Stasiland (22 page)
And there was a ballot paper on which the Communist Party candidate’s name was top of the list. It might have been a coincidence, except that next to this candidate’s name, ‘Paul Enke’, was written not ‘SED Candidate’, but, already, ‘Mayor’.
Nevertheless, when the vote came in, it was clear Heinz Koch had won the election. Lindau was a tiny place: the Liberal Democrats got 363 votes, the SED 289 and the CDU 131. People no longer wanted right or left—they wanted middle-of-the-road. ‘But Enke the Communist,’ Koch says, ‘was chairman of the Electoral Commission.’ Enke immediately called a meeting in the town hall, ‘for the evaluation of the vote’.
Koch tells me that the hall was full of women, some with children. There were several old men, but there were scarcely any young or middle-aged ones. Enke welcomed them, and then addressed the room: ‘So where are all your men?’
There was a silence, shuffling.
‘Fallen in war,’ came one answer.
‘Missing in action,’ said another voice.
One woman said quietly, ‘I don’t know.’
Then a voice came from the back of the hall. ‘My husband is a prisoner of war in Russia.’
Enke seized his moment. ‘How many of your men are in POW camps?’ he asked. The hands started to go up, at first slowly, but then there were many. ‘So how long did your husband serve in the forces?’ Enke asked a woman sitting near the front.
‘One year,’ she said. The answers started to come from all over the room: five years, three years, seven years.
‘And for that they were taken prisoners of war?’
‘That’s the way it happened,’ said the women.
‘Well, I ask you,’ said Enke, ‘do you think it right that your men, who served three years, five years, seven years in the armed forces, are in prison, when Master Sergeant Koch on my right here, who served that fascist imperialist army for sixteen years, gets off scot-free? Not one single day’s punishment?’
‘So in this way,’ Koch says, ‘my father was sentenced to seven years in a prisoner-of-war camp.’
‘What? Just like that?’ I ask.
Koch is agitated now. ‘The Russians came and took him into custody. That was just the way it worked. And the people said that it’s right that it should be so. If my husband is sitting it out over there, then so should he.’
Between 1945 and 1950 the Russian secret police imprisoned POWs, Nazis, and others like infantryman Heinz Koch who might have got in their way. They re-used the Nazi concentration camps of Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald and other places, and when they were full they built new prisons, or sent people to Russia. It is estimated that some 43,000 of these people died from illness, starvation or violence after the war. In Lindau, the people helped the victors punish their fellows and called it fair.
After nearly a month in custody, on 22 October 1946, Enke came to visit his prisoner. Heinz thought his time was up. Enke started in on an unusual tack.
‘It’s your wife’s birthday today, I gather,’ he said.
‘Yes.’
‘Wouldn’t it be a nice birthday surprise for her if you came home? What would you say to that?’
Heinz was confused. He had been steeling himself for transportation. ‘Is that…possible?’ he asked.
‘Sure it is. I am mayor, after all, and what I say goes.’
There was a pause, then it became clear. ‘What are the conditions?’ Heinz asked.
‘Relax, comrade, relax. It’s simple, really. All you need to do is quit the Liberal Democrats and come over to us. Become a member of the Socialist Unity Party. Just as soon as that happens I can take you home. In fact, I could take you home today.’
Koch is looking at me closely. ‘What would you do?’ he asks. ‘How should my father decide?’
‘For the wife and life, of course,’ I say.
Koch is pleased, smiling and nodding and waving the mike. ‘So,’ he says, ‘on his wife’s birthday Heinz changed parties and went home.’
In this way the Lindau Communist Party annihilated its opposition and at the same time installed one of their own as the local primary school teacher, under threat of deportation to a POW camp. They had him where they could keep an eye on him: there was only one school, and the children of all the Party members were there.
Later that same year Hagen started school. Heinz taught all his pupils the doctrine of Communism, including his little boy. He found himself educating good socialist citizens for a regime that had tried to ruin his family, and his life.
