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East Germany has disappeared, but its remains are still at the site.
In East Germany, information ran in a closed circuit between the government and its press outlets.
Bornholmer Bridge
Some people are comfortable talking about their lives, as if they can make sense of the progression of random events that made them what they are. This involves a kind of forward-looking faith in life; a conviction that cause and effect are linked, and that they are themselves more than the sum of their past.
I can’t see it but I know that just near there, on the site of the old Palace of the Prussian Emperors pulled down by the Communists, is the parliament building of the GDR, the Palast der Republik. It is brown and plastic-looking, full of asbestos, and all shut up.
Like so many things here, no-one can decide whether to make the Palast der Republik into a memorial warning from the past, or to get rid of it altogether and go into the future unburdened of everything, except the risk of doing it all again.
Streets near here are being renamed: from Marx-Engels-Platz to Schlossplatz, from Leninallee to Landsberger Allee, from Wilhelm-Pieck-Strasse to Torstrasse, in a massive act of ideological redecoration.
I catch the underground to the national Stasi Headquarters at Normannenstrasse in the suburb of Lichtenberg.
On 7 November 1990, only months after the citizens of Berlin barricaded this complex, Mielke’s rooms, including his private quarters, were opened to the public as a museum. The ‘Federal Commissioner for the Files of the State Security Service of the former GDR’ (the Stasi File Authority) has taken control of the files. People come here to read their unauthorised biographies.
Erich Honecker
The foyer of Stasi HQ is a large atrium. Soupy light comes through the windows behind a staircase that zigzags up to the offices. A small woman who reminds me of a hospital orderly—neat hair, sensible white shoes—is showing a tour group around. The visitors are chatty, elderly people, who have just got off a bus with Bonn numberplates. They wear bright colours and expensive fabrics, and have come to have a look at what would have happened to them had they been born, or stayed, further east.
Here, at the Normannenstrasse headquarters, there was panic. Stasi officers were instructed to destroy files, starting with the most incriminating—those naming westerners who spied for them, and those that concerned deaths. They shredded the files until the shredders collapsed.
Runden Tisch,
Runden Tisch
Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung (the overseas arm of the Stasi)
The group leaves, not even muttering among themselves any more. I imagine they are in a hurry to get back to the international-style West Berlin hotel that reminds them of nothing, and I don’t blame them.
They are the 1985 plans of the Stasi, together with the army, for the invasion of West Berlin.
It’s a spacious room, with the feel of well-kept impoverishment. It is the same sense you might get visiting someone who bought their furniture as a bride in the 1950s but never had the means to update it. In fact, everything seems to be in that particular fifties yellowy-green colour, nuclear mustard.
‘even after seven years. I don’t feel like I belong here at all. Did you know that in the suburb of Kreuzberg in West Berlin they wanted the Wall back! To protect them from us!’ She lights a cigarette. ‘Can you understand this German thinking?’
This evening she and her brood are doing a ‘horror-erotic’ show inspired by Walpurgisnacht, the night when witches meet to revel with the Devil.
Klaus Renft Combo. There are always sports bags full of beer and every kind of smoking equipment known to man. We are both regulars at the local pub, which we use, effectively, as a living room. The pub sound system is pumping out the plaintive and beautiful song ‘Hilflos’, re-recorded on their recent comeback album. ‘You still there?’ he says. ‘Yep. And I’m staying here.’ ‘Sweet dreams then, kiddo,’ he slurs. When he hangs up the receiver misses its cradle and dangles upside-down in the air. I take the phone back to bed. I lie listening to ‘Hilflos’, and then
In the GDR a great swathe of geography remained theoretical because people couldn’t travel outside the Eastern Bloc. If easterners thought about Australia at all, it was as an imaginary place to go in the event of a nuclear catastrophe.
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.
‘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!’
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.
