Authors: Paul Dowswell
As the summer drew to a close the whole country was galvanised by the forthcoming spectacle of the Munich Olympics. The Ostermanns were all looking forward to watching it on television. The stadium, the pool, and the other new buildings around the site, looked like something out of a science fiction story. The whole event was a great showcase for West German architecture and technology.
And the East Germans – so all the Western newspapers reported – were determined to show the world how their 15 million people were going to produce superior athletes to the 55 million who lived in West Germany. What was it Honecker had said? The Deutsche Demokratische Republik was ‘a victor of history’ and would soon prove to be a victor on the athletics field too.
Alex could not get enough of the West German newspapers. There was a saying in the East: ‘Twenty-three newspapers, four radio stations, two television channels, one opinion.’ In the West you would have two articles in the same paper completely contradicting each other, or two different papers, both with opposing opinions. Alex loved the way he was allowed to make up his mind about what was going on, rather than being spoon-fed with an opinion he was not allowed to disagree with.
He read a paper every morning as he ate his breakfast. One particular story nearly made him choke on his rye bread.
‘Hey, Geli,’ he shouted. ‘Come and have a look at this.’
She came in from the bathroom, towel drying her hair.
‘Look. It says here that East German athletes are being given drugs to make them faster and stronger.’
Geli was a little cynical. ‘That’s just sour grapes, isn’t it? They’re making excuses in case the Western athletes don’t do as well.’
But as they both read on something in the story began to ring horribly true. It said that the drugs were called steroids and they had drastic side effects. They made athletes aggressive, bad-tempered and, with girls, they affected how the body developed, especially if they were taken by teenagers. Even worse, claimed the articles, the East German coaches did not even tell their charges they were being given steroids. They told them they were ‘vitamin supplements’.
They both looked at each other. ‘We have to tell Lili!’ said Geli. ‘We have to get to Munich.’
That evening, over the family supper, they begged their parents to let them travel there.
‘Vati, the last few times I saw her she was like a different person,’ said Alex. ‘So angry and always looking for a fight. And she looks so manly these days. I’m sure those pills are doing terrible things to her.’
‘Sour grapes,’ said Frank. ‘It’s because our system is so much better than theirs at training athletes.’
They always noticed how he still said ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ about the East and the West; ‘Us’ was definitely the East.
‘Please let us go to Munich, Vati,’ pleaded Alex. He felt like his nine-year-old self asking Frank for another ten minutes out in the park when it was bedtime. ‘We can go to the Games and see if we can meet up with Lili there. Go and watch her swim, maybe talk to her at the poolside?’
Frank thought hard for a minute.
‘Alex, you know she’ll be surrounded by security people. What if the Stasi see you and recognise you as someone who has just escaped. What if they try to kidnap you?’
‘Come on, Vati,’ scoffed Alex. ‘This isn’t James Bond . . . Look, we really need to talk to her – tell her about these drugs she’s taking. She thinks they’re vitamins. I think they’re doing her terrible harm.’
‘Let them go, Frank,’ said Gretchen softly, as she put her arms around his shoulders. He had been an awful strain to live with since they had arrived in the West. Perhaps being away from the children, just being with her in the apartment, even for a couple of days, would make him more relaxed.
Frank relented. ‘You go with Geli. I’ll give you the fare for a trip to Munich. You’ll have to sleep on the train – I don’t think we have the money to put you up in a hotel. Besides, the hotels in Munich will be full of tourists.’
On the day before Lili’s race, Alex and Geli left Zoo Station in the early evening to catch a connection to Hannover. They were loaded down with bread, cheese and sausages, and two flasks of coffee. In the gathering dusk after their train had left West Berlin, they watched the East German countryside flash by as the train headed towards the West German border. Everything outside the carriage window was dull and flat and dirty. They passed scrappy towns and villages that were almost deserted.
Although they were excited to be heading towards West Germany, both felt uneasy and began to wonder if it was wise to have gone on this trip. If the train was stopped and the border guards came to check passes, what would prevent them arresting Alex and Geli as escapers? They had their new West German passports now, but would that be enough to protect them?
The train did not stop. And when they reached the West German border, everything changed. There was a full moon and in its silvery glow they could see the countryside looked better cared for. Bright lights burned in the well-maintained towns and villages. After changing trains at Hannover they slept as they thundered south.
Around the same time Alex and Geli’s train left Berlin, Frank was leaving work. Every Thursday evening, on the way home from the Siemens office, he stopped off at a café in Turmstrasse. The meeting was short – barely more than a couple of words and a brisk exchange of envelopes. His contact was usually a shifty young man he knew as Ulrich, who took his offering without comment. This Thursday a familiar face was waiting for him. It was Erich Kohl, the agent who had questioned him at Normannenstrasse.
‘We shall take a stroll, Herr Ostermann,’ he instructed.
They walked from Turmstrasse to Birkenstrasse, the next U-Bahn stop along, and Kohl spoke to him quietly but firmly. ‘We are growing weary of your lack of progress. The information you are sending us is of no use whatsoever. We need to see some cutting edge results.’
‘Herr Kohl, I am doing everything I can. It is a closely monitored office and the latest technology is not something that is available to everyone.’
‘Take them to the Café Amsel, buy them a beer, see if you can get their tongues to wag,’ said Kohl. ‘We are starting to lose patience. I will give you another month. Ulrich has gone. You now have me to answer to.’
The remark about the Café Amsel really shook Frank. Was someone trailing him or did they have another insider at the office? Maybe both? What frightened Frank the most was that if they were following him at work, perhaps they would try to follow him home too. He would have to be careful. He was beginning to realise, too late, that whatever was good about the East had been completely eclipsed by the sinister men who controlled it.
