Koch’s apartment is a cell in a honeycomb of high-rises where a lot of other former Stasi officers and their families lived before the Wall fell, and live still. The balconies have all been painted a pinkish colour. On some of them sun umbrellas are furled in hibernation.
The man who opens the door has a sort of glow about him—a bright face, receding hair and soft brown eyes. Koch smiles broadly, and shakes my hand. He gestures around himself exuberantly, like a ringmaster. ‘Welcome to the Wall Archive,’ he says.
All along the corridor hang framed colour photocopies of what were once top secret Stasi maps. They show various parts of the Wall in aerial view, with a colour-coded key for the guard towers, mine traps, dogs and trip-wires. Black-yellow-red East German pennants are pinned on the walls and the bodice of a uniform of the leaders’ elite guard, the Felix Dzerzhinski regiment, hangs from hooks, deflated as a scarecrow. More obscure mementos of the regime sit in glass-fronted cupboards. As we walk along the corridor, I think I see a crocheted doily in the national colours.
Koch talks as we walk, and by the time we reach his study he is listing off on his fingers the VIPs who have been to see him and his archive. Behind his desk a large gold plate bearing the East German hammer and compass shines out from just above head height. The room is lined with framed newspaper articles. The pictures show Koch with his visitors. He looks straight into the camera, clean-featured and moon-faced and beaming: Koch with the Queen of Sweden, Koch with an actor from ‘Star Trek’, Koch with Christo the wrap artist.
He is more than comfortable with the tiny microphone on my tape recorder. When I ask if I might clip it to his shirt he takes it from me and wields it like a rock star. His forearms are honey-brown and lightly haired.
I ask him how he had applied to join the Stasi.
‘No, no, no, no. It didn’t work like that. You had to be chosen.’ Apparently this was one of the fundamentals of the system: don’t call us, we’ll call you.
‘Who chose you then?’
‘Just a moment,’ he says. ‘It is hard for you to understand. Without understanding my childhood, you can’t see why anyone would want to join the Stasi.’
This isn’t quite true. I have given a lot of thought to why people would want to join. In a society riven into ‘us’ and ‘them’, an ambitious young person might well want to be one of the group in the know, one of the unmolested. If there was never going to be an end to your country, and you could never leave, why wouldn’t you opt for a peaceful life and a satisfying career? What interests me is the process of dealing with that decision now that it is all over. Can you rework your past, the grit that rubs in you, until it is shiny and smooth as a pearl?
‘My upbringing was so…’ he searches for the words, ‘so… GDR.’ His eyebrows move up and down. ‘Everything that was GDR-positive, that was me.’ Koch turns to a large cardboard box on the floor beside his desk. ‘My father put me on this track.’ He reaches into the box and pulls out a brownish photograph of his father in army uniform, with the expression men in armed services pictures often have, as if they are already elsewhere. Then he goes back to the box and produces a school report. He flashes it at me and I see the old-style gothic handwriting. Koch starts to read: ‘Hagen was a diligent and orderly pupil…’ And then he reads on through the report. We are right back at the beginning of his life. I look at the box, and the box is deep. It seems this afternoon we are going to go through it piece by plastic-wrapped piece.
‘You have to understand,’ he says, ‘in the context of my father, and of the propaganda of the Cold War—the GDR was like a religion. It was something I was brought up to believe in…’
He speaks passionately and loudly, although I am sitting close to him and the room is small. I watch him waving his arms and my microphone. He brings out more photographs and more documents and I hear him say, ‘You can see here after the war we had no mattresses, holes in our socks…’
But I am mulling over the idea of the GDR as an article of faith. Communism, at least of the East German variety, was a closed system of belief. It was a universe in a vacuum, complete with its own self-created hells and heavens, its punishments and redemptions meted out right here on earth. Many of the punishments were simply for lack of belief, or even suspected lack of belief. Disloyalty was calibrated in the minutest of signs: the antenna turned to receive western television, the red flag not hung out on May Day, someone telling an off-colour joke about Honecker just to stay sane.
