The Berlin Wall didn’t fall; it was happily hacked to pieces. Ordinary people
from East and West came, some with hammers or picks, others simply to give
it it a good kicking to get their piece. Everyone wanted to be in on it: if
all the “Certified Genuine Souvenir Fragments” in all the living rooms in
all the world were put together now they’d make an even more monstrous
edifice. When we think of November 9, 1989, the overwhelming picture is one
of joyful, incredulous Berliners — East and West together — out of danger
and dancing on top of the Wall.
But somewhere in a Berlin suburb, I imagine, still lives the Stasi man who was
in charge of the Bornholmer Strasse checkpoint that night. From his post he
watched the throng milling outside, impatient and wanting to flee. The
people had rushed there after seeing the East German minister [Günter]
Schabowski on the evening news, stammering that free travel was to be
allowed “immediately”.
But no orders had come down to the man at his post. (In one of a pantomime of
errors, Schabowski had been caught off-guard at the press conference — the
decision was meant to be effective only from the next day.) The man did not
know what to do. So, in what he no doubt imagined to be the spirit of the
regime, he took the initiative: he invented a secret sign. He ordered the
border guards to pick out “the most uppity” in the crowd and discreetly to
stamp their exit visa to the left-hand side of their ID photos. That way
these people — possibly those most desperate for freedom, or bravest — could
be identified on their way home again and, for reasons they would never
know, be refused re-entry.
That story, and it is true, combines in microcosm salient reminders about the
East German regime: its anti-democratic character, the über-diligence and
loyalty of its employees and the secrecy and chicanery of their methods.
Most of all, it shows the overwhelming delusion that many of its
functionaries held (and may still hold) that the German Democratic Republic
(GDR) was superior, that it would continue to exist and that people would
want to come back.
Twenty years on, we in the West are celebrating the fall of the Wall. But I
wonder how that Stasi officer feels about it, sitting in his apartment? Like
the hundreds of thousands of other members of the state apparatus — the
government, the Socialist Unity Party (SED), the army, the 91,000-strong
secret police the Stasi, the journalists, teachers, judges, and some of the
170,000 ex-informers — his loyalty to the late state may continue. All
except one of the former Stasi officers to whom I spoke remained loyal to
the GDR. Partly out of conviction, partly out of pride: it is hard to admit,
as the lone (and shunned) dissenter among its ranks did: “I told lies for 26
years.”
We grow to be who we are around the stake of what we love. The GDR has ceased
to be, but those who loved her still do. If they stopped, I had the
impression, they might crumble, fall limp and spineless to the ground. And,
it must be said, their love is made easier because the love-object always
was a fantasy: the ideal of the fairer, socialist world to come. The reality
of the GDR, as they well knew (though rarely admitted), fell far short.
It is worth recapping how far short. The East German Government maintained its
power by subjecting the people to fear and intimidation by its secret
police. People were turned into informers or collaborators in a terrible
bargain to stay “safe” from the Stasi: there was at least one informer for
every 50 people in the country; by some estimates one for every seven. The
Stasi ruined the lives of anyone it chose: men, women, teenagers, children.
In the early days there were a lot of deaths, or “liquidations”, of
opponents. In the 1970s and 1980s the regime preferred to destroy opponents
psychologically — spread rumours, ruin careers, marriages, take children
away — or to exile them.
Its practical methods demonstrate an institutional pathology of inventive
malice and utter disregard for human dignity: the Stasi broke into flats and
stole people’s underwear, bottling it as “smell samples” for identification
purposes; it irradiated objects and people (with lethal consequences) so as
to track them with Geiger counters; it used psychotropic drugs to turn
opponents into zombies under house arrest. The essential condition of the
GDR was the vicious war it waged on its own citizens, whom, with the stroke
of a bureaucratic pen, it turned into “traitors”, “asocials” or, most
spectacularly, “negative-enemy elements”.
The Stasi and its informers accumulated, in the 40 years of its existence
(1949 to 1989), more written records (largely the stolen biographies of its
own people) than in all of German history since the Middle Ages. Now, the
battle over how the GDR is to be remembered — or not — is raging hot. The
former cadres would like the GDR to be remembered as some kind of benign
leftist social-welfare experiment, idealistic and well-intentioned in
looking after people from cradle to grave, if perhaps a tad over-zealous.
