Ordinary people in the GDR were horrified. They feared that all this information about them might continue to be used, or that they would never know how their lives had been manipulated by the Firm. Protests began. On 4 September 1990 campaigners occupied the lobby here, and a week later they began a hunger strike. The protesters were successful, and provisions were included in the Unification Treaty regulating access to the files.
On 3 October 1990, the day of German reunification and the day that the GDR ceased to exist, the East German pastor Joachim Gauck took office as head of the newly formed Stasi File Authority. It was a close call, but Germany was the only Eastern Bloc country in the end that so bravely, so conscientiously, opened its files on its people to its people.
The group leaves, not even muttering among themselves any more. I imagine they are in a hurry to get back to the international-style West Berlin hotel that reminds them of nothing, and I don’t blame them. The guide comes over and asks me about my interest in this place. I explain that after the Runden Ecke in Leipzig, I wanted to see the Stasi headquarters. I say though, that I’m looking to speak with people who confronted the regime, as much as those who represented it. ‘In that case then,’ she says, ‘you need to meet Frau Paul.’ I follow her into her office, a small space lined with binders of files, and she gives me a phone number.
I make my way up the stairs in the foyer. On the landing, glass cases display objects that hid tape recorders and cameras in order to document the ‘enemy’. There is more variety than I saw in Leipzig: a flower pot, a watering can, a petrol canister, and a car door, all with cameras of varying sizes hidden in them. There’s a thermos with a microphone in its lid, a hiking jacket with a camera sewn into the lapel pocket and an apparatus like a television antenna that could pick up conversations fifty metres away in other buildings, or while you were in your car, stopped at lights.
On the next landing I pass a black bust of Marx on a pedestal, godlike with flowing hair. One of the offices has been converted into a trophy room for Stasi trinkets. There are banners for each regiment, ribbons and medals for service and buttonhole pins as signs of seniority. There are miniature pointy-bearded Lenins in a range of sizes, and a long row of clenched plaster fists sticking up for international socialism. There are trophies and vases and beer mugs with the GDR’s hammer-and-compass insignia on them. A miniature boxed book set contains the life and deeds of Comrade Erich Honecker and there’s a locket-sized portrait of Mielke himself in, of all things, enamel. A carpet hangs on the wall bearing the woolly triumvirate of Marx, Engels and Lenin in profile next to a lurid hand-worked mat with the Stasi insignia in red, yellow and black acrylic. The rugs fascinate me. They demonstrate, I think, the value of labour over everything else here, mostly aesthetics and utility.
A smaller room leads off from this one. At first I think it’s going to be more revolutionary kitsch, but here there are just books and medals under glass. In fact, mostly there seem to be papers. But when I read them, I see why they deserve a room of their own. They are the 1985 plans of the Stasi, together with the army, for the invasion of West Berlin.
The plans are methodical. They include the division of the ‘new territory’ into Stasi branch offices, and figures for exactly how many Stasi men should be assigned to each. And there’s a medal, cast in bronze, silver and gold by order of Honecker, to be awarded, after successful invasion, for ‘Courage in the Face of the Western Enemy’. No-one in the west had imagined the extent of the Stasi’s ambitions.
Mielke’s quarters are on the second storey. There’s no-one around. My shoes make a plasticky noise on the lino, till I reach his office where the floor is parquetry. It’s a spacious room, with the feel of well-kept impoverishment. It is the same sense you might get visiting someone who bought their furniture as a bride in the 1950s but never had the means to update it. In fact, everything seems to be in that particular fifties yellowy-green colour, nuclear mustard.
The main feature of the room is a middling-sized veneer desk. As I approach I pass a portrait of Lenin. His eyes follow me across the room. The only things on the desk are two telephones and a white plaster death mask of Lenin. Life-size, his head seems small compared with all the exaggerated versions of it in wool and paint and marble in the treasure chamber downstairs. It also looks very dead—a memento mori in this belief system, like a crucifix in another. Aside from his presence though, this place could be the mayor’s office in the down-at-heel council chambers of a small but proud rural town whose people recall fondly the days when wool prices were high.