I remember Sister Eugenia at school, with her tight sausage-fingers, explaining the ‘leap of faith’ that was required before the closed universe of Catholicism would make any sense. Her fingers made the leap, pink and unlikely, as we children drew the ‘fruits of the holy spirit’—a banana for redemption, as I recall—and all I could think of was a sausage-person walking off a clifftop, believing all the time the hand of God would scoop him up. The sense of having someone examine your inner worth, the violence of the idea that it can in fact be measured, was the same. God could see inside you to reckon whether your faith was enough to save you. The Stasi could see inside your life too, only they had a lot more sons on earth to help.
The GDR, in its forty years, tried strenuously both to create Socialist German Man and to get the people to believe in him. Socialist German Man was to be different from Nazi German Man, and different from western (Capitalist Imperialist) German Man. History was taught as a series of inevitable evolutionary leaps towards Communism: from a feudal state through capitalism and then—in the greatest leap forward to date—socialism. The Communist nirvana was the world to come. Darwinian diagrams flash into my mind showing man on a scale of increasing uprightness and lack of body hair: from monkey to Neanderthal to Cro-Magnon to Modern. Here now in front of me is Socialist Man, smooth and keen and very, very verbal.
As Koch dips into the carton once more, I wonder whether he ever wished he had been a disruptive and disorderly pupil, instead of a diligent and orderly one; whether it would have saved him from carrying his explanatory box through life.
‘My story comes directly out of my father’s story.’ Hagen Koch passes me the photograph of his father again, and Heinz Koch looks out from early in the century. He had the same brown eyes as his son, but in a narrower, more doubtful face.
Heinz Koch was born in a village in Saxony on 5 August 1912, and was brought up as the son of the village tailor. One day when he was sixteen years old he ran home from school, distraught, with his report card in his hand. In the space for ‘Name’ was written: ‘Koch, Heinz, Grandson of the Master Tailor.’ Koch pulls a yellowing report from the box. ‘This occurred on the twenty-third of the third, 1929,’ he says, shaking the document. ‘On that day my father learnt of his illegitimacy—his big sister was his mother!’ Heinz was stunned by the realisation that everyone had lied to him: You all hid this from me for so long?
‘Who was his real father?’ I ask.
‘I’ll get to that,’ Hagen says.
‘According to the German moral code of that time, illegitimacy was terrible, shameful.’ Heinz was immediately ostracised by his friends and left school. He decided to join the army, hoping that a uniform would hide the stigma of his birth. In September 1929 he signed up for a twelve-year term of duty.
Heinz Koch got more than he bargained for. By the time his term was due to expire in October 1941, he found himself stationed in France as part of the Nazi occupation force and could not be discharged. In May 1945, after Berlin surrendered, Master Sergeant Koch somehow made it back to Dessau, to his wife and two small children. He travelled over a landscape pockmarked with craters, through towns of rubble with pipes and plumbing exposed in the streets. People were crazy with pain and secrets. In the woods and on the roads were refugees, war criminals, rogue bomber groups and Allied forces who had started the Cold War between them before the hot one had ended. In Dresden he thought he smelt rotting flesh. But, one week after the war ended, Heinz Koch was home. At the Potsdam conference, Dessau was given to the Russians. They released him from active duty.
Koch is talking, dipping into his document box, talking. Then he leans forward as if to tell me a weighty piece of information. I smell his aftershave. ‘On 1 September 1945,’ he says, ‘the Soviet command issued Heinz with a Permission to Ride a Bicycle.’
‘Why did people need a permit to ride a bike?’ I ask.
‘Because they could bring messages! Pass on news!’ Koch cries. ‘There was no other transport. People on bikes could evade checkpoints, they could have secret meetings.’ Clearly the atmosphere of paranoid control had set in early under the Russians. All the same, I have started to worry about the level of detail we are sinking into. I steal a look towards his bottomless box, wondering whether we are descending into the morass for the sake of it, or whether there was some point to the bicycle tale. Then, as he turns away from me to put the document back in his box, he says, ‘But beforehand, you realise, they had to vet his record to check that he wasn’t an evil person.’
