For now, though, this terrible game of waiting keeps her suspended from her life with Charlie, still in contact. And underneath the need to know, is the need for justice. The regime may be gone, but the world cannot be set to rights until Miriam has some kind of justice. Things have been put behind glass, but it is not yet over.
We talk into the evening, and eat tomato and basil, prosciutto and melon. Miriam speaks of friends, but she has no partner in life. ‘Too hard,’ she says sadly, ‘to explain everything.’ I ask her about her family. Her mother, she says, is a social climber—‘you’d think that would have been hard under socialism, but she managed to give it a go!’ She laughs. Her sister is a dentist. ‘You would have seen her office downstairs in this building.’ I am glad her sister is close.
‘And your father?’
‘My father was a doctor,’ she says, ‘a very kind man. He died in the early ’70s, relatively young.’ She taps the cigarette packet on the table. ‘Of lung cancer.’
‘Oh.’
‘But the thing about that is,’ she says as she exhales, ‘it doesn’t take very long at all.’
Through the double doors into the next room, my eyes catch a doll’s china stare—it is an old puppet in a white silky suit, hanging limbs akimbo from its crucifix of strings on the corner of a bookshelf.
Miriam asks me to stay, and insists on giving me her bed. I wake in the night and need water and air. On the way from the bathroom to the window over the heath I see her in the moonlight and stop. She is asleep on the floor of the living room, in loose white pyjamas with a blindfold across her eyes. Her neck is bent and her arms and legs are spreadeagled over a round flat cushion. She’s so slender and crumpled her whole body nearly fits onto it, strings cut, in the spotlight.
In the morning Miriam takes me to the station. To my relief I find a copy shop, so I can give Charlie’s poem back to her. She comes to the platform and waits till the train moves out, silent and slow. The girl opposite me lip-smacks her puppy; on the platform an older dog huffs and rearranges itself in jealousy. Then Miriam waves and walks away, straightbacked into the sunlight.
I like trains. I like their rhythm, and I like the freedom of being suspended between two places, all anxieties of purpose taken care of: for this moment I know where I am going. We are quickly outside Leipzig, moving past maize and wheat and medieval-looking water towers near each station: Lutherstadt Wittenberg, Bitterfeld, Wannsee. In one field there’s a scarecrow equipped for all comers in a black motorcycle helmet; behind him a parachutist looks for touchdown. Two boys in a dinghy sit among the reeds in this vast flat sea of improbable green, fishing.
I move back from the window and the puppy finds me suddenly fascinating. It has caught the rustle of paper in my pocket. I take out Charlie’s poem.
In this land
I have made myself sick with silence
In this land
I have wandered, lost
In this land
I hunkered down to see
What will become of me.
In this land
I held myself tight
So as not to scream.
—But I did scream, so loud
That this land howled back at me
As hideously
As it builds its houses.
In this land
I have been sown
Only my head sticks
Defiant, out of the earth
But one day it too will be mown
Making me, finally
Of this land.
I fold it and think of Charlie Weber, now of this land. And I think of Miriam, a maiden blowing smoke in her tower. Sometimes she can hear and smell them, but for now the beasts are all in their cages.
I walk home to the apartment from Rosenthaler Platz station. The park is alive, the light so bright it picks out people and their shadows in exaggerated 3-D. Sunbathers loll on the grass, some in trunks and some bare-bottomed. There are teenagers removing gum from their mouths to kiss, a sheepdog with a single forelock dyed green, an adolescent cripple in a baby pusher being taken for a stroll. People shake infants up and down to make them calm, and children spin on swings and roundabouts I never noticed were there.
Some Notes on Sources
p. 5 Historian Dr Klaus-Dietmar Henke says the ‘peaceful revolution’ of 1989 was ‘the only successful revolution in German history. The East Germans added one of the most splendid moments to the history of our country, to the very troubled way of our nation to find and to accept individual and political freedom as the main values.’ He also states that the number of files generated by the Stasi is about ‘the equivalent of all records produced in German history since the middle ages’.