The light is so bad now that outlines are blurring. I walk further, through Mielke’s private quarters (a daybed and chair) and personal bathroom (a plain tiled affair) to a larger anteroom which now has cafeteria tables for tourists. It, too, is empty. There are a couple of old lounge chairs in one corner; a video plays on a television set. I move towards it, a source of light, and sit down to watch.
The film shows amateur footage of demonstrators storming this building on the cold night of 15 January 1990. They walked through the offices, the supermarket, the hairdressers, opening locked rooms and staring at the sacks and sacks of paper. They didn’t seem jubilant; they didn’t even show much bravado. Their faces wore instead a quiet mixture of disgust and sadness. I have heard this particular feeling described as not knowing whether you want to laugh or throw up.
It’s cold in here, and the air tastes recycled. I pull my coat collar up to my ears. I think that there is no parallel in history where, almost overnight, the offices of a secret service have gone from being so feared they are barely mentionable, to being a museum where you can sit in an easy chair next to the boss’s private pissoir and watch a video on how his office was stormed. There’s a footfall behind me and I start. A small blonde woman in jeans and rubber gloves stands holding a canister of cleaning spray.
‘Are you closing up now?’ I ask. ‘Should I go?’
She smiles and pats the air with a pink plastic hand. ‘You’re all right,’ she says. ‘We’re the last people left, so we might as well leave together when I’m done.’
She starts spraying the tables with perfumed ammonia. I turn back to the film. It shows footage of the Stasi mortuary in Leipzig—bodies on slabs, including that of a young man with no apparent injuries. It switches to an interview with a worker at the Southern General Cemetery who explains that, ‘about twenty or thirty times’ he’d had a call to leave a certain oven open ‘so that the Stasi could do their business’. The man looks uncomfortable, but he also shrugs as if to say, ‘it was just my job’. The voice-over comments that some thirty urns were found at the Leipzig Stasi offices, unlabelled and unclaimed. I wonder whether Miriam knows this. I think I should call her.
The next item is an interview with a man with neat hair and a red moustache who was a Stasi psychologist. He is accounting for the willingness of people to inform on their countrymen, which he calls ‘an impulse to make sure your neighbour was doing the right thing’. He doesn’t bat an eyelid. ‘It comes down to something in the German mentality,’ he says, ‘a certain drive for order and thoroughness and stuff like that.’
Stuff like that. There’s a cough behind me.
‘Of course I lived normally,’ the cleaning woman says. I turn around. She has a smoker’s lined face and hollow-chested thinness. ‘I conformed, just like everybody else. But it’s not true to say the GDR was a nation of seventeen million informers. They were only two in a hundred.’
‘Yes,’ I say, and then I’m stumped. Even with one informer for every fifty people, the Stasi had the whole population covered.
She gives up on me. ‘Can’t get these tables clean,’ she says, and turns back to her work.
When she finishes we start moving out through Mielke’s private quarters, his bathroom and his office. She locks the doors behind us as we go. ‘You know, there’s no real unity in this country,’ she says, ‘even after seven years. I don’t feel like I belong here at all. Did you know that in th
e suburb of Kreuzberg in West Berlin they wanted the Wall back! To protect them from us!’ She lights a cigarette. ‘Can you understand this German thinking?’
I hope it’s a rhetorical question. All I understand is that it only took forty years to create two very different kinds of Germans, and that it will be a while before those differences are gone.
We pass a toilet with ‘H’ for Herren on it. ‘They only needed a men’s bathroom,’ she says. ‘Women couldn’t get past colonel rank and there were just three of them anyway. This was a Männerklub.’
She puts her head into a small room for a sentry. ‘Have a look at this,’ she says. Over the desk a calendar is still on January 1990. ‘No, over there.’ She points to the other wall, behind the desk. There’s a smudge on the paintwork. ‘That’s where the fella would have leant back on his chair and rested his fat greasy head on the wall.’ She’s disgusted. ‘Won’t come off.’
We move on, down the zigzag stairs past Marx and his billowing hair. The only sound is of our footfalls, and the only light now is from over the entrance downstairs. ‘Do you get spooked here, by yourself at night?’ I ask.
