Stasiland
Stasiland
Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall
Anna Funder
Dedication
For Craig Allchin
Epigraph
‘…a silent crazy jungle under glass.’
The Member of the Wedding
,
Carson McCullers
‘The two of you, violator and victim (collaborator! violin!), are linked,
forever perhaps, by the obscenity of what has been revealed to you, by
the sad knowledge of what people are capable of. We are all guilty.’
The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist
,
Breyten Breytenbach
‘Let the jury consider their verdict,’ the King said,
for about the twentieth time that day.
‘No, no!’ said the Queen. ‘Sentence first—verdict afterwards.’
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
,
Lewis Carroll
Contents
Praise for Anna Funder and
Stasiland
I am hungover and steer myself like a car through the crowds at Alexanderplatz station. Several times I miscalculate my width, scraping into a bin, and an advertising bollard. Tomorrow bruises will develop on my skin, like a picture from a negative.
A man turns from the wall, smiling and zipping up his fly. He is missing shoelaces and some teeth; his face and his shoes are as loose as each other. Another man in overalls, with a broom the size of a tennis-court sweeper, pushes disinfectant pellets along the platform. He makes arcs of green powder and cigarette butts and urine. A morning drunk walks on the ground like it might not hold him.
I’m catching the underground to Ostbahnhof to board the regional line down to Leipzig, a couple of hours from here. I sit on a green bench. I look at green tiles, breathe green air. Suddenly I don’t feel too good. I need to get to the surface quickly and make my way back up the stairs. At ground level Alexanderplatz is a monstrous expanse of grey concrete designed to make people feel small. It works.
It’s snowing outside. I move through the slush to where I know there are toilets. Like the train lines, these too are cut into the ground, but noone thought to connect them to the station they serve. As I go down the steps, the sick smell of antiseptic is overpowering.
A large woman in a purple apron and loud makeup stands at the bottom. She is leaning on a glass-paned counter guarding her stash of condoms and tissues and tampons. This is clearly a woman unafraid of the detritus of life. She has shiny smooth skin and many soft chins. She must be sixty-five.
‘Good morning,’ I say. I feel awkward. I’ve heard stories of German babies having their input in food and their output in faeces weighed, in some attempt to get the measure of life. I have always found this kind of motherly audience inappropriate. I use the toilet and come out and put a coin in her dish. It occurs to me that the purpose of disinfectant globules is to mask the smells of human bodies with something worse.
‘What’s it like up there?’ the toilet madam asks, nodding to the top of the steps.
‘Pretty cold.’ I adjust my little pack. ‘But not too bad, not too much black ice.’
‘This is nothing yet,’ she sniffs.
I don’t know if it’s a threat or a boast. This is what they call
Berliner Schnauze
—snout. It’s attitude: it’s in your face. I don’t want to stay here, but I don’t want to go up into the cold either. The disinfectant smell is so strong I can’t tell whether I am feeling sicker or better.
‘I’ve been here twenty-one years, since the winter of ’75. I’ve seen much worse than this.’
‘That’s a long time.’
‘Sure is. I have my regulars, I can tell you. They know me, I know them. I had a prince once, a von Hohenzollern.’
I think she must use the prince on everyone. But it works—I’m curious. ‘U-huh. Before or after the Wall came down?’
‘Before. He was over on a day trip from the west. I used to get quite a few westerners you know. He invited me’—she pats her large bosom with a flat hand—‘to his palace. But of course I couldn’t go.’
Of course she couldn’t go: the Berlin Wall ran a couple of kilometres from here and there was no getting over it. Along with the Great Wall of China, it was one of the longest structures ever built to keep people separate from one another. She is losing credibility fast, but her story is becoming correspondingly better. And, suddenly, I can’t smell a thing any more. ‘Have you travelled yourself since the Wall came down?’ I ask. She throws her head back. I see she is wearing purple eyeliner which, at that angle, phosphoresces.
‘Not yet. But I’d like to. Bali, something like that. Or China. Yes, China.’ She raps her painted nails on the glass cabinet and dreams into the middle distance over my left shoulder. ‘You know what I’d really like to do? I’d really like to have me a look at that Wall of theirs.’
From Ostbahnhof the train pulls out and finds its cruising speed. The rhythm soothes like a cradle, hushes my tapping fingers. The conductor’s voice comes through speakers reciting our stops: Wannsee, Bitterfeld, Lutherstadt Wittenberg. In northern Germany I inhabit the grey end of the spectrum: grey buildings, grey earth, grey birds, grey trees. Outside, the city and then the country spool past in black and white.
