So I cannot resent it if she still has keys, and comes back to her old life, every now and again. I accustom myself to each unexpected absence—the rubber bathmat, the coffee machine, and now the milk crates. I acclimatise to the thinning of the atmosphere. I wear dust-free tracks on the linoleum from kitchen to desk, from bathroom to bed.
All I feel today in fact, as I pass where the bookshelf used to be in the hall, is the sudden predominance of linoleum in my life. Altogether I can count five kinds of linoleum in this once grand apartment, and they are all, each one of them, brown. Degrees of brown: dark in the hallway, fleck in my bedroom, a brown in the other bedroom that may have once been another colour before succumbing to house rule, brown-beige in the kitchen and, my favourite, imitation parquetry-in-lino in the living room.
In the kitchen I make coffee in the thermos. What surprises me about living here is that, no matter how much is taken out, this linoleum palace continues to contain all the necessities for life, at the same time as it refuses to admit a single thing, either accidentally or arranged, of beauty or joy. In this, I think, it is much like East Germany itself.
I take my cup to the living-room window. In the park there is snow on the ground and the trees, light on light. My breath mixes with coffee steam on the glass. I wipe it away. In the distance lies the city, the television tower at Alexanderplatz like an oversized Christmas bauble, blinking blue.
I can’t see it but I know that just near there, on the site of the old Palace of the Prussian Emperors pulled down by the Communists, is the parliament building of the GDR, the Palast der Republik. It is brown and plastic-looking, full of asbestos, and all shut up. It is not clear whether the fence around it is to protect it from people who would like to express what they thought of the regime, or to protect the people from the Palast, for health reasons. The structure is one long rectangular metal frame, made up of smaller rectangles of brown-tinted mirror glass. When you look at it you can’t see in. Instead the outside world and everything in it is reflected in a bent and brown way. In there, dreams were turned into words, decisions made, announcements applauded, backs slapped. In there could be a whole other world, time could warp and you could disappear.
Like so many things here, no-one can decide whether to make the Palast der Republik into a memorial warning from the past, or to get rid of it altogether and go into the future unburdened of everything, except the risk of doing it all again. Nearby, Hitler’s bunker has been uncovered in building works. No-one could decide about that either—a memorial could become a shrine for neo-Nazis, but to erase it altogether might signal forgetting or denial. In the end, the bunker was reburied just as it was. The mayor said, perhaps in another fifty years people would be able to decide what to do. To remember or forget—which is healthier? To demolish it or to fence it off? To dig it up, or leave it lie in the ground?
Between the Palast der Republik and my apartment lies the neigh-bourhood of Mitte, the old centre of Berlin, with its grey buildings and white sky and naked trees. Streets near here are being renamed: from Marx-Engels-Platz to Schlossplatz, from Leninallee to Landsberger Allee, from Wilhelm-Pieck-Strasse to Torstrasse, in a massive act of ideological redecoration. Most of the buildings though, are not yet renovated. They have largely lost their plaster and are scraped back to patches of brick; they look like tattered faces after plastic surgery. They are as they were before the Wall fell, except for the sprouting of domestic-size satellite dishes from the window-frames; a sudden white fungus, tuned to outer space. The trams are western now—they were among the first things to cross over here after the Wall came down. They are a flash of sighing yellow suspended from strings, shifting through this greyscape.
A tram stops right outside my apartment. It obeys a set of lights here under the window, though on the other side of the street there are none to match. I see the driver has the tabloid—screaming red-and-black headlines—on the control dash. Behind him sit tired-looking people for whom this day has come too soon.
I cannot fathom why these lights make the tram halt under my window. The stop itself is half a block away at the corner. Right here, the doors never open for passengers; they just sit, arrested and accepting. It is odd, the sight of a tram with a row of cars behind it stopped here for no pedestrians, no passengers, no reason, while on the other side vehicles continue unimpeded up the hill into Prenzlauer Berg. The lights change and the driver, still looking at the paper, moves a lever and slides the tram into action.