‘Lifting the Lid on Oppression—the Stasi Files’ address to the International Bar Association, 26th Biennial Conference, Berlin 1996. Dr Henke was then head of the research department at the Stasi File Authority (Der Bundesbeauftragte für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen Deutschen Demokratischen Republik aka BstU).
p. 57 For figures on KGB agents in the Soviet Union, Gestapo personnel during the Nazi regime and Stasi employees and agents, see John O. Koehler, Stasi: The Untold Story of the East German Secret Police, Westview Press, Boulder CO, 1999, pp. 7–8.
pp. 57–58 On Erich Mielke’s life, see Jochen von Lang, Erich Mielke: Eine deutsche Karriere, Rohwolt, Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1993; Koehler, pp. 33–72. For Mielke’s famous speech in parliament see Der Spiegel 46/1999 (15 November 1999), ‘Wende und Ende des SED-Staates (8)’, at http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel
This speech is also available at http://ddr-im-www.de/Geschichte/1989.htm
Mielke’s pronouncements on traitors and execution come from the television documentary Die Stasi-Rolle: Geschichten aus dem MfS by Stefan Aust, Katrin Klöcke, Gunther Latsch and Georg Mascolo, Spiegel TV, 1993.
p. 61 The GDR had the highest GDP per capita in the Eastern Bloc: Alexandra Ritchie, Faust’s Metropolis: A History of Berlin, Carroll & Graf Publishers Inc., New York, 1998, p. 755.
The Russian publication Sputnik, for example, was banned by the GDR authorities in November 1988: Informationen zur politischen Bildung, 1, Quartal, 1996, ‘Der Weg zur Einheit: Deutschland seit Mitte der Achtziger Jahre’, p. 15.
p. 62 The Stasi File Authority’s report on Stasi preparations for the incarceration of citizens on ‘Day X’ is ‘Vorbereitung auf den Tag X—Die Geplanten Isolierungslager des MfS’ by Thomas Auerbach and Wolf-Dieter Sailer, BstU, 1995.
p. 64 Honecker’s words were, ‘Den Sozialismus in seinem Lauf, wie man bei uns zu sagen pflegt, hält weder Ochs noch Esel auf,’ Erfurt, 14 August 1989, and again in his address to the parliament on 6 October 1989, the GDR’s fortieth anniversary: see ‘1989–40 Jahre DDR’ at http://ddr-imwww.de/Geschichte/1989.htm
See the same site for Gorbachev’s famous admonishment. For Honecker’s order to ‘nip the counter-revolutionaries in the bud’ see Der Spiegel 40/1999 (4 October 1999), ‘Wende und Ende des SED-Staates (2)’ at http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/0,1518,44895,00.html
For the Stasi taking notes on the protesters’ cries against them, see Der Spiegel 46/1999 (15 November 1999), ‘Wende und Ende des SED-Staates (8)’, at http://www.spiegel.de/druckversion/0,1588,52264,00.html
p. 65 Günter Schabowski’s press conference speech of 9 November 1989 featured in the TV documentary Die Stasi-Rolle: Geschichten aus dem MfS, Spiegel TV, 1993. The same program also has Stasi border guard Herr Jäger admitting that passports were to be stamped in such a way as to refuse certain people re-entry. Schabowski’s speech is available at ‘1989–40 Jahre DDR’ at http://ddr-im-www.de/Geschichte/1989.htm
p. 69 On the numbers of Stasi informers participating in the Runden Tisch negotiations, see Der Spiegel 49/1999 (6 December 1999), ‘Wende und Ende des SED-Staates (11)’ at http://www.spiegel.de/druckversion/0,1588,52264,00.html
p. 84 Frau Neubert of the Bürgerbüro e.V. Verein zur Aufarbeitung von Folgeschäden der SED-Diktatur to
ld me of porn and ticking-package deliveries; the Neuberts’ car’s brake leads had been cut; the writer Jürgen Fuchs told the puppy story, and his daughter was detained after school. For the threatened acid attack on the border guard, see Koehler, p. 29. Koehler also quotes Manfred Kittlaus, director of Berlin’s Government Crimes Investigation Unit, calling the associations of former Communist functionaries a ‘classic form of organized crime’, p. 30.
In 1998 a federal government parliamentary inquiry found that, in the weeks of the fall of the SED regime in 1989, somewhere between three and ten billion westmarks disappeared. See reference to Untersuchungsausschuss ‘DDR-Vermögen’ at Der Spiegel 50/1999 (14 December 1999), ‘Wende und Ende des SED-Staates (12)’ at http://www.spiegel.de/druckversion/0,1588,52264,00.html
p. 100 Although most people were able to watch western television, the western signal could not penetrate a geographically inaccessible area that included Dresden. The region came to be known as the ‘Tal der Ahnungslosen’, the Valley of the Clueless.
p. 119 Surveys conducted in the immediate postwar years showed that the Hitler period of German history (1933–45) was assessed positively by about 40 per cent of the German population: ‘Umfrage des Instituts für Demoskopie Allensbach 1951’, in Alfred Grosser, Die Bonner Demokratie: Deutschland von draußen gesehen, Rauch, Düsseldorf 1960, p. 22.