Last night is a smoky blur—another session at the pub with Klaus and his friends. But this is not one of those hangovers where you write the day off to darkness. It is the more interesting kind, where destroyed synapses are reconstructing themselves, sometimes missing their old paths and making odd, new connections. I remember things I haven’t remembered before—things that do not come out of the ordered store of memories I call my past. I remember my mother’s moustache in the sun, I remember the acute hunger-and-loss feeling of adolescence, I remember the burnt-chalk smell of tram brakes in summer. You think you have your past filed away under subject headings but, somewhere, it waits to reconnect itself.
I remember learning German—so beautiful, so strange—at school in Australia on the other side of the earth. My family was nonplussed about me learning such an odd, ugly language and, though of course too sophisticated to say it, the language of the enemy. But I liked the sticklebrick nature of it, building long supple words by putting short ones together. Things could be brought into being that had no name in English—
Weltanschauung
,
Schadenfreude
,
sippenhaft
,
Sonderweg
,
Scheissfreundlichkeit
,
Vergangenheitsbewältigung
. I liked the sweeping range of words from ‘heartfelt’ to ‘heartsick’. And I liked the order, the directness that I imagined in the people. Then, in the 1980s, I came to live in West Berlin for a while and I wondered long and hard what went on behind that Wall.
A barrel-stomached woman opposite me unwraps black bread sandwiches. So far she has managed to pretend I am not here, although if we weren’t careful our knees could touch. She has painted on her eyebrows in arches of surprise, or menace.
I think about the feeling I’ve developed for the former German Democratic Republic. It is a country which no longer exists, but here I am on a train hurtling through it—its tumbledown houses and bewildered people. This feeling needs a sticklebrick word: I can only describe it as horror-romance. It’s a dumb feeling, but I don’t want to shake it. The romance comes from the dream of a better world the German Communists wanted to build out of the ashes of their Nazi past: from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs. The horror comes from what they did in its name. East Germany has disappeared, but its remains are still at the site.
My travelling companion takes out a packet of West cigarettes, which seem to be the most popular brand here since the fall of the Wall. She lights up and directs her breath of smoke over my head. When she’s finished she butts out in the flip-top bin, clasps her hands around her middle and falls asleep. Her expression, fixed with pencil, doesn’t change.
I first visited in Leipzig in 1994, nearly five years after the Wall fell in November 1989. East Germany still felt like a secret walled-in garden, a place lost in time. It wouldn’t have surprised me if things had tasted different here—apples like pears, say, or wine like blood. Leipzig was the hub of what everyone now calls
die Wende
—the Turning Point. The
Wende
was the peaceful revolution against the Communist dictatorship in East Germany, the only successful revolution in German history. Leipzig was the start and the heart of it. Now, two years later, I’m on my way back.
In 1994 I found a town built by accretion. The streets wound crookedly, there were crumbly passages through buildings that led unexpectedly into the next block, and low arches funnelled people into underground bars. My map bore no resemblance to how life was lived in Leipzig. People in the know could take hidden short cuts through buildings, or walk along unmarked lanes between each block, moving above and below ground. I got thoroughly lost. I was looking for the Stasi museum in the Runden Ecke, or ‘round corner’ building which had formerly been the Stasi offices. I needed to see for myself part of the vast apparatus that had been the East German Ministry for State Security.
The Stasi was the internal army by which the government kept control. Its job was to know everything about everyone, using any means it chose. It knew who your visitors were, it knew whom you telephoned, and it knew if your wife slept around. It was a bureaucracy metastasised through East German society: overt or covert, there was someone reporting to the Stasi on their fellows and friends in every school, every factory, every apartment block, every pub. Obsessed with detail, the Stasi entirely failed to predict the end of Communism, and with it the end of the country. Between 1989 and 1990 it was turned inside out: Stalinist spy unit one day, museum the next. In its forty years, ‘the Firm’ generated the equivalent of all records in German history since the middle ages. Laid out upright and end to end, the files the Stasi kept on their countrymen and women would form a line 180 kilometres long.
Eventually, I found the Runden Ecke, and it was huge. A set of steps led up to vast metal-clad double doors with studs on them. I shrank like Alice. To the right there was a pale rectangle in the cement facade, a bit of the building that hadn’t been tanned by smog. A plaque saying ‘Ministry of State Security—Leipzig Division’ or something like it had hung there. It had been removed in a kind of fearful joy during the revolution and has not been seen since.
