Stasiland (2 page)
I walked around inside. All the desks were just as they were left the night the demonstrators took the building—frighteningly neat. Dial phones sat in breeding pairs. Shredding machines had been thrown out the back after collapsing in the Stasi’s final desperate attempt to destroy the most damning files. Above one desk was a 1989 calendar with a picture of a woman naked from the waist up, but mostly there were just Communist insignia on the walls. The cells were open, set up as if prepared for more prisoners. Despite the best efforts of Miss December, the building felt damp and bureaucratic.
The citizens’ committee administering the museum had mounted displays on cheap particleboard screens. There was a print of the famous photograph from the autumn 1989 demonstrations. It showed a sea of people holding candles, their necks craned up to the building, staring their controllers in the face. They knew it was from here that their lives were observed, manipulated and sometimes ruined. There were copies of the increasingly frantic telexes from the Berlin headquarters of the Stasi to here, where the officers had barricaded themselves in with tin on the windows. ‘Secure all Ministry Premises’, they read, and ‘Protect all Covert Objects’.
My favourites were the pictures of protesters occupying the building on 4 December 1989, squatting in the corridors with the surprise still on their faces, as if half-expecting to be asked to leave. As they entered the building, the Stasi guards had asked to see the demonstrators’ identity cards, in a strange parody of the control they were, at that very moment, losing. The demonstrators, in shock, obediently pulled their cards from their wallets. Then they seized the building.
Large and small mysteries were accounted for when the files were opened. Not least, perhaps, the tics of the ordinary man in the street. This document was on display:
SIGNALS FOR OBSERVATION
1. Watch Out! Subject is coming
—touch nose with hand or handkerchief
2. Subject is moving on, going further, or overtaking
—stroke hair with hand, or raise hat briefly
3. Subject standing still
—lay one hand against back, or on the stomach
4. Observing Agent wishes to be terminate observation because cover threatened
—bend and retie shoelaces
5. Subject returning
—both hands against back or on stomach
6. Observing Agent wishes to speak with Team Leader or other Observing Agents
—take out briefcase or equivalent and examine contents.
I pictured the street ballet of the deaf and dumb: agents signalling to each other from corner to corner: stroking noses, tummies, backs and hair, tying and untying shoelaces, lifting their hats to strangers and riffling through papers—a choreography for very nasty scouts.
Towards the back of the building, three rooms housed Stasi artefacts in glass cases. There was a box of fake wigs and moustaches alongside small tubes of glue to affix them. There were women’s vinyl handbags with built-in microphones disguised as flower petals in a studded decoration. There were bugs that had been implanted in apartment walls and a pile of mail that never reached the west. One of the envelopes had a child’s handwriting on it in coloured pencil—a different colour for each letter of the address.
One glass case contained nothing but empty jars. I was staring at it when a woman approached me. She looked like a female version of Luther, except she was beautiful. She was fiftyish, with high cheekbones, and a direct gaze. She looked friendly, but she also looked as if she knew I had been making mental ridicule of a regime which required its members to sign pledges of allegiance that looked like marriage certificates, confiscated children’s birthday cards to their grandparents and typed up inane protocols at desks beneath calendars of large-breasted women. This was Frau Hollitzer, who runs the museum.
Frau Hollitzer explained to me that the jars in front of us were ‘smell samples’. The Stasi had developed a quasi-scientific method, ‘smell sampling’, as a way to find criminals. The theory was that we all have our own identifying odour, which we leave on everything we touch. These smells can be captured and, with the help of trained sniffer dogs, compared to find a match. The Stasi would take its dogs and jars to a location where they suspected an illegal meeting had occurred, and see if the dogs could pick up the scents of the people whose essences were captured in the jars.
Mostly, smell samples were collected surreptitiously. The Stasi might break into someone’s apartment and take a piece of clothing worn close to the skin, often underwear. Alternatively, a ‘suspect’ would be brought in under some pretext for questioning, and the vinyl seat he or she had sat on would be wiped afterward with a cloth. The pieces of stolen clothing, or the cloth, would then be placed in a sealed jar. The containers looked like jam bottling jars. A label read: ‘Name: Herr [Name]. Time: 1 Hour. Object: Worker’s Underpants.’
