The corridor is fluorescent-lit, without a chink of natural light. The linoleum is beige, and either mottled or marbled. The walls are a peeling bilious yellow. There’s a stale smell. It is like being inside some old beast. We walk the length of the corridor and I count, from habit or obsession or just not wanting to get lost, fifteen steel doors on each side before we get to the last one. Frau Anderson opens it and turns to me. ‘I leave at 4.25,’ she says, ‘do you think you’ll be done by then?’
‘I hope so,’ I say.
‘It would be terrible,’ she jokes, ‘to leave you locked up here overnight.’
It sure would. This place seems to have been designed on the same one-size-fits-all architectural principle as everything else: the Runden Ecke in Leipzig and Stasi HQ at Normannenstrasse; the same as prisons and hospitals and schools and administrative buildings all over this country, and probably the same as inside the brown Palast der Republik only it’s behind bars and I can’t get in. From here to Vladivostok this was Communism’s gift to the built environment—linoleum and grey cement, asbestos and prefabricated concrete and, always, long long corridors with all-purpose rooms. Behind these doors anything could be happening: interrogations, imprisonment, examinations, education, administration, hiding out from nuclear catastrophe or, in this case, propaganda.
Inside, the room has the proportions of a prison cell, but is decorated like a trailer-home from the 1960s. There are brown curtains for the small high-up window, and brown wallpaper on the walls in a flower pattern. There’s an ancient reel-to-reel film-cutting machine, an office chair, and a tourist poster for the Gobi Desert with text in Russian and German. In the corner there’s a television set and a video player.
Frau Anderson leaves me with some tapes they found. I put one in the machine and turn the lights out. It’s von Schnitzler’s first program from March 1960. The titles come on: a mean-looking cartoon eagle, the West German emblem, wearing the red-white-and-black of fascism alights onto a television antenna. Then the words come up: THE BLACK CHANNEL. Suddenly, a man in a suit with boxy black glasses fills the screen. He addresses me directly, as if he were sitting here in the room:
The Black Channel, my dear ladies and gentlemen, carries filth and sewage. But instead of carrying it to a sewage farm as it ought, it pours, day after day, into hundreds of thousands of West German and West Berlin homes. This channel is the channel broadcasting West German television programs: The Black Channel. And every Monday at this time, we are going to devote ourselves to, as you might say, a hygiene operation.
The next tape was from 1965 after two people had been shot trying to flee over the Wall.
Dear viewers
You all know why I’m here today, returned from my holiday especially to appear before you tonight. Our border guards have, in accordance with their duty, had to shoot at two men. They were breaking the law and seeking to breach our national border. They stopped neither when called, nor when warning shots were fired. One of them was fatally wounded...
People should listen to us when we say, again and again:
we
determine the order at our border! And
we
ensure that it is maintained, for good reasons. Whosoever wants to traverse the GDR border needs permission. Otherwise: stay away from our border! He who puts himself in danger will die. I know, ladies and gentlemen, it sounds hard. And will perhaps even be interpreted by some of you as ‘inhumane’… But what is ‘humane’ and what is ‘inhumane’?
Humane it is, to make peace for all men on earth. That is not done by prayer! It is done by fighting. And if, as history teaches us, wars are made by man and not God, then peace too, is a work of man. And for the first time on German soil, here in the German Democratic Republic, peace has been elevated to a governing principle of the state. Whoever seeks to weaken or damage the GDR, whether consciously or unconsciously, weakens or damages the prospects of peace in Germany. It is humane to have created and built this state! It is humane to strengthen and protect it! It is humane to guard the German Democratic Republic against these people who would most like to eat it for breakfast…
He goes on and on, but I wind the tape back and take notes. I want to be able to see exactly how this man turned inhumanity into humanity, these deaths into symbols of salvation. I want more urgently to meet him, and see what he thinks now that the bulwark is down and his world is gone.
It’s nearly 4 pm, and I’m doing well for time. I’m not going to be locked up in here, no way. I start packing my things together. The tape is still running. It switches to another program called ‘In the Mood’ (
Gut Aufgelegt
) with cheery introductory music. A beautiful blue-eyed brunette in a 1960s pinched-waisted dress is in a record shop. She approaches the camera.
‘Record sellers have been getting strange requests from customers lately,’ she says, ‘for “Lipsi” music. I have a question: just what is “Lipsi”? Brockhaus [the music encyclopaedist] would say, “I have no idea and if it isn’t in any of my twenty volumes, it doesn’t exist.” But the record seller would tell you, “Lipsi—that’s all my customers are asking for! It’s an epidemic!” A young couple might say, “Lipsi—it’s the simplest thing. The dance itself is in 6/4 time and you just take her in your left arm like this”’—she extends her arm—‘well…it’s easy, look.’ She pretends to get stuck for words, and then finds her slogan:
If you really want to know, simply dance away,
All the young people dance the Lipsi today!
I’m curious and stop packing. The screen shows a couple in a dance hall: he clean-cut in a suit, and she in a dress and stilettos. And, together, they do the strangest dance that I have ever seen.
At first the man and the woman face the same way like Greek dancers, he behind her, her hand in his. They move from side to side with one another, then raise their forearms and bend apart, alarmingly, like teapots. The camera cuts to their feet, which, without warning, break into the complex footsies of an Irish jig. Then the pair turn to one another in a waltz grip before separating again and giving a little jump in the air. This is followed by a Russian-type movement with hands on hips. All the while they smile huge fixed smiles as if they needn’t give a single thought to what their feet are doing. Then they start with the Greek teapot manoeuvre again. Over the top a Doris Day voice sings to a bossa nova beat:
Today, all young people dance
The Lipsi step, only in lipsistep,
Today, all young people like to learn
The Lipsistep: it is modern!
