‘Yes.’
‘In Potsdam, in the afternoon?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then I will meet with you as follows: I will be outside the church on market square at fifteen hundred hours. I will have tomorrow’s Märkische Allgemeine rolled up under my left arm. Understood?’
‘Yes,’ I say obediently, although I am incredulous that this man wants to play spy games seven years after the fall of the Wall. And then I ask, ‘What is your name?’
Another pause. ‘Winz.’
‘Till tomorrow then, Herr Winz.’
I’m early to the church and stand alone in its forecourt. The sky is blanket-grey and close. I am wearing all-purpose black boots and a black coat with fake fur trim and I stand out a mile. I have so obviously nothing to do but wait for an assignation. At the market next to the church, women in bright scarves and woollen gloves push their strollers around caravan stalls, nosing under the red-and-white striped awnings. They buy potatoes and pickles from vats, and chunks of pink liverwurst. At the deli a man with ham-hock forearms serves a council worker a sausage and a piece of bread on a paper plate. The bells chime three times. I hop from one cold leg to the other.
After ten minutes a man approaches with a newspaper rolled under his left arm. He’s about sixty, paunchy and jowly as a hound-dog. He’s wearing a foreign-looking tweed suit coat. When he takes the newspaper from under his arm to greet me, I see it even has leather elbow patches: he is disguised as a westerner.
‘The parking here is terrible,’ Herr Winz says by way of apology for being late, but also as if it were my fault. He speaks in authoritative barks. ‘I suggest we go to a neutral place,’ he says. ‘I usually use the Hotel Merkur.’
Neutral? Usually? ‘Fine by me, Herr Winz,’ I say, and we set off on foot to the hotel, a good fifteen minutes from here. It occurs to me that he has hidden his car somewhere so that, should I succumb to the urge, I can’t tail him. I’m glad to get moving anyway.
The hotel has a low-ceilinged lobby with brown booth seats and a lot of plastic plants. There is no-one else here. We order coffee from a waiter with a strawberry mark over one side of his nose and I start to explain to Herr Winz my interest in speaking with former Stasi employees. He waves me silent. He waits until the waiter is well out of earshot. Then he leans forward. ‘One cannot be too careful these days,’ he says, tapping his nose and glancing towards the waiter’s back. Then he eyeballs me. ‘First, please show me your ID,’ he says.
‘Bitte?’
‘I would like to see your identity card,’ he says.
‘I don’t have one.’
‘What do you mean?’ he asks.
‘In Australia we don’t have ID cards.’
He is speechless. He looks at me as though all his suspicions are confirmed: I come from a place so remote, so primitive that the people there have not yet been labelled and numbered.
I give in. ‘But I have a passport,’ I say and pull it out of my bag. There are a great many things one cannot do anonymously here—from buying a mobile phone card to travelling on a train. I have had to prove my identity so frequently that I now carry my passport around with me like a fugitive.
He reads my date of birth and checks me against my younger self. Then he flicks through its pages to see where I have been in the last few years. ‘Ah, Czechoslovakia,’ he mutters at one point. Then he sees that back in 1987 I was in the GDR. ‘So you visited my country,’ he says approvingly.
‘Yes, I came here to Potsdam and I went to Dresden,’ I say, ‘and I went to a party once with some friends in East Berlin.’
I remember a cold grey day in Potsdam like this one, the streets deserted. Our busload of undergraduates visited only the paved and gilded parts of this show-town, selected streets made into a neat sheep-run for tourists. In Dresden we were shunted up a hill in a cable car and fed a meal, which, including the steak substitute, came entirely from tins. At my East Berlin party, the host, a Jewish journalist of impeccable Communist pedigree, was revealed after the Wall fell to have been an informer. I may gain credibility in this man’s eyes from having a couple of hammer-and-compass stamps in my passport, but it could not be said that I knew his country. I visited it only long enough to wonder what was being kept from me.