In the GDR people were required to acknowledge an assortment of fictions as fact. Some of these fictions were fundamental, such as the idea that human nature is a work-in-progress which can be improved upon, and that Communism is the way to do it. Others were more specific: that East Germans were not the Germans responsible (even in part) for the Holocaust; that the GDR was a multi-party democracy; that socialism was peace-loving; that there were no former Nazis left in the country; and that, under socialism, prostitution did not exist.
bilious
When she left Room 118 Julia was all right until she got home. Then her legs wouldn’t hold her weight.
in this land of merciless punctuality.
IG-Farben, the company responsible for delivering the poison gas Zyklon B to concentration camps.
Today I could make one every…single…day!’ This is a tantrum engineered to frighten me. ‘That’s how disgusting this, this shitbox television is!’ He points with his stick at the set in the room.
‘What makes me sorry,’ he says in a withering tone, ‘is what is dished up to people today on that piece-of-filth television.
Orwell was banned in the GDR; I wonder if von Schnitzler has taken particular offence to the program for its Orwellian overtones, or just its general stupidity. He is looking at me. ‘I think that big television tyrant of yours was involved in that—’ ‘She’s Australian,’ Frau von Schnitzler corrects him, ‘not American.’ ‘I know what I’m saying,’ he says. ‘Murdoch,’ I say. ‘Yes, he was Australian but now he’s American.’ ‘Who cares?’ von Schnitzler counters airily. ‘He’s a global imperialist.’
‘Moreover people in the GDR were not “walled-in”! They could go to Hungary, they could go to Poland. They just couldn’t go to NATO countries.
‘That’s why I’m so beloved by all those who think imperialistically and act imperialistically and bring up their children imperialistically!’ Each time he says ‘imperialistically’ he thrusts his fist on the stick forward towards me. This man, who could turn inhumanity into humanity, faces now perhaps his greatest challenge: to turn the fact that he is hated into the fact that he is, in the face of all available evidence, right.
‘No. I focused in my program quite deliberately and exclusively on anti-imperialism, not on GDR propaganda.’
‘But you understand my question, Herr von Schnitzler. The success propaganda in the GDR media was also lies—’ ‘It did distance the people from us, because it was in such stark contrast to the reality.’ He can switch from one view to another with frightening ease. I think it is a sign of being accustomed to such power that the truth does not matter because you cannot be contradicted.
changes tack, back to his friend Mielke. ‘The Wall was necessary to defend a threatened nation. And there was Erich Mielke at the top, a living example of the most humane human being.’ I have never heard Mielke referred to in this way. He was too fierce and feared to be referred to with anything like affection.
Behind her the sky is the colour of wet wool.
housing estates,’
‘I think I’m losing track of normal.’
And almost overnight the Germans in the eastern states were made, or made themselves, innocent of Nazism. It seemed as if they actually believed that Nazis had come from and returned to the western parts of Germany, and were somehow separate from them—which was in no way true. History was so quickly remade, and so successfully, that it can truly be said that the easterners did not feel then, and do not feel now, that they were the same Germans as those responsible for Hitler’s regime. This sleight-of-history must rank as one of the most extraordinary innocence manoeuvres of the century.
Socialist teachers had to be created.
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.
On the night of Sunday 12 August 1961 the East German army rolled out barbed wire along the streets bordering the eastern sector, and stationed sentries at regular intervals. At daylight people woke to find themselves cut off from relatives, from work, from school.
Klaus Renft Combo
Christian ‘Kuno’ Kunert, was trained in a church choir in Leipzig and his voice hits you like the truth. He sings their famous ‘Die Ketten werden knapper’ (The Chains Are Getting Tighter) and ‘The Ballad of Little Otto’, who longed to reach his brother in the west. Klaus sits down again and puffs
The Stasi had used radiation to mark people and objects it wanted to track. It developed a range of radioactive tags including irradiated pins it could surreptitiously insert into a person’s clothing, radioactive magnets to place on cars, and radioactive pellets to shoot into tyres.
impregnate them with radiation or secretly spray their floor at home so they would leave radioactive footprints everywhere they went.
