Yasmina smiles and flutters a taloned hand. ‘I always want to offer my public something a little different,’ she says, ‘then as now.’ She winks, the nose nods, and the program cuts abruptly to the next segment: plaster casts of body parts. The first is a female torso, the second a pair of long-nailed fingers either side of a clitoris. An unctuous man’s voice says, ‘PEEP!-Special! For 250 marks you too can have your most intimate parts preserved forever in plaster of Paris.’
I’m no longer capable of making sense of this. The whiteness of the plaster reminds me only of the dead Lenin’s head on Mielke’s desk. I switch channels and find my favourite program. It is manna for insomniacs, people like me who do not want to stay still. A camera is attached to the top of a vehicle. As it drives the pictures glide over the roads and lanes and highways of eastern Germany in glorious summer. The footage is mesmerising: flying bodiless through villages, down the main streets, and then out into the countryside again. The shops are open or closed, aproned women sweep footpaths where people sit drinking coffee, mothers run from under the umbrellas after straying children, road workers lean around in overalls. This is the world unfrozen. It’s black and white and snowing on my screen, but I know that it is really the bright yellow of rape, the green haziness of wheat, and the heavier green of summer oaks lining the road. Occasionally we stop at traffic lights, level with the hooded eye. Then on and on, moving magically through village after thawed village, places I have never been and may never go.
In my sleep I continue soundlessly through the countryside, exhilarated by the wind on my skin. Suddenly I am joined by another woman flying at the same height. There is a blur where her face should be, but that doesn’t bother me at all. She is naked, apart from pink rubber gloves. Her nipples are puckered a deeper pink and her pubic hair is luscious gold. I’m startled that I’m not alone in the air, that she’s naked. ‘The gloves, of course, are for driving,’ she says. I nod, and I look at my hands. I have no gloves. Then I look at my body and see that I am naked too. My feeling of wellbeing evaporates. I glance down over the main street of a village—there are people beneath us. The church bell starts to ring, it rings and rings and will not stop and soon I know I’ll drop—I have no driving gloves!—and they’ll all see me, fallen and naked and pointless.
I wake up to get the phone. The clock says 2.30 am—heart attack hour, the hour of bad news from home. Or another Stasi man? Telephone harassment is common, but I can’t be high on their list. It must be the fifteenth ring by the time I find the black phone, the duvet wrapped around me.
‘Hello?’
‘Hello my friend.’ A lubricated voice from my local pub, coming down the line through a mouth with a pipe in it, a thick Saxon accent and a beard. It’s Klaus. By the sound of it he’s holding his chin up with the receiver.
‘How’d you pull up after last time?’ he asks, ‘Feel like another drinking session?’
‘Klaus, it’s 2.30 in the morning.’
‘Come on,’ he says, ‘this time the other night you were just getting into it.’
I have no wish to be reminded of other nights. In my view one of the conventions among decent drinking partners is that where there isn’t actual amnesia it should be simulated. The other night we filled the air with words and smoke that are all gone now. My only memory is of the hangover I took with me to Leipzig.
‘I had a big day.’
‘It’s nice here,’ he says. ‘They’re playing our song.’
This is not a come-on. He means they’re playing
his
song.
Klaus Renft is the legendary ‘Mik Jegger’ of the Eastern Bloc. He lives around the corner from me in a one-room apartment lined with videos and posters of his band, the 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 I hang up.
I wake to the phone ringing. It’s morning.
‘
Guten Tag
. You put an advertisement in the
Märkische Allgemeine
.’
‘Yes. Thank you for calling. I am looking to speak with people who worked for the ministry, in order to be able to represent what it was like. I’m writing about life in the GDR.’
There is a pause. ‘The notice said you were Australian.’
‘Yes.’
‘You are Australian?’
‘Yes.’
‘You are from Australia?’
‘That’s right.’
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.
‘You are writing in English or in German?’
‘In English.’
‘I will meet with you,’ he says. ‘In order to set the record straight. It is possible that in Australia your media has not tainted people against us, and that there at least, we can put our side. With objective information and analysis. Are you available tomorrow?’
‘Yes.’
‘In Potsdam, in the afternoon?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then I will meet with you as follows: I will be outside the church on market square at fifteen hundred hours. I will have tomorrow’s
Märkische Allgemeine
rolled up under my left arm. Understood?’
‘Yes,’ I say obediently, although I am incredulous that this man wants to play spy games seven years after the fall of the Wall. And then I ask, ‘What is your name?’
Another pause. ‘Winz.’
‘Till tomorrow then, Herr Winz.’
I’m early to the church and stand alone in its forecourt. The sky is blanket-grey and close. I am wearing all-purpose black boots and a black coat with fake fur trim and I stand out a mile. I have so obviously nothing to do but wait for an assignation. At the market next to the church, women in bright scarves and woollen gloves push their strollers around caravan stalls, nosing under the red-and-white striped awnings. They buy potatoes and pickles from vats, and chunks of pink liverwurst. At the deli a man with ham-hock forearms serves a council worker a sausage and a piece of bread on a paper plate. The bells chime three times. I hop from one cold leg to the other.
After ten minutes a man approaches with a newspaper rolled under his left arm. He’s about sixty, paunchy and jowly as a hound-dog. He’s wearing a foreign-looking tweed suit coat. When he takes the newspaper from under his arm to greet me, I see it even has leather elbow patches: he is disguised as a westerner.
‘The parking here is terrible,’ Herr Winz says by way of apology for being late, but also as if it were my fault. He speaks in authoritative barks. ‘I suggest we go to a neutral place,’ he says. ‘I usually use the Hotel Merkur.’
