not well, and that things are getting worse. By ‘things’, he means the world around him. ‘People are still spreading lies about my dear friend Erich Mielke and he’s under the ground! On Monday the urn was interred and on Tuesday it was desecrated! Right under the noses of the police guarding it! Do you understand? My friend’s ashes were scattered and his grave plot was de-se-cra-ted!’ His voice is exactly the same: hoarse, old and angry. ‘That is capitalism, naked and brutal!
An absolute Unkultur.’
The desecration of Mielke’s grave is unlikely to have been the work of westerners, and it is only a product of capitalism in that capitalism does not protect, or not adequately to his mind, the former leadership of the former GDR from what their people thought of them. I hear fear though in his voice, the flipside of fury. Fear perhaps that his end, soon to come, will also be a desecrated grave. Then I remember his conviction to the cause. I think he may not be so much afraid of death itself but that it will eliminate, finally, his powers of rebuttal.
Today I walk from my place up Brunnenstrasse, past Frau Paul’s tunnel to Bernauer Strasse where the Wall was. There is a new museum here. Its greatest exhibit is opposite: a full-size reconstructed section of the Wall, complete with freshly built and neatly raked death strip, for tourists. Right alongside it in Bernauer Strasse there are still some pieces of the real Wall, covered, as they always were on the western side, with bright graffiti. These remnants are behind bushes though, scrappy and crumbling. In some places the steel reinforcements in the concrete are bare as bones.
The new Wall, however, is pristine. It is utterly without grafitti. I can understand why the original has all but disappeared, and why, as Frau Paul and Torsten said, people wanted it to. But this new one is a sanitised Disney version; it is history, airbrushed for effect.
Inside the museum there are displays and touch-screen presentations showing how the Wall was built, recordings of Kennedy’s ‘Ick bin ein Berliner’ speech, and dramatisations of various escape attempts. ‘Yes, yes, yes,’ a man with his back to me is saying to another man behind the counter, ‘I’ll take them from here and bring them back here. I think it’ll take about two hours. That’s what I’m going to check now.’
‘Right then,’ the other man says, then he looks over at me. He is wearing fancy eyeglasses that appear to be held together by a row of miniature, multicoloured clothes pegs. ‘Can I help you?’
The man standing at the counter turns around to have a look at me. ‘Frau Funder!’ he cries. It is Hagen Koch. ‘Well, well, well! How are you? Yes! You might like to come with me!’ He speaks in exclamation marks. It is as if I have hardly been away. For him the past is the Wall, and I am part of the present, whether three years ago or now. His hair has turned white, but his eyes are the same bright and smiley brown.
‘Herr Koch, I’m well, thank you. Come where?’
‘I’m taking a busload of tourists tomorrow along the route where the Wall was, because you can hardly tell any more. I’m off now to check how long it will take.’
‘I’d love to come.’
We are to drive along the municipal boundary where the Wall was built: in a ring around the old city centre in the east, and past the western suburbs of Wedding, Moabit and Tiergarten. Then, he says, we will drive where the Wall went right through the centre of town, down Niederkirchnerstrasse through to the Spree River, and along its bank to the Oberbaum Bridge.
We climb into his small red car and he drives fast and sure. He is happy to have an audience to rehearse his ‘tour of the forgotten city’ routine. The first stop is just down the street, a stretch of grass maybe a hundred metres wide. Straggly weeds grow to knee-height, sway like sentient things in the warm air. There’s a cemetery behind here. A large stone angel on a pedestal is turned this way, her head bent low in prayer. We walk out to the middle. The sky seems wide in this place.
‘This was the death strip’—Herr Koch holds his arms out—‘but before that the cemetery extended to the street. When they built the Wall they had to dig up the bodies and take away the gravestones.’ He raises his eyebrows, ‘The guards used to get a bit spooked by that.’ Apparently, the border guards working on the death strip preferred no evidence of death in it.
Herr Koch is pleased to be with someone who shares his interest in the Wall. He is also, perhaps, even more obsessed with it than I remember. He seems to have lost the awareness that his is a particular interest. He is, once more, a true believer: the Wall is the thing that defined him, and he will not let it go. I think for a moment of Frau Paul, who will also not let it go. Herr Koch starts to take photographs. I look up at the angel’s long face and I think of Miriam and Julia; lives shaped, too, by the Wall. Will they let it go? Or, will it let them go?
Our next stop is the Schiffahrtskanal. Herr Koch is excited, speaking fast. We park outside a new housing development. The apartments are fresh and brightly coloured. They are arranged around a courtyard in the usual Berlin style but, in a startling departure from tradition, there’s an original, two-storey East German guard tower in the middle of the yard. Herr Koch gestures towards it. ‘This,’ he says, proudly, ‘is my tower.’ For a moment he’s so pleased he’s speechless.