I go out for the paper and bread, and walk through the park. In summer this park is festooned with motley groups of drunks and punks. In winter the punks claim the underground stations for warmth, while the drunks install themselves in tram shelters. Today the corner stop is occupied by an old man with a mane of matted locks, a huge felt beard and flowing black robes. His belongings, in plastic bags around him, double as pillows. He is timeless and grand like someone walked in from another century—a Winter King. As passengers alight from trams he acknowledges them as if they were supplicants paying their respects to his throne, nodding to each and waving them on their way.
I cross to the bakery past a billboard that reads ‘Advertising Makes Better Known’. My baker holds, to some extent, with tradition. He makes wholegrain and rye and country loaves, stacked as oblong bricks on the back wall. But now, freed of state-run constraints on his ingenuity, he appears to be conducting his own personal experiment in bestsellerdom. On the left-hand side under the glass counter are the baked goods: iced donuts and cheesecake and blueberry crumble. On the other side, also under the glass and laid out just as neatly, is a bewildering assortment of fat paperbacks with embossed titles.
I am served by a woman with a bad perm. She’s wearing a T-shirt which has a lion’s face on it—the lion has winking sequins for eyes placed exactly where her nipples must be. I buy half a loaf of rye and ask no questions about the books. When I reach my building I see that the Winter King has crossed here to the place where the tram stops for no reason. He waits, but no passengers emerge for him to receive. Instead, as I approach, he turns to me and bows, long and dangerously low.
Over the next week I think about Miriam and I think about Stasi men. I am curious about what it must have been like to be on the inside of the Firm, and then to have that world and your place in it disappear. I draft an advertisement and fax it to the personal columns of the Potsdam paper.
Seeking: former Stasi officers and unofficial collaborators for interview. Publication in English, anonymity and discretion guaranteed.
6
Stasi HQ
The next day the phone calls start very early in the morning. I hadn’t thought it through—I hadn’t imagined what it would be like to have a series of military types, who had lost their power and lost their country, call you up at home.
I’m asleep. I pick up the phone and say my name.
‘Ja. In response to your notice in the Märkische Allgemeine.’
‘Ja…’ I fumble for my watch. It is 7.35 am.
‘How much are you paying?’
‘Bitte?’
‘You must understand—,’ the voice says. I sit up and pull the covers around me.
‘To whom am I speaking?’
‘That doesn’t matter for the moment.’ The voice is assured. ‘You must understand that it is very hard for some of us now to get jobs in this new Germany. We are discriminated against and ripped off blind from one minute to another, in this—this Kapitalismus. But we learn fast: so I ask you, how much you are prepared to pay for my story?’
‘I don’t know, if I don’t know what sort of story it is.’
‘I was IM,’ he says.
I am tempted. The ‘IMs’ were ‘inofizielle Mitarbeiter’ or unofficial collaborators. I know I probably won’t find many who will speak to me. They are the most hated people in the new Germany because, unlike the uniformed Stasi officers and administrative staff who went off to their bureaucratic jobs each day, these informers reported on family and friends
without them knowing. ‘Moment, bitte,’ I say, and I put the phone in my lap. I remember Miriam telling me that informers routinely argue that their information didn’t harm anyone. ‘But how can they know what it was used for?’ she asked. ‘It is as if they have all been issued with the same excuses manual.’
I pick up the receiver and say no. How can I reward informers a second time around? And besides, I don’t have the money.
The phone keeps ringing. I make a series of assignations with Stasi men: in Berlin, in Potsdam, outside a church, in a parking lot, in a pub and at their homes.
My kitchen overlooks the yard. I often see movement behind the windows of the other apartments. Today in one of them a man stands, staring out absent-mindedly. He is naked. I’m on the telephone and I look away, hoping he has not felt observed. When I turn to put the receiver down he’s still there—for a moment I think he may not have seen me. But then I notice he has pulled the curtain across his penis, where he holds it in a gesture of static modesty, a polyester toga.
I need to get out of the house, and away from the phone.