‘Sometimes,’ she says, ‘but it was much worse back when we had just opened. At that time the whole building smelled—we cleaned and cleaned and we just couldn’t get rid of the smell.’
She stops walking and turns her face up to me. Even in the half-light her eyes are cornflower blue and pretty. She winces. ‘Do you know it?’ She does not wait for an answer. ‘It was the smell,’ she says, ‘of old men.’
8
Telephone Calls
The phone rings. I steel myself for another Stasi man. But it’s a woman’s voice.
‘Anna, Anna is that you?’ Something turns itself over in my chest. It’s Miriam.
‘Yes, Miriam, hello, I’ve been meaning—’
‘I’m just calling,’ she says, ‘to say thank you for the other day. I wanted to thank you very much.’
What is she thanking me for? Suddenly I know I should have called her earlier. ‘No, please, I thank you,’ I say. Something is odd here. A retreat from intimacy is taking place.
‘It was very nice to meet you,’ she says. ‘And I wish you good luck with your work.’
This sounds final. I want to ask whether she has heard about the unclaimed urns at the Runden Ecke, but it feels wrong. ‘Perhaps we could meet again,’ I say, ‘at some point.’
‘I’d love to,’ she says quickly. ‘I’d love you to come down, sometime. We could visit my friends who have a sculpture garden. It’s very beautiful, and I’d like you to meet them, and…’ She trails off. ‘Just call me and we’ll go there.’
‘I will,’ I say, ‘and thanks. For everything.’
I replace the handset. If I were Miriam and had told the most painful and formative parts of my life to someone, I’m not sure I’d want to see that person again either. Especially if my life had already been written down by other people, stolen and steered. The phone is made of black plastic. It’s not a walk-around model but as a compromise some nifty student attached an extremely long extension cord to it. I walk back through the bare and broken apartment, retracing the lead to its source.
I’ve dragged my mattress into the living room, to be closer to the heater. Every evening I watch television until I fall asleep. It is a canny box which receives only three channels but they are of its own choosing, and one of them, although I have no dish, is a satellite channel. They are all black and white, and the terrestrial ones have constant snow.
Late at night there’s a program called ‘PEEP!’ Guests are interviewed and quizzed about their sex lives in seamy catch-22 hypotheticals (‘If your girlfriend brought her sister home to play with would you…?’ ‘Is there anything you have had to give up since the reassignment?’). Footage is shown to tempt the censorship provisions—about sex expos, sex experiments, sex revues and sexual art.
Tonight there’s a feature about a Leipzig stripper named Heidi, aka Yasmina. Yasmina is stocky and firm-bodied with blue eyes and fake blonde hair. This evening she and her brood are doing a ‘horror-erotic’ show inspired by Walpurgisnacht, the night when witches meet to revel with the Devil. On the stage young witches, wearing latex masks, leopard-skin and lace, are undressed by skeletons till they are nothing but rubber faces and sequinned G-strings in the dry ice gloom. The camera zooms dizzyingly in and out from breasts and crotches. Then there’s an interview with Yasmina, who has pushed her witch’s face onto the top of her head so that the nose droops a little over her forehead, nodding when she speaks. The interviewer wants to know what it was like to have had the only strip school ‘back in the GDR’, and, ‘is it true’—he puts the microphone closer to her face—‘that you stripped for the Politbüro?’
Yasmina smiles and flutters a taloned hand. ‘I always want to offer my public something a little different,’ she says, ‘then as now.’ She winks, the nose nods, and the program cuts abruptly to the next segment: plaster casts of body parts. The first is a female torso, the second a pair of long-nailed fingers either side of a clitoris. An unctuous man’s voice says, ‘PEEP!-Special! For 250 marks you too can have your most intimate parts preserved forever in plaster of Paris.’