In late 1946 the Communists founded the
Pioniere
, a youth organisation designed to instil in young children a love of Marx and country. For the older ones the Free German Youth was established. The scheme mirrored exactly the Nazis’
Pimpfe
for small children and the Hitler Youth for adolescents. People joked that the Free German Youth and the Hitler Youth were so similar that only the colour of the neckerchiefs distinguished them. In both, there were meetings, torches, oaths of allegiance and a confirmation ceremony for thirteen-year-olds, complete with candles and prayer-like incantations.
All small children were required to join the
Pioniere
. But this came too soon for the villagers of Lindau. They baulked at seeing their children once more in line and marching and refused to put them in uniform again for the powers that be. Heinz Koch was arrested and taken into custody.
Enke said, ‘Why should the other children join up if the teacher’s own son does not?’ It was necessary for Heinz Koch to set an example through his son. He was released and given one more chance to show why he should not be deported.
Koch turns to his box and pulls out a small blue scarf. ‘So, as a result, on 13 December 1946 I was the first child to wear this kerchief around my neck.’
This is how Hagen Koch became a
Musterknabe
, a poster boy for the new regime. My gaze has wandered to the wall behind him. Next to the gold plate hangs a girly calendar displaying a naked woman’s torso in a forest. The photographer has cut off her head and her legs below the knee. The caption reads, ‘Wilderness Area’.
Hagen Koch turns back to his box, his collection of strange talismans from a bygone world. ‘Let me show you this beetle,’ he says, pulling out a poster. He unrolls it: ‘STOP THE AMERICAN BEETLE!’ is written in large capitals across the top. Below there’s a drawing of a child holding a magnifying glass to the ground. Under it is a beetle with a human face and big human teeth. The beetle wears a jacket in the colours of the American flag, and its face is the face of President Truman. ‘These were all over our school,’ he says, and explains why.
In 1948 the Russians decided they had had enough of the small island of capitalist imperialism that was West Berlin. It seethed with the spies of enemy countries. It was a toehold for the Allies on socialist soil. In a modern siege, Stalin’s forces cut off the land supply routes through East Germany to West Berlin. On the night of 24 June 1948, they switched off the eastern power plant that supplied the city. The West Berliners were to be starved out in the dark.
But the Allies would not give up the two million West Berliners. For almost a year, from June 1948 to October 1949, they kept the city alive by plane. In that time American and British planes made some 277,728 flights through Soviet airspace to drop bundles of food, clothing, cigarettes, medicine, fuel and equipment, including components for a new power station, to the people of West Berlin.
In the west, the aircraft came to be known as the ‘
Rosinenbomber
’, or ‘raisin bombers’, because they brought food. But in the east, Koch and his classmates were told the enemy planes sprayed potato beetles over East German crops as they flew over, in order to spoil the harvest. ‘Lindau was virtually under the flight path—the planes flew day and night,’ Koch says. ‘This is how they gave us a picture of the enemy: in a place where people get no news from outside, they have nothing else to believe.’
‘Why was it credible that the Americans would do this?’ I ask. It seemed improbable that a nuclear superpower would be loading up planes full of live beetles on leaves and setting out across the Atlantic with them.
‘Because they had just bombed Dresden flat!’ he cried. ‘That beautiful centre of German culture! Senselessly! And they even dropped two atom bombs on Japan! They were clearly truly evil! What more proof do you need?’
Bombs, atomic weapons, and now a biblical pestilence.
‘I am telling you how propaganda works!’ he continues. ‘That is how I grew up.’
At this time, there was still rationing. Sugar was scarce and boiled sweets were a luxury. But there was an incentive scheme for the children. ‘For every beetle we collected we could redeem a penny. For a larva, a halfpenny. And for every hundred, we got ten ration cards for sugar! So we children went into the fields every spare minute we had, collecting beetles and larvae, beetles and larvae. We handed them in and we got more sweets than we could eat!’
In Koch’s mind, the sweet taste of reward is connected with foiling the American plot to spoil the potato crop and starve his people. This story—of insects and sweets and the making of an enemy—is the story of the making of a patriot.
