‘But that wouldn’t be possible!’ I laugh.
He looks at me soberly. ‘But anything is possible,’ he says. ‘One can never say that something is not possible.’
His mother agrees. ‘Who would have thought that a wall could be built!’ she says. ‘That was also impossible! And who would have thought at the end that it might ever fall! That was also impossible!’
People here talk of the
Mauer im Kopf
or the Wall in the Head. I thought this was just a shorthand way of referring to how Germans define themselves still as easterners and westerners. But I see now a more literal meaning: the Wall and what it stood for do still exist. The Wall persists in Stasi men’s minds as something they hope might one day come again, and in their victims’ minds too, as a terrifying possibility.
Torsten offers to give me a lift to the station. Frau Paul kisses him and takes my hand with both of hers. Then she shrugs her shoulders. ‘That’s it,’ she says, as though, when she added up the parts of her life, it was a smallish thing.
Torsten’s car is an old-style BMW with a high seat custom-built behind the steering wheel. He puts on some music with a Latin beat, and it keeps strange, syncopated time with the windscreen wipers. We chat and he takes me past the station, nearly all the way to Alexanderplatz. Then he lets me out with a wave and drives on, crooked and crippled and living for the day.
I walk around to pick up my last Stasi man. In his street new tramlines are being laid, lengths of steel are strewn like licorice down the median strip. It’s lunchtime and the workers are nowhere to be seen. I ring the buzzer where it says ‘Bohnsack’. A man comes out putting on a smart tan overcoat. He’s tall and slightly stooped, thickset through the chest. His face is pleasant, with receding hair and full cheeks. He looks me straight in the eye and smiles a warm smile.
‘Let’s go to my local,’ he says.
The pub is a traditional Berlin
Kneipe
. It has a bar in dark wood with mirrors behind it, booth seats and lacy white curtains to shield people from the street. A shaft of light slips past them on an angle, slow afternoon light of lazy particles and beams. Two regulars watch their glasses. There are little pubs like this in both East and West Berlin, where everyone knows everyone else. I have occasionally walked in—for directions, or cigarettes—and each time I felt I had walked into someone’s living room uninvited. When a stranger enters, the hum of conversation breaks while people look up and hunch their shoulders. Here though, when the regulars see Herr Bohnsack, they nod. The publican smiles like a brother. ‘How are we?’ he asks, rubbing his hands together. ‘What it’ll be today then?’
‘We might go into the side room,’ Herr Bohnsack says, ‘if that’s all right. For a chat.’
‘Of course, of course.’ He shuffles out from behind the bar in his socks and slippers and shows us in. There are old advertisements for beer on the walls, pictures of glowing-cheeked maidens and horses and hops. I look at Herr Bohnsack. In the light from the windows at his back he seems to have a bit of a glow about him, too.
‘What can I get for the lady and the gentleman?’
‘I’ll have a wheat beer and a
Korn
,’ he says, ‘and you?’ It’s early. I order a beer and forgo the schnapps. Günter Bohnsack’s voice is deep and slightly slurred, like a person with ill-fitting crowns, or a man who has been drinking. His eyes are bright and he is relaxed with me. He is not, as it turns out, a man with anything to prove. He is fifty-seven years old, and the only Stasi man I have ever met who outed himself. A lieutenant colonel, he worked in one of the most secret divisions of the overseas spy service, the
Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung
(HVA). Herr Bohnsack was in Division X, responsible, as he put it on the phone to me, for ‘disinformation and psychological warfare against the west’.
The HVA was the overseas espionage service of the Stasi. Its director, Markus Wolf, the son of a Jewish doctor and playwright, is intelligent and urbane, and was the model, apparently, for John le Carré’s spymaster Karla. Wolf’s HVA was subject to its minister, Mielke. But Wolf and his men always saw themselves as a breed apart. Although they were organised according to military rank like the rest of the Firm, they wore suits instead of uniforms, were highly educated and enjoyed a privileged existence. ‘Because we were responsible for the west,’ Herr Bohnsack explained to me, ‘we could travel and we were quite different. Our diplomats could speak languages and were cultivated. We all scorned Mielke; we had our Wolf, the tall slim elegant intellectual.’