Neutral? Usually? ‘Fine by me, Herr Winz,’ I say, and we set off on foot to the hotel, a good fifteen minutes from here. It occurs to me that he has hidden his car somewhere so that, should I succumb to the urge, I can’t tail him. I’m glad to get moving anyway.
The hotel has a low-ceilinged lobby with brown booth seats and a lot of plastic plants. There is no-one else here. We order coffee from a waiter with a strawberry mark over one side of his nose and I start to explain to Herr Winz my interest in speaking with former Stasi employees. He waves me silent. He waits until the waiter is well out of earshot. Then he leans forward. ‘One cannot be too careful these days,’ he says, tapping his nose and glancing towards the waiter’s back. Then he eyeballs me. ‘First, please show me your ID,’ he says.
‘
Bitte?
’
‘I would like to see your identity card,’ he says.
‘I don’t have one.’
‘What do you mean?’ he asks.
‘In Australia we don’t have ID cards.’
He is speechless. He looks at me as though all his suspicions are confirmed: I come from a place so remote, so primitive that the people there have not yet been labelled and numbered.
I give in. ‘But I have a passport,’ I say and pull it out of my bag. There are a great many things one cannot do anonymously here—from buying a mobile phone card to travelling on a train. I have had to prove my identity so frequently that I now carry my passport around with me like a fugitive.
He reads my date of birth and checks me against my younger self. Then he flicks through its pages to see where I have been in the last few years. ‘Ah, Czechoslovakia,’ he mutters at one point. Then he sees that back in 1987 I was in the GDR. ‘So you visited my country,’ he says approvingly.
‘Yes, I came here to Potsdam and I went to Dresden,’ I say, ‘and I went to a party once with some friends in East Berlin.’
I remember a cold grey day in Potsdam like this one, the streets deserted. Our busload of undergraduates visited only the paved and gilded parts of this show-town, selected streets made into a neat sheep-run for tourists. In Dresden we were shunted up a hill in a cable car and fed a meal, which, including the steak substitute, came entirely from tins. At my East Berlin party, the host, a Jewish journalist of impeccable Communist pedigree, was revealed after the Wall fell to have been an informer. I may gain credibility in this man’s eyes from having a couple of hammer-and-compass stamps in my passport, but it could not be said that I knew his country. I visited it only long enough to wonder what was being kept from me.
I ask to see Herr Winz’s ID too, but he fobs me off with a laugh and a dismissive gesture. Behind him the waiter starts, as if this could be a summons, but I catch his eye and shake my head slightly. He slides his notepad back into his apron pocket.
Herr Winz opens his briefcase and takes out papers and pamphlets and a thesis bound in a springboard cover. Then he places a small hardback book on top of the pile. It is Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’
The Communist Manifesto
.
He tells me he worked from 1961 to 1990 at the ministry in Potsdam, exclusively in counter-espionage. He picks up the thesis and reads its title:
The Work of the Ministry for State Security on the Defence Against Intelligence Infiltration by the Secret Services of the NATO States against the GDR. Presented from the Viewpoint of a Member of the Division for Counter-Espionage, Regional Administration, Potsdam.
‘This is a discussion paper I wrote based on my work at the ministry. If you read this, you will learn a lot of what you want to know.’
I flick to the front page, and see that the paper was written in 1994 for the ‘Potsdam Working Group of the
Insiderkomitee
for the Reexamination of the History of the Ministry for State Security, Inc.’
‘This was written for the
Insiderkomitee
?’ I ask.
‘Yes.’
‘You are a member?’
‘Yes, but we have changed our name to the “Society for the Protection of Civil Rights and the Dignity of Man”.’
The
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.
It is widely suspected, however, that these men also harass people who they fear may uncover them. A former border guard who appeared on a television talk show was threatened with an acid attack and had to be placed under police protection. Home-delivered harassment is popular: one man had a ticking package delivered to his doorstep; wives have had to sign for porn not ordered by their husbands. The strangest incident I heard of was when a man was delivered a truckload of puppies, yelping outside his door and the driver demanding a signature. Car brake-leads have been cut, accidents and deaths reverse-engineered. The child of an outspoken writer was picked up from school by a person or persons unknown and taken to drink hot chocolate, just for an hour or so. Detaining people clearly has its own pleasures; a habit hard to break.
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.
‘What does the
Insiderkomitee
do?’ I ask.
‘We try to present an objective view of history,’ he says. ‘To combat the lies and misrepresentation in the western media.’
‘It is said that the
Insiderkomitee
is also a front to co-ordinate action against those working to uncover what the Stasi did to people.’
‘I wouldn’t know about that.’
‘Why not?’
‘I am a small fish,’ he says. ‘I am here to tell you about the excellent work—the masterful work—of the Stasi in counter-espionage. That is where I spent my life.’
Either Herr Winz doesn’t know much, or he’s not telling. He won’t respond to my questions about the
Insiderkomitee
or talk about himself either. Each time I ask him about the reality of life in the GDR he returns to the beauties of socialist theory. I think he hopes, through me, to sow the seeds of socialism in an untainted corner of the world.
‘We had people everywhere!’ he says. His main interest seems to have been placing young committed East Germans into lives in West Germany, where they would eventually come into the sights of the West German security service and be recruited. ‘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!’ This is true, but it is widely known. I find it hard to believe that Herr Winz was personally involved at a high level. He’s too underconfident and unconvincing with all his spy play-acting to have ever done it for real. I try to imagine what he probably did do, because he won’t tell me. The best I can come up with is that he wrote procedural manuals.