In a 1971 survey of the German people, the majority still held that Nazism was a good idea, which had gone wrong in its implementation: Max Kaase, ‘Demokratische Einstellungen in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland’ in Rudolf Wildenmann (ed.), Sozialwissenschaftliches Jahrbuch für Politik, vol. 2, Olzog, Munich, 1971, p. 325.
pp. 130–31 For Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler’s own account of his life, see Meine Schlösser oder Wie ich mein Vaterland fand,Verlag Neues Leben, Berlin, 1989. For more of his views see Provokation, Edition Nautilus, Hamburg, 1993.
p. 191 The Stasi File Authority’s report on the use of radiation against ‘oppositional’ elements is its Bericht zum Projekt: Einsatz von Röntgenstrahlen und radioaktiven Stoffen durch das MfS gegen Oppositionelle—Fiktion oder Realität?’ by the Projektgruppe Strahlen: Bernd Eisenfeld (Leiter), Thomas Auerbach, Gudrun Weber and Dr Sebastian Pflugbeil. Published by BstU, 2000.
p. 200 I later found instructions to operatives on ways of crippling ‘oppositional’ people, which gave more detail than Herr Bock’s little lecture. It comes from the Directive ‘Perceptions’ (‘Richtlinien, Stichpunkt Wahrnehmung’). It aims:
To develop apathy (in the subject)…to achieve a situation in which his conflicts, whether of a social, personal, career, health or political kind are irresolvable…to give rise to fears in him…to develop/create disappointments…to restrict his talents or capabilities…to reduce his capacity to act and…to harness dissentions and contradictions around him for that purpose…
On 18 January 1989—long before anyone could foresee the October demonstrations of that year—the state issued a further refined Directive called ‘Zersetzungsmassnahmen’. The German word Zersetzung is harsh, and has no direct English equivalent. Zersetzung, as a concept, involves the annihilation of the inner self. The Directive recommended these methods:
[the] targetted spreading of rumours about particular persons with the aid of anonymous and pseudo-anonymous letters…making compromising situations for them by creating confusion over the facts…[and] the engendering of hysterical and depressive behaviours in the target persons.
See Jürgen Fuchs, Unter Nutzung der Angst 2/1994, published by the BstU, and ‘Politisch-operatives Zusammenwirken und aktive Maßnahmen’ in Bearbeiten–Zersetzten–Liquidieren Analysen und Berichte 3/93 of the BstU, pp. 13–24. For the Stasi’s own definitions see also Das Wörterbuch der Staatssicherheit: Definitionen des MfS zur ‘politisch-operativen Arbeit’, Siegfried Suckut (ed.), Christoph Links Verlag, Berlin, 1996.
p. 227 None of the torturers at Hohenschönhausen has been brought to justice. See Ritchie, p. 877.
pp. 237 and 242 Articles on Herr Bohnsack include Der Spiegel 29/1991 pp. 32–34 (in which Bohnsack confirms that West German politicians’ votes were bought by the Stasi), and Der Spiegel 30/1991, pp. 57–58. On disinformation see also Der Spiegel 49/1991, pp. 127–30. Despite the Stasi vote-buying, Brandt’s term as chancellor was short-lived. Two years later Brandt fell when it was revealed that one of his closest advisers, Günter Guillaume, was one of Wolf’s agents.
Acknowledgments
My first debt of thanks is to the people who told me about their lives, most of all Miriam Weber, whose story was the impetus for finding the others. I am grateful too, to the people who spoke with me but whose stories are not in this book, in particular Herr Wolfgang Schellenberg, whose life deserves a book of its own.