‘So it was that I came on 5 April 1960 to the Ministry of State Security.’ Hagen Koch nearly swallows the words. ‘Four days later,’ he says, ‘this photo was taken.’ The photo shows a young man in his grey Stasi uniform spruced and tense behind a huge lectern. Koch was giving his maiden speech: why I want to protect and defend my homeland. He took the oath: ‘By order of the workers’ and farmers’ state, I promise if necessary to lay down my life…to protect against the enemy…obediently and everywhere…’ All the top brass were there. Mielke was there.
Afterwards, Koch stood in a loose group with his commandant. The other recruits were pretending to relax and trying to be noticed at the same time. Suddenly Koch felt all eyes on him, a hand on his shoulder. He turned around. It was Mielke.
‘What is your training, young man?’
‘Technical draftsman.’
Mielke addressed Koch’s commandant. ‘I want you to look after this one. His career. This is the kind we need.’
‘And so,’ Koch says, ‘that is how I was lifted out from the great grey mass.’ He was immediately made director of the Drafting Office for Cartographics and Topography. ‘I didn’t have a clue,’ he tells me. ‘My training was as a technical draftsman for machines. I knew nothing about maps.’
In the summer of 1960, shortly after joining the Stasi, Koch fell in love with a girl from Berlin. She hadn’t been in the
Pioniere
or the Free German Youth, and she certainly wasn’t in the Party, but she wasn’t radical either. Koch smiles and sort of half-winks. ‘I chose my wife by her outside, not her political convictions.’ I find myself looking away, and the girly calendar catches my eye. It can’t meet my gaze because its head is cut off. I look at its map of Tasmania in the forest.
The Stasi knew everything. Koch’s boss called him in and told him, ‘That girl is inappropriate. We have plans for you, and that little one, she is GDR-negative.’
For their part, her parents were horrified: he was one of
them
. As soon as she turned eighteen they eloped. It was 21 July 1961.
Koch turns around and flicks a hand at the calendar. ‘You noticed that did you?’ he chuckles.
‘Hmm.’
‘Do you know what it is?’
‘What do you mean?’ I ask.
‘That is the calendar for the border troops of the GDR,’ he said. ‘Do you know what is special about it?’
‘No.’
‘That calendar was printed in mid-1990.
After
the Wall came down. It was printed because, even at that late stage, people here could not believe that the nation would simply cease to exist. Despite all the evidence, they thought the GDR would go on as an independent country, with an army and a border guard of its own. And that border guard would need its own girly calendar.’
‘When the Wall was built in 1961 I thought it was something we had to do because they were robbing us blind,’ Koch says. ‘The GDR was compelled to protect itself from the swindlers and parasites and black marketeers of the west.’
Because of subsidisation, prices were lower in the east, but so were wages. ‘Before there was a Wall,’ he says, ‘people thought: why should I work in the east when I could earn more in the west? So they went across to them each day and offered them their labour, when we so badly needed it here to rebuild.
‘And then at the checkpoints on their way home they’d change their west marks for eastern ones at a rate of five to one! Can you imagine?’ He says this as if rates of exchange were some kind of money voodoo. ‘They’d come back here able to buy up everything of ours. Not only that, but they’d buy up for friends in the west as well—in the mornings we used to see these people on their way to work with rucksacks full of our bread, our butter, our milk, eggs and meat. Something had to be done to stop people fleeing through this mousehole in the GDR.’
As well as leaving to work in the western sector each day, hundreds and later thousands of refugees started leaving the eastern sector for good. By 1961 about 2000 people were leaving the east each day through West Berlin.
Koch says his thinking was orthodox for the time. ‘These people were shirking the hard work that had to be done here in order to build a better future for themselves—they wanted to enjoy their lives right here, right now.’ It was as if that were a moral failure, a religious falling off the branch—who are these people who will reap where they have not sown?
The GDR was haemorrhaging. ‘And it wasn’t just the ordinary workers who were leaving! It was the doctors, the engineers, the educated people. The GDR had paid for their education and then they allowed themselves to be seduced by the lure of the west.’
So, according to Koch, Ulbricht, the head of state, decided he needed to build an ‘anti-fascist protective measure’. I have always been fond of this term which has something of the prophylactic about it, protecting easterners from the western disease of shallow materialism. It obeys all the logic of locking up free people to keep them safe from criminals.