When the citizens of Leipzig entered this building, they found a large collection of smell samples. Then the jars disappeared. It was not until June 1990 that they turned up—in the ‘smell pantry’ of the Leipzig police. But they were empty. Apparently, the Leipzig police had taken them for their own use, even in the period after the fall of the Wall when democracy was beginning here. The jars still bore all their meticulous labels. From these it was clear that the Leipzig Stasi had collected smell samples of the entire political opposition in this part of Saxony. No-one knows who has these scraps of material and old socks now, nor what they might be keeping them for.
Later, Frau Hollitzer told me about Miriam, a young woman whose husband had died in a Stasi remand cell nearby. It was rumoured the Stasi orchestrated the funeral, to the point of substituting an empty coffin for a full one, and cremating the body to destroy any evidence of the cause of death. I imagined paid-off pallbearers pretending to struggle under the weight of an empty coffin, or perhaps genuinely struggling beneath a coffin filled with eighty kilos of old newspapers and stones. I imagined not knowing whether your husband hanged himself, or whether someone you now pass in the street killed him. I thought I would like to speak with Miriam, before my imaginings set like false memories.
I went home to Australia, but now I am back in Berlin. I could not get Miriam’s story, the strange second-hand tale of a woman I had never met, out of my mind. I found a part-time job in television, and set about looking for some of the stories from this land gone wrong.
I work at the overseas television service in what was West Berlin. The service was set up by the government after the war to beam benign Germanness around the globe. My job is to answer letters from viewers who’ve been beamed at and have some queries.
At Viewer Post I am a cross between an agony aunt, a free research assistant and a receptacle for messages in bottles. ‘Dear Viewer Post, I am looking for the address of the clinic of Dr Manfred von Ardenne to try his new ultra-high temperature cancer treatment for advanced stages as featured in your program…’; ‘Dear Viewer Post, Many thanks for your interesting program on asylum seekers in your country. I am sixteen years old and living in Akra. Could you please send me informations on asylum…’ The occasional neo-Nazi from Missouri or Liverpool writes wanting information on ‘mother groups’ in East Germany. A man from Birmingham, Alabama sent me a photograph of himself in uniform at the liberation of Bergen Belsen concentration camp in 1945 standing behind corpses. He wrote, ‘Thank you for your program on the fiftieth anniversary of the peace. I would like you to know that I recall with great fondness the welcome we Americans received from the ordinary German people. In the villages they had nothing, but when we came they shared it with us like family…’ I write contained and appropriate responses. Sometimes, I wonder what it would be like to be German.
Alexander Scheller is my boss. He’s a tall man just on forty who has a picture of a tight-faced blonde wife, a glass ashtray and a permanent cup of coffee on his vast and otherwise empty desk. He taps incessantly, fidgety with caffeine and nicotine. To his credit, he does me the honour of behaving as if my work answering viewer correspondence is as important as that of the journalists and professional people here. A month ago I sat on the other side of that desk because he had made time for a meeting I called myself.
Scheller’s off-sider Uwe Schmidt was there too. Uwe’s main job as adjutant is to make Scheller seem important enough to have an adjutant. The other part of his job is to appear busy and time-short, which is more difficult because he has hardly anything to do. Scheller and Uwe are both westerners.
Uwe has a similar amount of TV-journo energy to Scheller, only Uwe’s is sexual not chemical. Uwe’s girlfriends are always leaving him and he is, therefore, at most times of day and in almost any company, deeply distracted by desire.
I like Uwe and feel sorry for him because I know that in looking for the reason why his girlfriends leave him he has started to wear himself out from the inside. I recently saw him singing ‘You’re once, twice, three times a layayadeee’ in English in his car at the lights with tears on his face. Now, over the other side of the desk, he caught himself looking at me like food, and I knew he hadn’t heard what I was saying.
‘Pardon?’ he said.
I decided to start from the beginning. ‘We’ve had a letter from a German living in Argentina in response to the item on the puzzle women.’
‘Puzzle women? Puzzle women?’ Uwe said, trying to remember the story.
