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I sit in the chair exploring the meaning of dumbstruck, rolling the word around in my mind.
Ten days is time enough to die, to be born, to fall in love and to go mad. Ten days is a very long time. Q: What does the human spirit do after ten days without sleep, and ten days of isolation tempered only by nocturnal threat sessions? A: It dreams up a solution.
Relations between people were conditioned by the fact that one or other of you could be one of them. Everyone suspected everyone else, and the mistrust this bred was the foundation of social existence.
Miriam is upset again. Here, across the desk, was the face of the system itself: a mockery of a lawyer, making a mockery of her.
As she speaks it is as if her existence is no longer real to her in itself, more like a living epitaph to a life that was.
‘Do you ever run into any Stasi men you recognise in the street?’ I ask. I think that is what would terrify me, in the nonsensical way in which it is horrible to run into someone who has wronged you.
And I know that her small cat is incontinent, which makes her place smell, somehow, of anxiety.
What surprises me about living here is that, no matter how much is taken out, this linoleum palace continues to contain all the necessities for life, at the same time as it refuses to admit a single thing, either accidentally or arranged, of beauty or joy. In this, I think, it is much like East Germany itself.
Nearby, Hitler’s bunker has been uncovered in building works. No-one could decide about that either—a memorial could become a shrine for neo-Nazis, but to erase it altogether might signal forgetting or denial. In the end, the bunker was reburied just as it was. The mayor said, perhaps in another fifty years people would be able to decide what to do. To remember or forget—which is healthier? To demolish it or to fence it off? To dig it up, or leave it lie in the ground?
The Stasi’s brief was to be ‘the shield and sword’ of the Communist Party, called the ‘Socialist Unity Party of Germany’ (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands) or SED.
Berliners used to refer to this place as the ‘House of One Thousand Eyes’.
They shredded the files until the shredders collapsed. Among other shortages in the east, there was a shredder shortage, so they had to send agents out under cover to West Berlin to buy more.
I think that there is no parallel in history where, almost overnight, the offices of a secret service have gone from being so feared they are barely mentionable, to being a museum where you can sit in an easy chair next to the boss’s private pissoir and watch a video on how his office was stormed.
‘It comes down to something in the German mentality,’ he says, ‘a certain drive for order and thoroughness and stuff like that.’
I look at Herr Winz and suddenly the landscape here seems crowded with victims: of the Nazis, of Stalin, of the SED and the Stasi; and now this lot, wannabe victims of democracy and the rule of law.
Does telling your story mean you are free of it? Or that you go, fettered, into your future?
Lately, a study has suggested that depressed people have a more accurate view of reality, though this accuracy is not worth a bean because it is depressing, and depressed people live shorter lives. Optimists and believers are happier and healthier in their unreal worlds.
Now Julia had withdrawn from him, withdrawn into her home, and withdrawn from hope. This was more than internal emigration. It was exile.
‘My question is whether today you are of the same view about the Wall as something humane, and the killings at the border an act of peace.’ He raises his free arm, inhales and screams, ‘More! Than! Ever!’ He brings his fist down.
But he has the gift of taking things easy. Cushioned by alcohol, his landings are soft. He seems incapable of regret, and anger evaporates off him like sweat.
‘I’m not that interested,’ he says. ‘I didn’t let them get to me.’ This, I think, is his victory. This is what stops him being bound to the past and carrying it around like a wound. If there was ‘internal emigration’ in the GDR, there was also, perhaps, internal victory.
‘You can’t let it eat you up, you know, make you bitter. You’ve got to laugh where you can.’ He’s right, of course.
‘We weren’t interested if he betrayed anyone else…’ He leans his head to one side, in thought. ‘In point of the fact he had to, didn’t he?’ he says. ‘Perhaps,’ he continues, ‘this ability is not a great quality in a human being. But it was vital for our work. I have to say that it is the same in all secret services.’
To my mind, there is something warmer and more human about the carnality of other dictatorships, say in Latin America. One can more easily understand a desire for cases stuffed with money and drugs, for women and weapons and blood. These obedient grey men doing it with their underpaid informers on a weekly basis seem at once more stupid and more sinister. Betrayal clearly has its own reward: the small deep human satisfaction of having one up on someone else. It is the psychology of the mistress, and this regime used it as fuel.
But the Stasi were, in effect, trained for them, schooled in the art of convincing people to do things against their own self-interest.
He has learned not to play the ‘if only’ game: if only there had been no Wall I might not have relapsed; I might have grown up with my parents; they might not have gone to prison; I might have had a healthy body, a job, a partner. He shifts in his seat to look at me straight on. ‘There are no people who are whole,’ he says. ‘Everyone has issues of their own to deal with. Mine might be a little harder, but the main thing is how one deals with them.’
‘Well, it is an issue for me. I think life can end much too quickly, so I have no long-term aspirations. Whatever it is I want, I want it now, to experience it today. I have no patience for saving money, or building up some kind of enterprise. It makes me nervous. Other people say, “You have time, you’re still relatively young.” But I’m always so afraid that things can come to an end at any time.’ He pauses. ‘Or that politically, too, it could all change again, and then I’d have no chance to experience certain things.’
After she died, grief came down on me like a cage. It was another eighteen months before I could focus on anything outside an immediate small area of sadness, or could imagine myself into anyone else’s life. All up it was nearly three years before I came back to Berlin.
I hear fear though in his voice, the flipside of fury. Fear perhaps that his end, soon to come, will also be a desecrated grave. Then I remember his conviction to the cause. I think he may not be so much afraid of death itself but that it will eliminate, finally, his powers of rebuttal.
For now, though, this terrible game of waiting keeps her suspended from her life with Charlie, still in contact. And underneath the need to know, is the need for justice. The regime may be gone, but the world cannot be set to rights until Miriam has some kind of justice. Things have been put behind glass, but it is not yet over.