I ask to see Herr Winz’s ID too, but he fobs me off with a laugh and a dismissive gesture. Behind him the waiter starts, as if this could be a summons, but I catch his eye and shake my head slightly. He slides his notepad back into his apron pocket.
Herr Winz opens his briefcase and takes out papers and pamphlets and a thesis bound in a springboard cover. Then he places a small hardback book on top of the pile. It is Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ The Communist Manifesto.
He tells me he worked from 1961 to 1990 at the ministry in Potsdam, exclusively in counter-espionage. He picks up the thesis and reads its title:
The Work of the Ministry for State Security on the Defence Against Intelligence Infiltration by the Secret Services of the NATO States against the GDR. Presented from the Viewpoint of a Member of the Division for Counter-Espionage, Regional Administration, Potsdam.
‘This is a discussion paper I wrote based on my work at the ministry. If you read this, you will learn a lot of what you want to know.’
I flick to the front page, and see that the paper was written in 1994 for the ‘Potsdam Working Group of the Insiderkomitee for the Reexamination of the History of the Ministry for State Security, Inc.’
‘This was written for the Insiderkomitee?’ I ask.
‘Yes.’
‘You are a member?’
‘Yes, but we have changed our name to the “Society for the Protection of Civil Rights and the Dignity of Man”.’
The Insiderkomitee. Civil Rights and the Dignity of Man? I have heard of this group. It is a more or less secret society of former Stasi men who write papers putting their side of history, lobby for entitlements for former Stasi officers, and support one another if facing trial. They have close links to the successor party to the SED, the Party of Democratic Socialism, and it is alleged that together they may have access to the tens of millions of marks which belonged to the SED and remain unaccounted for.
It is widely suspected, however, that these men also harass people who they fear may uncover them. A former border guard who appeared on a television talk show was threatened with an acid attack and had to be placed under police protection. Home-delivered harassment is popular: one man had a ticking package delivered to his doorstep; wives have had to sign for porn not ordered by their husbands. The strangest incident I heard of was when a man was delivered a truckload of puppies, yelping outside his door and the driver demanding a signature. Car brake-leads have been cut, accidents and deaths reverse-engineered. The child of an outspoken writer was picked up from school by a person or persons unknown and taken to drink hot chocolate, just for an hour or so. Detaining people clearly has its own pleasures; a habit hard to break.
I look at Herr Winz and suddenly the landscape here seems crowded with victims: of the Nazis, of Stalin, of the SED and the Stasi; and now this lot, wannabe victims of democracy and the rule of law.
‘What does the Insiderkomitee do?’ I ask.
‘We try to present an objective view of history,’ he says. ‘To combat the lies and misrepresentation in the western media.’
‘It is said that the Insiderkomitee is also a front to co-ordinate action against those working to uncover what the Stasi did to people.’
‘I wouldn’t know about that.’
‘Why not?’
‘I am a small fish,’ he says. ‘I am here to tell you about the excellent work—the masterful work—of the Stasi in counter-espionage. That is where I spent my life.’
Either Herr Winz doesn’t know much, or he’s not telling. He won’t respond to my questions about the Insiderkomitee or talk about himself either. Each time I ask him about the reality of life in the GDR he returns to the beauties of socialist theory. I think he hopes, th
rough me, to sow the seeds of socialism in an untainted corner of the world.
‘We had people everywhere!’ he says. His main interest seems to have been placing young committed East Germans into lives in West Germany, where they would eventually come into the sights of the West German security service and be recruited. ‘We had them very high up! We had Günter Guillaume as Chancellor Brandt’s secretary and Klaus Kuron in West German counter-intelligence and the woman who prepared Chancellor Kohl’s daily intelligence briefings!’ This is true, but it is widely known. I find it hard to believe that Herr Winz was personally involved at a high level. He’s too underconfident and unconvincing with all his spy play-acting to have ever done it for real. I try to imagine what he probably did do, because he won’t tell me. The best I can come up with is that he wrote procedural manuals.
But Herr Winz is warming to his tale. ‘The CIA—now they were bandits! A very nasty crew. Did you know they made twenty attempts on Fidel Castro’s life?’