Outside the cold is bitter and soggy. There’s no wind; it is as if we have all been refrigerated. In the stillness people trail comets of breath. I catch the underground to the national Stasi Headquarters at Normannenstrasse in the suburb of Lichtenberg. The brochure I picked up at the Runden Ecke shows a vast acreage of multi-storey buildings covering the space of several city blocks. The picture is taken from the air, and because the buildings fold in at right angles to one another the complex looks like a gigantic computer chip. From here the whole seamless, sorry apparatus was run: Stasi HQ. And, deep inside this citadel was the office of Erich Mielke, the Minister for State Security.
On 7 November 1990, only months after the citizens of Berlin barricaded this complex, Mielke’s rooms, including his private quarters, were opened to the public as a museum. The ‘Federal Commissioner for the Files of the State Security Service of the former GDR’ (the Stasi File Authority) has taken control of the files. People come here to read their unauthorised biographies.
I see through a window into a room where several men and a woman sit each at their own small table. They look at pink and dun-coloured manila folders and take notes. What mysteries are being solved? Why they didn’t get into university, or why they couldn’t find a job, or which friend told Them about the forbidden Solzhenitsyn in their bookcase? The names of third parties mentioned in the files are crossed out with fat black markers so other people’s secrets are not revealed (that Uncle Frank was unfaithful to his wife, that a neighbour was a lush). But you are entitled to know the real names of the Stasi officers and the informers who spied on you. For the moments that I stand there at least, no-one is crying or punching the wall.
I make my way to the main building like a rat in a maze. I want to get a sense of the man who ran the place, before meeting some of his underlings face to face.
The name Mielke has now come to mean ‘Stasi’. Victims are dubiously honoured to find his signature in their files; on plans for someone to be observed ‘with all available methods’, on commands for arrest, for kidnapping, instructions to judges for the length of a prison term, orders for ‘liquidation’. The honour is dubious because the currency is low: he signed so many. Mielke’s apparatus, directed largely against his own countrymen, was one and a half times as big as the GDR regular army.
After the Wall fell the German media called East Germany ‘the most perfected surveillance state of all time’. At the end, the Stasi had 97,000 employees—more than enough to oversee a country of seventeen million people. But it also had over 173,000 informers among the population. In Hitler’s Third Reich it is estimated that there was one Gestapo agent for every 2000 citizens, and in Stalin’s USSR there was one KGB agent for every 5830 people. In the GDR, there was one Stasi officer or informant for every sixty-three people. If part-time informers are included, some estimates have the ratio as high as one informer for every 6.5 citizens. Everywhere Mielke found opposition he found enemies, and the more enemies he found the more staff and informers he hired to quell them.
Here, at Normannenstrasse, 15,000 Stasi bureaucrats worked every day, administering the activities of the Stasi overseas, and overseeing domestic surveillance through each of the fourteen regional offices in the GDR.
Photos show Mielke to be a small man with no neck. His eyes are set close together, his cheeks puffy. He has the face and the lisp of a pugilist. He loved to hunt; footage shows him inspecting a line of deer carcasses as he would a military parade. He loved his medals, and wore them pinned over his chest in shiny, noisy rows. He also loved to sing, mainly rousing marches and, of course, ‘The Internationale’. It is said that psychopaths, people utterly untroubled by conscience, make supremely effective generals and politicians, and perhaps he was one. He was certainly the most feared man in the GDR; feared by colleagues, feared by Party members, feared by workers and the general population. ‘We are not immune from villains among us,’ he told a gathering of high-ranking Stasi officers in 1982. ‘If I knew of any already, they wouldn’t live past tomorrow. Short shrift. It’s because I’m a humanist, that I am of this view.’ And, ‘All this blithering about to execute or not to execute, for the death penalty or against—all rot, comrades. Execute! And, when necessary, without a court judgment.’
Mielke was born in 1907, the son of a Berlin cartwright. At fourteen he joined the Communist youth organisation, and at eighteen the Party. Through the 1920s and early 1930s, the political situation in Germany was volatile—there were street fights between the Communists and the Nazis, and the Communists and the police. The 1931 death of a Communist in a skirmish in Berlin prompted the Party to order revenge. On 8 August, at a demonstration at Bülowplatz, Mielke and another man killed the local police chief and his off-sider by shooting them in the back at point-blank range.