Former human rights activists, political prisoners and historians — of left
and right — would have it remembered as it was. Then it might serve as a
warning to future generations about the dual seductions of belief and
obedience.
A growing degree of Ostalgie — toxic, rose-coloured fantasy — infects
misrepresentations of the late state. A visit to the new GDR Museum in
Berlin could leave you with the impression that the Stalinist dictatorship
was an exercise in mid-century domestic kitsch and a “liberated”
nude-bathing culture. For £48 you can stay in the “Stasi Suite” of an hotel
offering an eastern experience — minus interrogation or arbitrary
imprisonment. You might take a Trabi ride to one of the proliferating “DDR
stores” and come away believing that consumers were happy back then with
what was on offer. I have heard countless examples of the insidious
misremembering of those who can’t afford things in a free society wanting to
go back to a past where there was nothing to buy and nowhere to go, and
anyone who complained could have his or her life destroyed.
There were some things that could have been examples to us in the West — the
documented better sense of self-worth and autonomy of women in the GDR as
opposed to West Germany might be one of them. But nothing is worth the price
some people paid.
Miriam Weber* is a sparrow of a woman with short hair and round glasses. She
was imprisoned as a 16-year-old in the late 1960s for leafleting, and then
again for trying to escape over the Wall. Later, her young husband Charlie
was taken into custody and died mysteriously in his cell. Miriam spent many
years bravely refusing to co-operate with the Stasi and, after the Wall
fell, hoping for an explanation of Charlie’s death and some kind of justice.
Her extraordinary story became the cornerstone of my book Stasiland.
I asked her recently how she feels, 20 years on. “I feel good!” she says.
“Fundamentally. I feel free. Of course, die alten sitzen da.”
She means that the old cadres — from the Stasi and the Socialist Unity Party
— are still in places of relative privilege. As Faulkner has it, so
beautifully: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Nothing in
contemporary Germany could be truer.
Miriam is a producer at the state public radio station and among her managers
are former Stasi informers. At a 20th anniversary commemorative
demonstration last month, she says: “All the bosses went along, candles and
everything. And we — the former dissidents — were rostered to work.” She
laughs deeply; Miriam has the gift of distilling humour from the blackest of
ironies, to ward off despair. “It is right though, in a way,” she adds,
“because they were there in the crowd 20 years ago. They were there as
informers.”
What does it do to a society and to its ability to remember accurately the
dictatorship in its recent past, to have those loyal to it still in
positions of state responsibility? The judge who signed the warrant for
Charlie’s arrest — a charge found to be baseless after the fall of the Wall
— is, extraordinarily, still on the bench. Did he switch overnight from
being someone who got his orders from the political police to condemn
demonstrators for democracy, to someone who could uphold the values for
which they they were fighting?
At the radio station, Miriam’s most senior boss, now in charge of this
important state-funded media body, was responsible for political commentary
at the GDR radio station Stimme der DDR. Was he able to change from being a
spokesman for a dictatorship to being a bulwark of democracy against one? In
this part of the world there had been no democracy since Hitler took power
in 1933.
Miriam relates a telling effect of having former cadres in power at the radio
station. After the Wall fell the SED — allegedly with billions in state
funds — changed its name to the “Party of Democratic Socialism” and launched
itself into the Western electoral system. Today this party still has many
members who are former SED or Stasi. It was regularly referred to in news
bulletins as “the PDS, successor party to the SED”. That is, until the
directive from above to cease mentioning the SED in relation to it. Now, the
PDS no longer needs the former comrades in the media to spin its moniker. It
has erased all mention of socialism by changing its name to “Die Linke” —
The Left. And, in the September elections it won, astoundingly, almost 30
per cent of the vote in some former eastern states and fielded successful,
former Stasi informer candidates.
Miriam quips that it’s more likely that the GDR is stealthily taking over the
Federal Republic than the other way around. Then she turns serious.
