Stasiland: True Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall

by Anna Funder

I wind the tape back. I want to pinpoint, in all these movements, what it is that makes the dance so curious. ‘Lipsi’ is colloquial for ‘Leipzig’ but it wasn’t just the regime’s overt attempt to manufacture a trend for the masses, as if it had come from that hip city. I watch the stiff couple closely. The woman seems to be missing an incisor—an odd choice for a dance model. Then I concentrate on their movements, and I get it: in not one of this panoply of gestures do the dancers’ hips move. Their torsos remain straight—neither bending towards one another, nor swivelling from side to side. The makers of this dance had plundered every tradition they could find and painstakingly extracted only the sexless moves. Just as ‘The Black Channel’ was the antidote for western television, the Lipsi step was the East’s answer to Elvis and decadent foreign rock’n’roll. And here it was: a dance invented by a committee, a bizarre hipless camel of a thing.

‘Nothing “angers” me!’ he says. He is incandescent with rage.

Stasi men are by and large less affected by the unemployment that has consumed East Germany since the Wall came down. Many of them have found work in insurance, telemarketing and real estate. None of these businesses existed in the GDR. But the Stasi were, in effect, trained for them, schooled in the art of convincing people to do things against their own self-interest.

The strangest cell contained a wooden yoke arrangement, something like an apparatus at a county fair. The prisoner would be nearly bent double, head and hands through the slots and the yoke closed over them. In front of his head hung a metal bucket of water like a nosebag. The floor and walls were black, and lined with spiky ridges. Frau Paul explained that the prisoner would be barefoot, yoked into position. The ridges would bite into the soles of his feet. Then water dripped from a pipe hanging through the ceiling, onto his head. Eventually, the prisoner would be in such pain that he would lose consciousness, and his head would slump. It would hit the water in the bucket in front of him, and he would either revive into pain again, or drown.

People here talk of the Mauer im Kopf or the Wall in the Head. I thought this was just a shorthand way of referring to how Germans define themselves still as easterners and westerners. But I see now a more literal meaning: the Wall and what it stood for do still exist. The Wall persists in Stasi men’s minds as something they hope might one day come again, and in their victims’ minds too, as a terrifying possibility.

I like trains. I like their rhythm, and I like the freedom of being suspended between two places, all anxieties of purpose taken care of: for this moment I know where I am going.

I didn't realise until I read this, but I think this is why I like trains too.