Mielke fled to Moscow. There, he attended the International Lenin School, the elite training ground for Communist leaders, and worked with Stalin’s secret police, the NKVD. In January 1933 the Nazi Party came to power in Germany. Some of the Communists responsible for the Bülowplatz murders were sentenced to death, others to long jail terms. A warrant was issued for his arrest.
Mielke stayed out of Germany. In the late 1930s he was active in the Spanish Civil War; by his own account, he was interned in France during World War II. But afterwards Stalin decorated him with medals for service: it seems clear that from the mid-1930s, wherever he was, Mielke was a hatchet man in Stalin’s secret service.
When the war was over he returned to the Soviet sector of Berlin, where he was safe from prosecution. He worked in the internal affairs division of the Soviet-run police force. In 1957 Mielke engineered a coup against its leader, and then he took over as Minister for State Security. He proceeded to consolidate his power within the Party and over the country. In 1971 he helped organise the coup which brought Erich Honecker to power as Secretary-General. Honecker rewarded Mielke with candidacy for the Politbüro, and a house in the luxurious Party compound at Wandlitz. From that time on the two Erichs ran the country.
Mielke was an invisible man, but Honecker’s picture was everywhere. It was in schools, in Free German Youth halls, in theatres and over swimming pools. It was at the universities, in police stations, at holiday camps and in the border guards’ watchtowers. He always wore a suit and tie, large dark-rimmed glasses and his hair, first dark then grey, combed back off a high forehead. Other than being small, Honecker was unremarkable-looking, except for his strange, full-lipped mouth which seemed to widen, only partially, for a smile.
Honecker’s background was not dissimilar from Mielke’s. His father was a miner, and he joined the ‘Jung-Spartakus-Bund’ at eleven, and the Communist Youth at fourteen. He was apprenticed as a roof-tiler, before spending 1930–31 at the Lenin School in Moscow, then working underground for the Communists against the Hitler regime. In 1937 he was arrested by the Gestapo and sentenced to ten years imprisonment fo
r ‘preparation of high treason’. He escaped shortly before the end of the war, when he began, steadily, to make his career in the Party running East Germany.
The Stasi’s brief was to be ‘the shield and sword’ of the Communist Party, called the ‘Socialist Unity Party of Germany’ (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands) or SED. But its broader remit was to protect the Party from the people. It arrested, imprisoned and interrogated anyone it chose. It inspected all mail in secret rooms above post offices (copying letters and stealing any valuables), and intercepted, daily, tens of thousands of phone calls. It bugged hotel rooms and spied on diplomats. It ran its own universities, hospitals, elite sports centres and terrorist training programs for Libyans and the West Germans of the Red Army Faction. It pockmarked the countryside with secret bunkers for its members in the event of World War III. Unlike secret services in democratic countries, the Stasi was the mainstay of State power. Without it, and without the threat of Soviet tanks to back it up, the SED regime could not have survived.
The foyer of Stasi HQ is a large atrium. Soupy light comes through the windows behind a staircase that zigzags up to the offices. A small woman who reminds me of a hospital orderly—neat hair, sensible white shoes—is showing a tour group around. The visitors are chatty, elderly people, who have just got off a bus with Bonn numberplates. They wear bright colours and expensive fabrics, and have come to have a look at what would have happened to them had they been born, or stayed, further east.
The group is standing around a model of the complex, as the guide tells them what the demonstrators found here on the evening of 15 January 1990 when they finally got inside. She says there was an internal supermarket with delicacies unavailable anywhere else in the country. There was a hairdresser with rows of orange helmet-like dryers, ‘for all those bristle-cuts’. There was a shoemaker and, of course, a locksmith. The guide crinkles her nose in order to push her glasses up its bridge; a reflex which doubles as a gesture of distaste. She explains that the neighbouring building—the archive—was invisible from outside the complex, and a copper-lined room had been planned for it, to keep information safe from satellite surveillance. There was a munitions depot here, and a bunker underneath for Mielke and a select few in the event of a nuclear catastrophe. She says Berliners used to refer to this place as the ‘House of One Thousand Eyes’.