I am indebted to many other people I spoke with in Germany. Frau Hollitzer at the Museum in der Runden Ecke in Leipzig was generous with her time and hospitality. The staff at the Federal Authority for the Files of the Former GDR (Der Bundesbeauftragte für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen DDR), in particular Regina Schild, Dr Klaus-Dietmar Henke, Thomas Auerbach, Roger Engelmann, Jens Gieseke and Bernd Eisenfeld were most helpful with their information and, sometimes, their own experiences. Frau Neubert at the Bürgerbüro e.V. Verein zur Aufarbeitung von Folgeschäden der SED-Diktatur provided invaluable insights, as did her colleague Uwe Bastian. Martin Gutzeit, the Berliner Landesbeauftragte für die Stasi Unterlagen, was helpful, as were staff at the Antistalinistische Aktion Berlin—Normannenstraße e.V (ASTAK), the Bürgerkomitee ‘15 Januar’ e.V. zur Aufarbeitung der Stasi-Vergangenheit, and the Forschungs-und Gedenkstätte Normannenstraße, Berlin. My thanks too, to Professor Manfred Görtemaker of the University of Potsdam.
This book would not have been written without the extraordinarily generous support at its inception of members of the Australian German Association. I thank the AGA for the award of the Educational Development Fellowship 1995, and most particularly its members BMW (Australia) Ltd, Dresdner Bank AG, Mercedes Benz (Australia) Pty Ltd and Deutsche Bank Group in Australia. I thank also Mr Andrew Grummet for his facilitation and friendship.
My heartfelt thanks to the Australia Centre, Potsdam, where I was writer-in-residence over 1996–97. Dr Ditta Bartels in Australia and Ruth Bader and Rico Janke in Potsdam provided invaluable encouragement and administrative support while the real work began.
I am grateful for the Felix Meyer Creative Writing Award, and a New Work grant from Arts Victoria which bought me time to write. A fellowship at Varuna—The Writers’ House and the support there of Peter Bishop were terrific.
I thank the Australian Society of Authors and John Tranter for their assistance through the Mentorship Program. I am much indebted to Marion Campbell of the University of Melbourne for her insights and wisdom. I thank also Jenny Lee, whose early reading came at a crucial time and Gudruna Papak of the Goethe Institute, Sydney.
My great friends in Berlin provided a much needed sense of normal life while I explored Stasiland: Annette and Gerhard Pomp, Charlotte Smith and Markus Ickstadt, Harald and Marianne Meinhold, Lorenz and Monika Prell and Rainer Merkel. My father John and my late mother Kate were enormously supportive. I am especially grateful to my publisher Michael Heyward, whose unstinting enthusiasm kickstarted me many times whilst I was writing, and whose editing is magnificent. Most of all I am indebted to Craig Allchin, my constant inspiration, who asked all the right questions, without ever questioning whether this was worth four years of our lives.
About the Author
Anna Funder was born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1966, and grew up there and in Paris. She has worked as an international lawyer and a radio and television producer. She is the author of Stasiland, winner of the prestigious Samuel Johnson Prize for Nonfiction in the United Kingdom (the world’s biggest prize for nonfiction), the Index Freedom of Expression Award, and the W. H. Heinemann Award from the Royal Society of Literature. The book was also short-listed for the Guardian First Book Award. Anna F
under’s debut novel, All That I Am, will be published in hardcover in February 2012 by HarperCollins. She lives in Brooklyn.
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Praise for Anna Funder and Stasiland
“The Stasi were the secret police of the former East Germany, infamous for their obsession with detail and for being, literally, everywhere. Some believe their network of collaborators and informants numbered one in every six people. Anna Funder went back to East Germany seven years after the fall of the Berlin Wall to interview those whose lives had been affected by the Stasi. Her portraits are by turns funny, heartbreaking, and stirring. She tells the story of the collapse of a way of life with wit, style, and sympathy.”
—Marie Claire
“Impressive. . . . Funder’s fully humanized portrait of the Stasi’s tentacles reads like a warning of totalitarian futures to come.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“As well as the horror, Funder writes superbly of the absurdities of the Stasi, such as their practice of keeping the underpants or knickers of tens of thousands of GDR citizens in carefully labeled jars.”
—Evening Standard (London)
“Written with rare literary flair. I can think of no better introduction to the brutal reality of East German repression.”
—The Telegraph (London)
“A highly readable and stylishly written account of the Stasi’s forty-year reign of terror.”
—Irish Times
“To call the stories that she relates Orwellian is rather an understatement; the fact that they are true alone goes beyond Orwell: the mysterious death of a husband while in detention, the sudden ‘nonexistence’ of a rock star, a mother’s separation from her critically ill infant. What the reader learns from these stories is that evil swings like a pendulum, from the banal to the surreal, but no matter where it is in the spectrum, it always leaves pain behind.”