‘They couldn’t have been very good then,’ I smile. He looks startled. He is not amused.
‘Bandits!’ he shouts, ‘I said they were bandits!’
I cast a look behind him in the direction of the waiter, shuffling busily at his station. If he had any curiosity about this man’s origins, it is now well and truly sated.
‘How are you treated today, as a former Stasi man?’ I ask. I would like to find out why he is disguised as a westerner.
‘The foe has made a propaganda war against us, a slander and smear campaign. And therefore I don’t often reveal myself to people. But in Potsdam people come up and say’—he puts on a small sorry voice—‘“You were right. Capitalism is even worse than you told us it would be. In the GDR you could go out alone at night as a woman! You could leave your apartment door open!”’
You didn’t need to, I think, they could see inside anyway.
‘This capitalism is, above all, exploitation! It is unfair. It’s brutal. The rich get richer and the masses get steadily poorer. And capitalism makes war! German imperialism in particular! Each industrialist is a criminal at war with the other, each business at war with the next!’ He takes a sip of coffee and holds his hand up to stop me asking any more questions.
‘Capitalism plunders the planet too—this hole in the ozone layer, the exploitation of the forests, pollution—we must get rid of this social system! Otherwise the human race will not last the next fifty years!’
There is an art, a deeply political art, of taking circumstances as they arise and attributing them to your side or the opposition, in a constant tallying of reality towards ends of which it is innocent. And it becomes clear as he speaks that socialism, as an article of faith, can continue to exist in minds and hearts regardless of the miseries of history. This man is disguised as a westerner, the better to fit unnoticed into the world he finds himself in, but the more he talks the clearer it becomes that he is undercover, waiting for the Second Coming of socialism.
He pulls himself together and lowers his voice, leaning towards me in a conspiratorial way. His breath is hot and bitter from coffee and small flecks of brownish spittle spray over the cardboard thesis cover. ‘Have this.’ He passes me The Communist Manifesto from the top of his pile. It looks well-loved. ‘You should read it,’ he hisses. ‘Then you will understand a great deal more. There is, even today, no better analysis of capitalism. It’s a present from me.’ He takes out a pen and inscribes it to me ‘as a memento of our Potsdam discussion’.
‘Thank you very much.’
Herr Winz collects his material and stands up to go. Then he puts one set of knuckles down on the table and pushes his face close to mine. ‘You can take it from me,’ he says. ‘I have lived through a revolution already—in 1989—and I know the signs.’ His voice is getting louder. I can see the veins in his forehead. ‘This system is on its last legs! Its days are numbered! Capitalism will not last! The revolution’—he raises his fist off the table—‘is coming.’
Then he marches through the lobby out the front door, and the waiter brings me the bill.
A cheery voice: ‘No-one can come to the phone right now, but if you leave a message, someone will call back as soon as possible. If it’s good news, even sooner. Bye.’
‘Miriam, it’s Anna,’ I start. Then I hear the electronic beep. I start again. ‘Miriam, it’s Anna calling. Just to say hello really. No news. I’ll call back another time, or you can reach me on the Berlin number. Hope all’s well.’ I can’t think of any other small thing to say. ‘Bye.’
For a few days afterwards each time the phone rings I think it might be her, but it’s mostly Stasi men. After a week or so, despite the Stasi men, I somehow remain hopeful when the phone rings. Another week passes and this feeling coagulates into something grimmer: have I offended her? I fill her silence with possible scenarios: ‘she’s lost my number’, ‘she’s on holiday’ and even the full-blown, ‘now that she has re-lived her story it’s all too much and she’s swinging from a rope in her tower’. Despite the vividness of this last, I decide to give it another fortnight or so before I call again. At some level, at least, I am aware that I am following a person who has been hounded enough.
Does telling your story mean you are free of it? Or that you go, fettered, into your future?