Herr Bohnsack trained as a journalist and worked for twenty-six years in disinformation. Much of Division X’s work was directed against West Germany. It collected sensitive or secret information from agents in the west and leaked it to cause harm; it manufactured documents and spliced together recordings of conversations that never took place in order to damage persons in the public sphere; and it spread rumours about people in the west, including the devastating rumour that someone worked for them. Division X men fed ‘coups’ to western journalists about the Nazi past of West German politicians (several major figures were brought down this way); it funded left-wing publications and it managed, at least in one instance, to exert an extraordinary influence over the political process in West Germany itself. In 1972, the Social Democrat head of the West German government Willy Brandt faced a vote of no-confidence in parliament. Division X bribed one and possibly two backbenchers for their votes in order to keep him in power. Colonel Rolf Wagenbreth, the head of Division X, described its work simply as ‘an attempt to turn the wheels of history’.
Herr Bohnsack starts with a joke. He told it at lunch back in 1980 to a group of his colleagues at the restaurant reserved for the highest ranks of the Stasi. He leans back and smiles, like an uncle with a secret. ‘The USA, the Soviet Union and the GDR want to raise the
Titanic
,’ he says, lifting his eyebrows. ‘The USA wants the jewels presumed to be in the safe,’ he nods, ‘the Soviets are after the state-of-the-art technology; and the GDR’—he downs his
Korn
for dramatic pause—‘the GDR wants the band that played as it went down.’
We laugh. ‘Was it normal to tell jokes like that?’ I ask.
‘Yes, yes,’ he says, ‘quite normal, but it depended who was there. As soon as I’d told that one I thought: oh brother, that was a bit foolish of me because there was a general at the table.’ He runs a hand over his head. ‘After lunch the general took me aside and said, in a quiet voice, “Next time Bohnsack, I wouldn’t tell a joke like that.” And that was way back in 1980! They were sensitive about the whole thing going down even then.’
‘Were there Mielke jokes?’
‘Yes, lots,’ he says. ‘But the worst Mielke ones weren’t jokes, they were true.’
Herr Bohnsack was invited to the party the Stasi threw for themselves and their Russian comrades to celebrate the forty years of the GDR. It was 3 October 1989, the height of the demonstrations and unrest. ‘There were about two thousand people at the party,’ he says. ‘Mielke made his entrance’—he raises one arm behind his ear and does a two-fingered walk through the air—‘down some stairs in the corner surrounded by his generals. Like a ghost, or the god in the machine.’ Mielke made a speech. ‘For four hours he spoke, on and on. Every now and then he gave a rallying cry. “And just remember Comrades this one thing: the most important thing you have is power! Hang on to power at all costs! Without it, you are nothing!” He didn’t mention the democracy demonstrations and the fact that the Soviets were backing away from us,’ Herr Bohnsack says, ‘but it was clear he must, at some level, have felt the end coming.’
When Mielke finally finished there was a banquet: there were grapes, and chicken drumsticks and melon and stone fruits, ‘things that we never had in the GDR and that were truly exquisite, amazing delicacies to us’. But just as they were about to tuck in, Mielke would quickly pick up the microphone to say ‘a few more idiotic words’ and everyone would have to put their drumsticks and bunches of grapes back down on their plates until he was done. He would finish up by saying ‘
Guten Appetit
’, and the men would start to eat, but moments later he’d grab the microphone again and they would have to put it all down once more. ‘It went on and on,’ Herr Bohnsack says. ‘The whole occasion was insane.’
At Christmas 1989, from his telling of it, events bloomed into full-scale, fast-forward farce. Herr Bohnsack’s entire division was ordered to stay at home so as not to provoke the demonstrators, and to be near the phone. At 3 am they would receive a call ordering them to drive to Normannenstrasse, parking some way away so the demonstrators wouldn’t know the buildings were occupied, and to enter by a rear door. When they reached their offices, all the lights would be out. They were ordered to don camouflage combat gear—‘like the foreign legion in the jungle’—and then to kit themselves out with cooking equipment and cutlery, a spade, a protective suit in the event of chemical warfare, a blanket, toothpaste and brush, and ammunition. They were each issued with a pistol and a machine gun. The whole operation was timed.
‘What would you do then?’ I ask.
‘We’d lie down on our desks and sleep. The generals upstairs on the ninth floor were simulating a war situation. One would come down and wake us up with a message—say, an American sub has been sighted off Turkey. Or, the American B52s are on stand-by. Then at 5 am we’d get worse news—maybe that a Russian sub had been taken off Norway. They were pretending World War III had broken out.’