When Geli and Alex woke, it was light outside and the train was only an hour away from Munich. Over a breakfast roll and coffee they formulated a plan. Geli would buy a ‘Good Luck’ card and address it to Lili. They would put a note in telling her their address and telephone number so she could get in touch with them and also several newspaper cuttings they had brought with them, all about the dangers of taking steroids. Now, if they could not get to speak to Lili, they would just give her the envelope. It would be an innocent enough gesture – fans giving her a good luck card. She would recognise her friends and know to keep the card from them.
The Olympics had been billed as ‘The Happy Games’ and the authorities were making every effort to ensure there could be no comparison with the 1936 Berlin Olympics hosted by the Nazis. The city was bursting with colourfully dressed tourists and the excitement of the day was contagious. The contrast with the grey dour streets of East Berlin was overwhelming. Everywhere they looked, among the brash advertising, was the bright blue solar logo of the Games, and images of the Olympic mascot – Waldi the multicoloured dachshund.
‘Isn’t it great to see all these adverts and these Olympic signs, and not one picture of Karl Marx and Erich Honecker!’ said Alex.
‘And no square-jawed socialist supermen!’ said Geli. They liked the look of Waldi. There was absolutely nothing about him that suggested the burning urgency of increasing the grain harvest or cement quota or the need to emancipate yourself from the false consciousness of bourgeois consumerism.
On the way to the stadium they bought a paper. The steroid story was in the news again. One of the East German women’s swimming team coaches had been questioned about why his girls looked so masculine and why some of them had such deep voices. Was this because they were taking steroids?
He was evasive. ‘My girls have come to Munich to swim, not sing,’ he said.
When they got to the pool, there were hundreds of people milling around outside, and touts selling tickets at four times the asking price. The day’s events were sold out.
‘We couldn’t afford it anyway,’ said Geli. ‘Maybe this was not our brightest idea.’
‘Then let’s look for the athletes’ entrance,’ said Alex. ‘There’s got to be one somewhere. We can pretend we’re after an autograph.’
The pool complex was a magnificent edifice of glass and steel. They wandered all around it and eventually found the right entrance. Here, they waited all day, taking refuge from the bright sunlight in the shadows close to the walls. Inside, they could hear the PA announcing each event and the crowd cheering the races and their victors.
They were hungry, so Geli went to buy sausages and drinks from the street vendors who ringed the stadium. They could never get over how expensive these things were in West Berlin and Geli was even more outraged by the prices in Munich. She bought one sausage roll and a can of coke for them both to share.
‘Capitalism,’ she fumed when she got back to Alex. ‘There should be a law against this. It is pure exploitation.’
Alex laughed. ‘The days of the five-
Pfennig
roll are over. Not everything Vati hates about the West is unreasonable.’
They spent the afternoon listening to a variety of national anthems and even heard Lili’s name announced before a race. They were disappointed to hear she was not among the medal winners.
Late in the afternoon the East German team came out of the athletes’ entrance to board a minibus back to their accommodation at the Olympic Village. They spotted Lili at once in her blue Olympic tracksuit, there in the middle of them all, surrounded by security people.
The team were mobbed by autograph hunters and Alex knew this was the one chance he was going to get. He pushed past the burly coaches and security men, who he was certain were Stasi, and barged up to Lili. ‘Good luck card for you,’ he shouted, and gave her the envelope. He looked her in the eye to make sure she had seen it was him and winked. Before she could say anything, he vanished into the crowd.
Alex and Geli hurried to the station without looking back. Although they had scoffed at Frank, they had half expected the East German security men to come after them.
Alex felt elated. His plan had succeeded. A train for Hannover and Berlin was leaving in ten minutes. Their carriage was not crowded. After they had wolfed down the bread and sausages they bought at the station, and had drunk their bottles of beer, they managed to stretch out on the seats and sleep. Alex drifted off, feeling he had done a good deed. Perhaps in the grand scheme of his life he had redeemed himself for telling Sophie they were going and allowing her to betray them. Now Lili knew about her ‘vitamin pills’, she would surely refuse to continue taking them.
Back in Munich one of the Stasi officers delegated to watch the team and ensure there were no defectors used a paper knife to open the envelope Alex had taken so much trouble to deliver. He had removed it from Lili Weber’s hands almost as soon as Alex had given it to her. She had been trouble all along, that one. And she was on a final warning. Any further insolence and lack of cooperation and she would be on a plane straight back to Berlin. A sealed envelope from a fan outside the stadium was exactly the sort of unofficial access the Stasi men were trained to prevent.
At first he thought the envelope might contain instructions from outside accomplices on how to escape. Then Lili Weber would really be for it. Four or five years in a
Jugendwerkhof
.
But it didn’t. Lili was off the hook. Still, the contents were very interesting. The officer read the newspaper cuttings, which he dismissed as capitalist disinformation, and took a careful note of the West Berlin contacts who had given it to her. The Stasi knew Lili Weber had never been out of the Eastern Bloc in her life, so these people would have to have been friends of hers from East Berlin. They must be border violators.
Colonel Theissen received another memo from Kohl the next afternoon.
LATCH is now operational for Central Reconnaissance Administration Science and Technology Sector. Operative 122 in the Western Sector successfully complied with order to enable placement at Siemens facility in West Berlin before redeployment. LATCH’s knowledge of electronics makes him especially suitable. (He has been compelled to sign declaration of obligations prior to insertion.) So far, information arriving is of limited use. Further coercive pressure may be necessary and I have now taken on this responsibility.