I’m no longer capable of making sense of this. The whiteness of the plaster reminds me only of the dead Lenin’s head on Mielke’s desk. I switch channels and find my favourite program. It is manna for insomniacs, people like me who do not want to stay still. A camera is attached to the top of a vehicle. As it drives the pictures glide over the roads and lanes and highways of eastern Germany in glorious summer. The footage is mesmerising: flying bodiless through villages, down the main streets, and then out into the countryside again. The shops are open or closed, aproned women sweep footpaths where people sit drinking coffee, mothers run from under the umbrellas after straying children, road workers lean around in overalls. This is the world unfrozen. It’s black and white and snowing on my screen, but I know that it is really the bright yellow of rape, the green haziness of wheat, and the heavier green of summer oaks lining the road. Occasionally we stop at traffic lights, level with the hooded eye. Then on and on, moving magically through village after thawed village, places I have never been and may never go.
In my sleep I continue soundlessly through the countryside, exhilarated by the wind on my skin. Suddenly I am joined by another woman flying at the same height. There is a blur where her face should be, but that doesn’t bother me at all. She is naked, apart from pink rubber gloves. Her nipples are puckered a deeper pink and her pubic hair is luscious gold. I’m startled that I’m not alone in the air, that she’s naked. ‘The gloves, of course, are for driving,’ she says. I nod, and I look at my hands. I have no gloves. Then I look at my body and see that I am naked too. My feeling of wellbeing evaporates. I glance down over the main street of a village—there are people beneath us. The church bell starts to ring, it rings and rings and will not stop and soon I know I’ll drop—I have no driving gloves!—and they’ll all see me, fallen and naked and pointless.
I wake up to get the phone. The clock says 2.30 am—heart attack hour, the hour of bad news from home. Or another Stasi man? Telephone harassment is common, but I can’t be high on their list. It must be the fifteenth ring by the time I find the black phone, the duvet wrapped around me.
‘Hello?’
‘Hello my friend.’ A lubricated voice from my local pub, coming down the line through a mouth with a pipe in it, a thick Saxon accent and a beard. It’s Klaus. By the sound of it he’s holding his chin up with the receiver.
‘How’d you pull up after last time?’ he asks, ‘Feel like another drinking session?’
‘Klaus, it’s 2.30 in the morning.’
‘Come on,’ he says, ‘this time the other night you were just getting into it.’
I have no wish to be reminded of other nights. In my view one of the conventions among decent drinking partners is that where there isn’t actual amnesia it should be simulated. The other n
ight we filled the air with words and smoke that are all gone now. My only memory is of the hangover I took with me to Leipzig.
‘I had a big day.’
‘It’s nice here,’ he says. ‘They’re playing our song.’
This is not a come-on. He means they’re playing his song.
Klaus Renft is the legendary ‘Mik Jegger’ of the Eastern Bloc. He lives around the corner from me in a one-room apartment lined with videos and posters of his band, the Klaus Renft Combo. There are always sports bags full of beer and every kind of smoking equipment known to man. We are both regulars at the local pub, which we use, effectively, as a living room. The pub sound system is pumping out the plaintive and beautiful song ‘Hilflos’, re-recorded on their recent comeback album.
‘You still there?’ he says.
‘Yep. And I’m staying here.’
‘Sweet dreams then, kiddo,’ he slurs. When he hangs up the receiver misses its cradle and dangles upside-down in the air. I take the phone back to bed. I lie listening to ‘Hilflos’, and then I hang up.
I wake to the phone ringing. It’s morning.
‘Guten Tag. You put an advertisement in the Märkische Allgemeine.’
‘Yes. Thank you for calling. I am looking to speak with people who worked for the ministry, in order to be able to represent what it was like. I’m writing about life in the GDR.’
There is a pause. ‘The notice said you were Australian.’
‘Yes.’
‘You are Australian?’
‘Yes.’
‘You are from Australia?’
‘That’s right.’
In the GDR a great swathe of geography remained theoretical because people couldn’t travel outside the Eastern Bloc. If easterners thought about Australia at all, it was as an imaginary place to go in the event of a nuclear catastrophe.
‘You are writing in English or in German?’
‘In English.’
‘I will meet with you,’ he says. ‘In order to set the record straight. It is possible that in Australia your media has not tainted people against us, and that there at least, we can put our side. With objective information and analysis. Are you available tomorrow?’