‘They sit in Nuremberg puzzling together the shredded files the Stasi couldn’t burn or pulp.’
‘Right. I’m with you,’ Scheller said. He was tapping the eraser end of a pencil on the desk.
‘This man says he left Dresden after the war. He asks whether we might do an item on what things are actually like now for the East German people instead, as he says, of “always broadcasting what is being done for the poor cousins”.’
‘Puzzle women,’ Uwe muttered.
I took a deep breath. ‘And I agree with him—we’re always talking about the things that Germany is doing
for
people in the former GDR. It would be great to do an item from the eastern point of view. For instance, to find out what it’s like to wait for part of your file to be pieced together.’
‘You know we don’t broadcast domestically,’ Scheller said, ‘so there’s no point us doing items on the Ossis for their gratification.’
I looked to Uwe, off to one side with his feet up on Scheller’s acreage of desk. He was rolling a fountain pen over his knuckles, lost in a reverie. Puzzling over women.
‘I know, I know,’ I said to Scheller. ‘But East Germany—I just think we should show some of the stories from there. From here, I mean.’
‘What sort of stories?’ Scheller asked. Behind him the computer gave off a glockenspiel beep signalling new email.
‘I don’t know,’ I said, because I really didn’t know. ‘There must be people who stood up to the regime somehow, or who were wrongfully imprisoned.’ I felt myself warming up, a little dangerous. ‘I mean, after World War II people searched high and low for the smallest signs of resistance to Hitler—as if a tiny piece of national pride could be salvaged and tied onto a couple of student pacifists and a bunch of old Prussian aristocrats. What about here? There must have been some resistance to the dictatorship?’
‘They aren’t a nation.’ Scheller was tetchy now.
‘I know, but it was a nation.’
‘Look,’ he said, ‘they are just Germans who had Communism for forty years and went backwards, and all they want now is the money to have big TV sets and holidays in Majorca like everyone else. It was an experiment and it failed.’
‘Well, what do you suggest I write to this guy?’ I could hear my voice getting higher. ‘Should I tell him that no-one here is interested in East Germans and their stories, because they don’t form part of our overseas image?’
‘For God’s sake!’ Scheller said. ‘You won’t find the great story of human courage you are looking for—it would have come out years ago, straight after 1989. They are just a bunch of downtrodden whingers, with a couple of mild-mannered civil rights activists among them, and only a couple at that. They just had the rotten luck to end up behind the Iron Curtain.’ He tilted his head. ‘What has gotten into you?’
Uwe put his feet down. ‘Are you all right?’
Uwe walked back to my desk with me, solicitous as a doctor with a patient who’s had bad news. That he did this made me realise I had gone over the top. He said, ‘He’s simply not interested.’
‘No-one is interested in these people.’
‘Look.’ Uwe touched my forearm gently, turning me towards him like a dance partner. His eyes were green and slanted up, his teeth short and neat, little pearls. ‘You’re probably right. No-one here is interested—they were backward and they were broke, and the whole Stasi thing…’ He trailed off. His breath was minty. ‘It’s sort of…embarrassing.’
I replied to the Argentinian thanking him for his suggestion but telling him that ‘regrettably the station’s remit is only for current affairs and news, and we are therefore unable to investigate more personal, “point-of-view” stories.’
A week ago he wrote back. He was angry, telling me that history is made of personal stories. He said that issues were being swept under the carpet in East Germany, and people along with them. It took twenty years after the war, he said, for the Nazi regime even to begin to be discussed in Germany, and that that process is repeating itself now. ‘Will it be 2010 or 2020 before what happened there is remembered?’ he wrote. And, ‘Why are some things easier to remember the
more
time has passed since they occurred?’
The woman opposite me wakes up as the train pulls into Leipzig. Because there is something intimate about watching another person sleep, she now acknowledges my existence. ‘
Wiedersehen
,’ she says as she leaves the compartment.
Miriam Weber stands at the end of the platform, a small still woman in the stream of alighting passengers. She holds a single rose in front of her body so I will know who she is. We shake hands, not looking too closely at first, talking about trains, trips, rain. It feels like a blind date, because we have described ourselves to each other. I know she has not told her story to a stranger before.