‘What could you do?’
‘Nothing: we slept some more.’
At 7 am they would get an order to go into the field. ‘We’d play war for a day, stand around, and shoot the cardboard figures that popped up out of the grass. Everyone was there—highly intelligent specialists who could speak Arabic and goodness knows what—and we were all reduced to playing soldiers.’ By the end of 1989 they were doing this every single week. ‘And we knew the GDR was lost,’ he says, ‘so it was a circus.’
Herr Bohnsack’s greatest fear was that he and the others would be ordered to shoot the demonstrators outside their building. During the exercises they were told that the enemy had infiltrated the country and was inciting the East Germans against them. At the end Mielke was more direct. He told them that they—he meant the people—were the enemy. He said, ‘It’s them or us.’
‘For me,’ Bohnsack says, ‘that was the most terrifying thing. That instead of shooting cardboard figures we’d have to shoot our own people. And we knew, just like under Hitler, that if we refused we’d be taken off and shot ourselves.’
There was another fear too. Mielke had also told his men, ‘If we lose, they’ll string us all up.’ The atmosphere was hysterical. Herr Bohnsack had been Markus Wolf’s contact man between the Stasi and the secret services in Hungary, Moscow, Prague and Warsaw. ‘Our man in Budapest had told me that in the drama of ’56 his people were hanged in the trees outside their offices. He said to me, “If someone points you out, five minutes later you’ll be swinging.”’
Herr Bohnsack runs his hand over his head again. ‘Thank God it didn’t come to that,’ he says. He explains that by the time the demonstrators really got going in Berlin—and it was later there than in Leipzig and elsewhere—Mielke had already stood down. And he had been there so long the generals simply did not know how to give any orders on their own. They could not seize control. ‘And this is what saved us,’ Bohnsack says, shaking his large head, ‘us and the people.’
Somehow, back in September, it became clear to Herr Bohnsack that the files would have to be destroyed. He told his boss he was going to start shredding. ‘It is not allowed!’ the boss said, ‘There is no order to do so!’ ‘But,’ Herr Bohnsack says, ‘I just drove my car into the yard and got the files out of the filing cabinets. There were metres and metres of them—agents’ key files, films, reports—and I drove to our garden one hundred kilometres away from Berlin.’ The family had an old baker’s oven on its holiday plot. And then, ‘totally privately and personally, without any permission and without any command,’ he says, ‘I destroyed everything, all day long.’ There was so much paper to burn the oven nearly collapsed. A cloud of black smoke hung over him in the sky. Herr Bohnsack stood there for three days, feeding the files into the fire.
The weak afternoon light is fading and the publican comes in to turn on some lamps. He is a man of Herr Bohnsack’s age, with a ravaged face, red hands and a tea towel tucked into his apron. ‘Everything all right here?’ he asks.
Herr Bohnsack orders another beer, another
Korn
and a coffee. I say I’m fine for the moment. Herr Bohnsack smiles gently at me. ‘You, no?’ he says. ‘You are utterly without need?’ I glimpse beneath the genial drinker a man who was the match of anyone east or west.
Herr Bohnsack wanted to stop his files getting into the wrong hands. They concerned the western agents he ran, West German citizens who did things for the Stasi. ‘In my section,’ he says, ‘they were all journalists. We used them to start scandals, or break open political cover-ups. We funded them, and we fed them scoops.’
The smoke attracted attention. Bohnsack’s neighbour in the country, he says, was a hopeless soak. ‘But of course even he had a suspicion about where I worked. We call it the
Stallgeruch
(the smell of the sty). He used to lean over the fence and slur abuse at me: “Old Shiny Bum” and “SED” and all kinds of insults. He was there again, drunk as usual while I was burning it all up. And as the smoke passed over his house he began singing the anthem of the citizens’ rights movement, “
Wir Sind das Volk
”. He knew exactly what I was doing. It was grotesque really,’ Bohnsack chuckles, ‘his aria to accompany my burning pyre.’
I look at Herr Bohnsack in all his clever dishevelment—a strand of his hair has left the rest and sticks out at an angle above his ear. He tilts his head back to drain his shot glass again. His neck is ringed and ridged, the Adam’s apple moving up and down like a mouse on a ladder.