Rhumba, boogie and Cha cha cha
These dances are all passé
Now out of nowhere and overnight
This new beat is here to stay!
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.
I throw my things together and hightail it out of the room down the corridor. The fluorescent is still on, but there’s no light coming from the counter. I’m halfway there when I remember I’ve left the video in the machine. I run back to the room and pull it out so I can return it to Frau Anderson, if she’s still here. If anyone’s still here. Running down the corridor for the second time, I wonder if I need to know a code to get out.
My watch says 4.27 and the Cardigans are gone. I stand in front of the counter, my bag in one hand, the tape in the other. To each side of me the corridor stretches to infinity, its doors all shut. I turn and face the exit, and see, to the left of it, an old keypad security system. How many attempts at getting the combination before I’m trapped? Or an alarm goes off? I don’t want a scene. But I don’t want to spend the night here either.
I need to find a phone. As I turn back, I hear a sound. It’s a door opening. Frau Anderson is coming out, in a fake fur hat and carrying a green mock-crocodile handbag.
‘I was just coming to fetch you,’ she says. ‘Thought I’d give you a bit more time.’ She takes the tape from me. I steady my breath. I don’t know whether she can tell I’ve panicked and is having a bit of fun with me. Perhaps I’ve started to take deadlines, train times and closing hours too seriously in this land of merciless punctuality.
A week later an anonymous man calls me. Herr Winz has told him what I want, and he is ringing to check me out before he calls Herr von Schnitzler. In a few minutes he phones back and says that Frau von Schnitzler will take my call. He gives me the number. Frau von Schnitzler answers, and she tells me their address.
It’s her maiden name, not his on the doorbell. A fine-faced woman in her sixties lets me in. She has bobbed dark hair, red lips and red fingernails. Frau Marta von Schnitzler was an actress.
‘Welcome,’ she says extending a lacquered hand. She shows me through to the living room. The apartment is small but light. The accumulated debris of a lifetime rests on bookcases and shelves, hangs on the walls: books, medal boxes, figurines, and plastic cups full of biros.
In the living room a man with square glasses and a carefully contoured beard sits in an easy chair. His right hand, smooth for a seventy-nine-year-old, holds the top of a walking stick. He greets me, nodding in my direction. On the coffee table there’s a thermos of hot water, a jar of Nescafé and a medicine bottle. In front of him Herr von Schnitzler has a large wineglass of something that looks like red cordial. I sit down opposite. His head is larger and more wizened, the cheekbones more pronounced than on television but it is unmistakably ‘
Sudel-Ede
’ or ‘Filthy Ed’. Behind his head I notice another row of other heads at the same level on a picture rail: a bust of Marx, a daguerreotype of Lenin, and, as my eye casts along, even a miniature full-body statue of Stalin.
‘Herr von Schnitzler,’ I say, ‘I’d like to ask you some questions about your biography—’
‘Yes, that’s important, a) for my life history, and b) because what you will have read about me is 95 per cent false.’ His voice comes croaky through a dry old throat.
‘You think—’
‘I don’t think, I know. It is so.’ His voice is gaining strength and timbre.
‘—but I’ve been reading books you wrote yourself,’ I say. ‘They wouldn’t be wrong, would they?’
‘Well, in that case, it’s different,’ he says, but he doesn’t even crack a smile. ‘No, that’s good, that’s very good.’ This is not going to be easy. He looks challengingly in my direction. I can hear him breathing.
Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler was born in 1918 into a wealthy Berlin family. His father Julius Eduard Schnitzler had been Emperor Wilhelm’s consul-general in Antwerp, and a lieutenant in the Prussian military. In 1913, the emperor elevated Julius and his two brothers to the nobility, granting them the privilege of using the prefix ‘von’. The family remained close to power into the Nazi regime. One of von Schnitzler’s cousins was banker to Hitler, another was the sales director of IG-Farben, the company responsible for delivering the poison gas Zyklon B to concentration camps.
Karl-Eduard reacted against the disparities of wealth, and the Nazism around him. At fourteen he became fascinated with Communism. He briefly studied medicine, then switched to an apprenticeship in sales. During World War II he served in Hitler’s army. In June 1944 the British took him into custody in their ‘anti-fascist’ POW camp Ascot, and a few days later he began making broadcasts in German at the BBC for the program ‘German Prisoners of War speak to the Homeland’.
Von Schnitzler was released back to Germany in 1945, where he continued to broadcast from the British Occupied Zone in Cologne, but before long his staunchly Communist views brought him into conflict with the British administrators and he was sacked.
In 1947 he left for the Soviet Occupation Zone. When he got there he told its future leader Walter Ulbricht that he wanted to drop the ‘von’ in front of his name. Ulbricht said, ‘Are you crazy? Everyone should know that
all
sorts of people are coming over to us!’
This is how the man with the ridiculously noble name became the media face of the regime. ‘The Black Channel’ aired until the very end in October 1989.
Von Schnitzler has started talking and is going into a lot of detail about the war.
I interrupt him. ‘I’d like to talk about “The Black Channel”—’
‘But you’re jumping over a very important part of my life—my time as a POW when I broadcast from the BBC—’
‘I’m happy to talk about that, but it depends how much time you have.’
‘I have time,’ he counters. ‘How much time do you have?’ ‘I have the whole day,’ I say, ‘but presumably we don’t want to talk the whole day. I’d like to talk for a couple of hours.’
Frau von Schnitzler has installed herself away from our sight-line but well within earshot. The apartment is smaller than I thought; it is a far cry from the mansion Karl-Eduard was born in. I think Frau von Schnitzler is sewing. She murmurs something about time that I don’t quite catch.
‘
Nein?
’ he says, sort of to her.