9
Julia Has No Story
After work I catch the underground to Rosenthaler Platz and then walk home through the park. Away from the corner the grass slopes into a hill, rare for this swamp city. At the top there is a community centre with a terrace café that serves coffee and beer. Saturday afternoons the centre fills with dancing pensioners moving in tender, timeless coupledom.
The pensioners are just visiting—the park belongs to the drunks and the punks. The drunks dress either in tracksuits or old business suits. Each morning they emerge from the corners of the park and shuffle together in an amphitheatre arrangement around the statue of Heine. All day long they hold what look like philosophical discussions, gesticulating slowly with their free hands and clasping tins of beer with the other. They seem to share knowledge of a world where each of them once had a place.
Closer to the station are the young people. Here, there are women as well as men. They have as much beer and as many cigarettes as the drunks, but a lot more rancour. Their heads are partially shaved or covered with dreadlocks in blue and deep black, their faces pierced, limbs tattooed. Their appearance says both ‘Look at me’ and ‘Fuck off’. There are fights and tears; terrible pain, public in the park. Sometimes they ask for money. Unlike the drunks who claim the benches and tram shelters, the young people sit or sleep on the ground, with only their dogs for warmth. The dogs often look better groomed than the humans. But this afternoon, passing one young man, I realise I probably underestimate the effort required to maintain a cockscomb of eight 12-inch cones of hair erect and green, every day.
My door is unlocked. Pushing it open, I can see through to the living room. It looks like a giant cat has pissed, twice, on the lino. Then I hear a sound I know instinctively from my childhood: possums in the roof. Only the roof of this building is four storeys higher. I turn around and there’s a ladder set up against the wall in the hallway to the height of the mezzanine, about a metre under the ceiling.
‘Only me, only me,’ a muffled voice says. A small behind in army pants is backing out. ‘I came over to water the plants,’ Julia turns to me. ‘I thought I’d just get some of this old stuff while I was here.’ She passes me a bike pump like a relay baton and climbs down with a shoebox under one arm.
‘Old love letters,’ she says apologetically, and to my surprise she turns red. The blush begins at the neck and moves rapidly up to her yellow hair. This used to happen to me until some merciful god put an end to it so I don’t look, but walk straight through to the kitchen.
Julia has started to use the plants as a reason to drop by, both as if she is saving me the trouble of watering them, and by way of gentle rebuke. ‘The plants’ are two skinny croo
ked bald-trunked palm things in pots in the living room and not only is it true that I forget to water them—I forget their existence altogether. Subconsciously I have come to think of this apartment as some kind of closed and self-sustaining universe, with its own laws of nature. It tolerates my presence but demands as little interference from me as possible. I just keep to my tracks: bed to bath, window to desk.
Julia comes through to the kitchen. Along with the army pants, she is wearing her usual assortment of black: black boots, black baggy jumpers and a black scarf twisted like a dishrag around her neck. Right now she is black, red and yellow, uncharacteristically patriotic in the colours of the German flag.
‘Coffee?’ I ask.
‘Love some. I ran out two days ago.’
I look at her and I know that under all those layers of black is a wiry body and a sharp-sharp mind, but there is something about Julia that breaks my heart. She has an honesty I have started to think of as East German, a transparent fairness with all things that leaves her so open. But it’s not that. She is a hermit crab, all soft-fleshed with friends but ready to whisk back into its shell at the slightest sign of contact. It’s not that either. I don’t know what it is.
‘I’ve been thinking lately about all the drunks and the homeless in the park,’ I say.
‘There were no drunks before the Wall came down,’ Julia says. ‘I mean,’ she corrects herself, ‘in the park. No-one was homeless as they are now.’
They might not have been in the park, but there certainly were drunks. Per capita the East Germans drank more than twice as much as their West German counterparts. Sometimes they had to live in untenable arrangements because of the lack of housing: divorced couples still together, or newlyweds with the in-laws. Whatever the other shortages were, you could always, always buy beer and schnapps. People were drunk on the job, drunk after work, and drunk at home putting up with one another in a place from which there was no escape.