“Democracy is being poisoned by the former Easterners,” she says.
“Forgetting how the GDR really was and the increase in their power go
together.”
One of the few voices in Germany to call for an accurate remembering is the
historian Hubertus Knabe, director of the memorial museum at
Hohenschönhausen, formerly the main prison for political prisoners in East
Berlin. He has faced many threats from organisations of former Stasi men. He
says that Miriam’s experiences — the judge still on the bench, the former
cadres controlling the media — are “quite typical”. After the Wall fell
there was barely any holding to account for the crimes of those in power.
Almost all the high-level functionaries retained their positions and their
pension rights and are now much better off than their former victims.
“You get more compensation if you were a warder in Bautzen [a notorious jail]
than if you were a prisoner there for ten years,” Knabe says. It’s similar
to after the Nazi period, he says, when the over-valuing of the continuity
of administrative experience meant people kept their jobs. “A big mistake
was made in the early 1990s, in that there was no programme for the quick
training of new journalists, teachers and, especially, [new people] in the
justice system — more than half of all judges and prosecutors stayed in
office.”
Knabe tells of one effect of having the old system’s schoolteachers still in
control. “If a teacher wanted to bring his class to visit the museum at
Hohenschönhausen he would be isolated in his school.”
As a result, today’s generation is shockingly ignorant of the truth of the
GDR. A survey in June found the GDR to have its highest approval rating
since unification: 57 per cent of people agreed with the statement that the
GDR was “more good than bad”, and a majority of schoolchildren were under
the illusion that it had a legitimate, democratically elected government.
I have some small experience of former cadres. I was stared down threateningly
by a phalanx of vinyl-jacketed former Stasi or Party men at the German
launch of Stasiland. (Fittingly, the launch was in the so-called
Runde Ecke — the former HQ of the Leipzig Stasi, now a museum about its
regime.) Then my German publisher was sued by a group of former cadres who
objected to me reporting on the Stasi’s alleged harassment of former
activists after the Wall fell. Although all the activities — the cutting of
brake leads, the detention of someone’s child for a few hours, the delivery
of a ticking package on a doorstep — were on the public record, both the
original and subsequent publishers of the book have been cowed into deleting
the paragraph (retained in the UK edition).
The former Stasi have been quick to learn how to use democratic means to their
ends, in the electoral and the judicial system. They have the habit of power
and the funds to wield it. Until their victims — among them many as yet
unsung heroes of the resistance — are properly financially compensated and
more generally honoured it looks as if the SED and its Stasi lost the Cold
War, but prevailed in the end.
Hubertus Knabe asks: “Where are the street names, the school names honouring
the resisters?” Or as Miriam puts it: “If the resisters are not properly
remembered, the lesson of history looks to be: conformity and collaboration
pay, in both the short and the long term.”
Knabe, though, is optimistic about whether the GDR will be remembered
accurately in its “criminal character”. “When this generation dies,” he
says, “the next might speak more critically.”
But that will be too late for Miriam to live in a place where she could tell
me her story under her real name, or feel confident enough of no reprisals
at work to have her photograph taken for this article.
Though she too is optimistic. Long ago she told me that after the Wall fell
she used to drive up to the Runde Ecke in Leipzig, park outside and just
feel “triumph!” I ask her if she still gets that feeling. “I love that it is
a museum,” she says. “Even if some people go there for nostalgic reasons,
they are still — it’s still — just a museum.”
So much is true: the Stasi headquarters is now a museum. Before I finish our
conversation, I think of making a joke about the film Night at the Museum
where all the exhibits come back to life . . . but it sticks in my throat.
* Not her real name
The author’s Stasiland was awarded the Samuel Johnson Prize in
2004. She is now working on a novel based on the true stories of four
anti-Hitler activists in exile in London.
Anna Funder joins David Chipperfield, David Edgar, Misha Glenny and Susanne
Schädlich for the discussion “Berlin and Beyond” on Monday, November 9 at
7.45pm, at the Purcell Room, Queen Elizabeth Hall, South Bank, London SE1.
0871 6632500 or southbankcentre.co.uk
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