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The exception was for clergy—a pastor cost nothing because they were often independent anti-regime thinkers, and it was worth it to the regime to be rid of them.
For a long time, workers in the power stations were on alert every Monday night. First, everyone tuned in at once to the movie, so they went into overdrive. Then, when ‘The Black Channel’ came on, the workers had to struggle to stop the power supply from collapsing under a back-surge as everyone, simultaneously, switched off their sets.
I remember what the German absurdist poet Kurt Tucholsky said about his countrymen and counters: they all grovel in front of them, and aspire to sit behind them.
have a 1986 map of Potsdam in which the areas where there were Stasi buildings—anything from bunkers to multi-storey edifices to shooting ranges—are left blank. On another, a 1984 map of East Berlin, entire city blocks and streets in Stasi areas are simply not represented: they are pale orange gaps in the map. Out of curiosity I look up Golm, and find that it is a gap on the map, on the outskirts of Potsdam.
I once saw a note on a Stasi file from early 1989 that I would never forget. In it a young lieutenant alerted his superiors to the fact that there were so many informers in church opposition groups at demonstrations that they were making these groups appear stronger than they really were. In one of the most beautiful ironies I have ever seen, he dutifully noted that it appeared that, by having swelled the ranks of the opposition, the Stasi was giving the people heart to keep demonstrating against them.
‘Well,’ he says in his soft voice, ‘once an investigation was started into someone, that meant there was suspicion of enemy activity.’ This was perfect dictator-logic: we investigate you, therefore you are an enemy.
‘The next morning when I went to the hospital again to see my son he wasn’t there. No-one had spoken with me about it. There was no time to speak with me about it.’ When they realised they couldn’t help him, the eastern doctors managed to have the baby spirited across the new border, back to the Westend Hospital. Frau Paul doesn’t know how they did it, but she thinks that it saved his life. ‘I hold absolutely nothing against the doctors at the Charité. What it would mean for him, what would come of it for all of us, was not possible to foresee.’
Later, I learned that these trucks were sometimes disguised as linen service vehicles, or refrigerated fish transports, or bakers’ vans, when all the time they were ferrying prisoners and dissidents at gunpoint around the Republic.
Though somehow there was something even more chilling about the office with the little stool Frau Paul was made to sit on, and the ordinary administrative desk and chair where the interrogator sat over her. It was in offices that the Stasi truly came into their own: as innovators, story-makers, and Faustian bargain-hunters. That room was where a deal was offered and refused, and a soul buckled out of shape, forever.