I gaze at the thing. It is, unmistakably, an old guard tower from the death strip. It has square cement walls and windows up high to see in all directions. On the top there’s a fenced area the guards could shoot from. It is hardly a thing of joy, but Herr Koch’s face is shiny with delight.
‘Your tower?’
‘My tower.’
He explains that at the end of 1989 in his capacity as a cultural officer with the Stasi, he took it upon himself to be responsible for ‘Denkmalschutz’ or the preservation of historical monuments. He found a lot of little white-and-blue ‘national heritage’ enamel plaques, and in the chaos of those last days he went around screwing them into things precious to him like the Wall, the boom gates at Checkpoint Charlie and guard towers. Most of them were pulled down despite his efforts.
This tower here, he says, gave him a lot of trouble, particularly when the developers came in to build the apartments. ‘So what did I do?’
I look back at him. I cannot imagine.
‘I found a homeless man, and installed him in it! And I gave him money and a job—to renovate the tower! They couldn’t pull it down because it was inhabited!’
I see that over the door someone has hand-painted an address: Kieler Strasse 2. We enter and, sure enough, a modern white-tiled bathroom is being installed downstairs. ‘Unfortunately,’ Herr Koch says, ‘my tenant died.’ We climb a ladder to the top, where the guards worked. The tower is crumbling and smells of wet concrete, but I enjoy the thought that the previous tenant, an old eastern streetperson, would have lapped up the view from here, where before the guards had watched over him.
Herr Koch says, ‘But I think it is saved now. They had to build the apartments around it. The tenants didn’t like it at first, but I’ve been talking to them, and as time goes on they appreciate its historical significance more and more.’ He takes a dustpan and brush, and sweeps up proprietorially before we leave.
We drive into town, past the Bundestag, the Reichstag and Potsdamer Platz. At a set of lights I see a bollard with a poster of Renft promoting their current tour of the old East Germany. I enjoy the thought of Klaus strutting his stuff, blossomed once more into his rock star being. We stop in an ordinary street.
‘See?’ Herr Koch says, opening up his arms. I look around. There’s nothing to see.
‘You can’t see! You can’t see where the Wall went at all!’ He’s right, there’s no sign of it left, no bits of concrete, no wasteland.
‘Look down here though.’ He points to the ground. A narrow strip of granite is inlaid in the pavement, slightly darker grey than the footpath itself. ‘That’s all there is!’ he cries. ‘It used to be a red line, but even that was thought too obvious, so they came up with this instead. And what’s more, in the places where it does say, “Berliner Mauer 1961–1989” it’s written to be read from the western side. For us easterners it’s upside down!’
As we get back in the car he says, ‘I am the only person who is keeping alive the sense of the Wall from the eastern side. If there is one thing my life has taught me, it is that one must not see things just from one side! People don’t like me for it, but it must be done!’ Herr Koch is a lone crusader against forgetting.
We drive along Zimmerstrasse away from the centre
to Bethaniendamm. It is a scrawny part of town. There are more new brightly painted apartments on one side, and grey cement buildings on the other. In between there’s what looks at first like an empty lot, fenced in with wire mesh and boards and sticks. Behind the fence someone has planted potatoes and eggplants in neat rows, and tomatoes on stakes. But I’m still not sure what we’re looking at. ‘These,’ Herr Koch says, ‘are the Turkish onions.’
He takes me around the fenced area, a small triangle of land. There is an elaborate three-storey shack at one end made of pieces of fibroboard, crates and a ladder, with a grapevine climbing over it. Outside it there’s an old couch and chairs, and at the other end of the plot a child’s wooden swing hangs from a tree, painted red and yellow.
Herr Koch says that this land was, strictly speaking, in the eastern zone, but that it was too hard to build a bend in the Wall to include it, so the Wall went straight along the nearest street, leaving this island of land out in the west. No-one in West Berlin knew what to do with it; it could not be resumed for any purpose without antagonising the eastern regime. It was, literally, no-man’s land. Eventually, a Turkish family simply fenced it off and planted vegetables. When the Wall came down, no-one seemed to have a claim, so they are gardening here still. I gaze through the fence. There’s an apricot tree, and a large oak at the end. I imagine great family working bees; grandma on the couch, the kids on the swing and the smell of coffee from the summer palace at the end.
‘But you know what happened,’ Koch says. I turn back to him. ‘The family eventually fought—it was two brothers, I think. They fought so badly that in the end all they could do was to put a fence down the middle of the garden and split it into two separate zones!’ His face is alive with the irony of it. ‘Come here, look.’ We walk to the middle where a two-metre-high cyclone fence runs right through the little field, separating the part with the hut from the part with the swing, and no way of going between.