Was this the point? Was Koch using the available evidence—in this case a bicycle permit—to construct or confirm a story of his father’s innocence during the war? There’s clearly a portion of the past here that cannot be pinned down with facts, or documents. All that exists is permission to ride a bike.
Immediately after the war ended the Allies divided up their conquered enemy. The English, Americans and French took over the western parts of Germany and the Russians took the eastern states of Thuringia, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, Mecklenburg-West Pomerania and Brandenburg. Berlin was divided among the victors in the same way: its western suburbs to the English, French and Americans, its eastern ones to the USSR. But, because the city lay deep in the eastern zone, its western suburbs became an odd island of democratic administration and market economy in a Communist landscape.
In their zones, the western powers set about catching prominent Nazis and establishing democratic systems of governance: a federated system of states, the division of political, administrative and judicial power, and guarantees of private property. In 1948 they handed over these institutions to the newly created Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) together with massive injections of funds from the Americans’ Marshall Plan.
The Russians ran the eastern parts of Germany directly until the German Democratic Republic was established as a satellite state of the USSR in 1949. Production was nationalised, factories and property turned over to the state, health care, rent and food were subsidised. One-party rule was established with an all-powerful secret service to back it up. And the Russians, having refused the offer of American capital, plundered East German production for themselves.
They stripped factories of plant and equipment which they sent back to the USSR. At the same time, they required a rhetoric of ‘Communist brotherhood’ from the East Germans whom they had ‘liberated’ from fascism. Whatever their personal histories and private allegiances, the people living in this zone had to switch from being (rhetorically, at the very least) Nazis one day to being Communists and brothers with their former enemies the next.
And almost overnight the Germans in the eastern states were made, or made themselves, innocent of Nazism. It seemed as if they actually believed that Nazis had come from and returned to the western parts of Germany, and were somehow separate from them—which was in no way true. History was so quickly remade, and so successfully, that it can truly be said that the easterners did not feel then, and do not feel now, that they were the same Germans as those responsible for Hitler’s regime. This sleight-of-history must rank as one of the most extraordinary innocence manoeuvres of the century.
In Dresden once, on a blue bridge over the river Elbe, I saw a plaque commemorating the liberation of the East Germans from their Nazi oppressors by their brothers the Russians. I looked at it for a long time, a small thing dulled by grime from the air. I wondered whether it had been put there immediately after the Russians came into a vanquished Germany, or whether a certain time had been allowed to elapse before things could begin to be rewritten.
To start a new country, with new values and newly minted socialist citizens, it is necessary to begin at the beginning: with children. Schoolteachers in the eastern regions were immediately dismissed because their job had been to educate children in the values of the Nazi regime. Socialist teachers had to be created. The authorities established six-month training schemes for ‘People’s Teachers’, who then went into the schools. By February 1946 Heinz Koch, who hadn’t finished school himself, was a fully qualified teacher in the village of Lindau, thirty kilometres from Dessau.
In October of that year, the first ‘free democratic’ elections were held in East Germany. In fact, throughout the life of East Germany, elections were regularly held. On the ballot paper there were representatives of all the major parties: mirror-image replicas of the parties that existed in West Germany. There were centre-right Christian Democrats (CDU), Liberal Democrats (later the FDP), and Communists (SED). Election after election for forty years, the results would be broadcast on television: and always, overwhelmingly, the Communists were voted in. The majorities stretched credibility: 98.1 per cent; 95.4 per cent; 97.6 per cent.
None of this, though, was evident in 1946. At that time, it was possible, just possible, that somehow a socialist state would emerge which lived up to the ‘democratic’ of its name. They’d all been through hell on earth; didn’t they deserve heaven? People’s dreams had been honed by suffering, whittled into sharp and definite shapes.
Heinz Koch founded the Lindau branch of the Liberal Democrats and stood for election as mayor. September there is a month of long sunsets, late light falling through the leaves, still on the trees. Even in this land of rubble and dust there was room for hope. This was, after all, an election: there were parties, there were candidates, there were local campaigns and there were polling stations.