She stubbs out a cigarette, and keeps stubbing the butt.
She is probably right about what happened. But will digging him up reveal anything? Perhaps it might prove whether he died by hanging or not, but at whose hands? Or, if they cremated him as the file indicates, there will be nothing in the coffin that can tell her what happened and she will still be here, with only the frail comfort of theories.
For now, though, this terrible game of waiting keeps her suspended from her life with Charlie, still in contact. And underneath the need to know, is the need for justice. The regime may be gone, but the world cannot be set to rights until Miriam has some kind of justice. Things have been put behind glass, but it is not yet over.
We talk into the evening, and eat tomato and basil, prosciutto and melon. Miriam speaks of friends, but she has no partner in life. ‘Too hard,’ she says sadly, ‘to explain everything.’ I ask her about her family. Her mother, she says, is a social climber—‘you’d think that would have been hard under socialism, but she managed to give it a go!’ She laughs. Her sister is a dentist. ‘You would have seen her office downstairs in this building.’ I am glad her sister is close.
‘And your father?’
‘My father was a doctor,’ she says, ‘a very kind man. He died in the early ’70s, relatively young.’ She taps the cigarette packet on the table. ‘Of lung cancer.’
‘Oh.’
‘But the thing about that is,’ she says as she exhales, ‘it doesn’t take very long at all.’
Through the double doors into the next room, my eyes catch a doll’s china stare—it is an old puppet in a white silky suit, hanging limbs akimbo from its crucifix of strings on the corner of a bookshelf.
Miriam asks me to stay, and insists on giving me her bed. I wake in the night and need water and air. On the way from the bathroom to the window over the heath I see her in the moonlight and stop. She is asleep on the floor of the living room, in loose white pyjamas with a blindfold across her eyes. Her neck is bent and her arms and legs are spreadeagled over a round flat cushion. She’s so slender and crumpled her whole body nearly fits onto it, strings cut, in the spotlight.
In the morning Miriam takes me to the station. To my relief I find a copy shop, so I can give Charlie’s poem back to her. She comes to the platform and waits till the train moves out, silent and slow. The girl opposite me lip-smacks her puppy; on the platform an older dog huffs and rearranges itself in jealousy. Then Miriam waves and walks away, straightbacked into the sunlight.
I like trains. I like their rhythm, and I like the freedom of being suspended between two places, all anxieties of purpose taken care of: for this moment I know where I am going. We are quickly outside Leipzig, moving past maize and wheat and medieval-looking water towers near each station: Lutherstadt Wittenberg, Bitterfeld, Wannsee. In one field there’s a scarecrow equipped for all comers in a black motorcycle helmet; behind him a parachutist looks for touchdown. Two boys in a dinghy sit among the reeds in this vast flat sea of improbable green, fishing.
I move back from the window and the puppy finds me suddenly fascinating. It has caught the rustle of paper in my pocket. I take out Charlie’s poem.
In this land
I have made myself sick with silence
In this land
I have wandered, lost
In this land
I hunkered down to see
What will become of me.
In this land
I held myself tight
So as not to scream.
—But I did scream, so loud
That this land howled back at me
As hideously
As it builds its houses.
In this land
I have been sown
Only my head sticks
Defiant, out of the earth
But one day it too will be mown
Making me, finally
Of this land.
I fold it and think of Charlie Weber, now of this land. And I think of Miriam, a maiden blowing smoke in her tower. Sometimes she can hear and smell them, but for now the beasts are all in their cages.
I walk home to the apartment from Rosenthaler Platz station. The park is alive, the light so bright it picks out people and their shadows in exaggerated 3-D. Sunbathers loll on the grass, some in trunks and some bare-bottomed. There are teenagers removing gum from their mouths to kiss, a sheepdog with a single forelock dyed green, an adolescent cripple in a baby pusher being taken for a stroll. People shake infants up and down to make them calm, and children spin on swings and roundabouts I never noticed were there.
p. 5 Historian Dr Klaus-Dietmar Henke says the ‘peaceful revolution’ of 1989 was ‘the only successful revolution in German history. The East Germans added one of the most splendid moments to the history of our country, to the very troubled way of our nation to find and to accept individual and political freedom as the main values.’ He also states that the number of files generated by the Stasi is about ‘the equivalent of all records produced in German history since the middle ages’.
‘Lifting the Lid on Oppression—the Stasi Files’ address to the International Bar Association, 26th Biennial Conference, Berlin 1996. Dr Henke was then head of the research department at the Stasi File Authority (
Der Bundesbeauftragte für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen Deutschen Demokratischen Republik
aka BstU).
p. 57 For figures on KGB agents in the Soviet Union, Gestapo personnel during the Nazi regime and Stasi employees and agents, see John O. Koehler,
Stasi: The Untold Story of the East German Secret Police
, Westview Press, Boulder CO, 1999, pp. 7–8.
pp. 57–58 On Erich Mielke’s life, see Jochen von Lang,
Erich Mielke: Eine deutsche Karriere
, Rohwolt, Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1993; Koehler, pp. 33–72. For Mielke’s famous speech in parliament see
Der Spiegel
46/1999 (15 November 1999), ‘
Wende und Ende des SED-Staates
(8)’, at http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel
This speech is also available at http://ddr-im-www.de/Geschichte/1989.htm
Mielke’s pronouncements on traitors and execution come from the television documentary
Die Stasi-Rolle: Geschichten aus dem MfS
by Stefan Aust, Katrin Klöcke, Gunther Latsch and Georg Mascolo, Spiegel TV, 1993.
p. 61 The GDR had the highest GDP per capita in the Eastern Bloc: Alexandra Ritchie,
Faust’s Metropolis: A History of Berlin
, Carroll & Graf Publishers Inc., New York, 1998, p. 755.
The Russian publication
Sputnik
, for example, was banned by the GDR authorities in November 1988:
Informationen zur politischen Bildung
, 1, Quartal, 1996, ‘
Der Weg zur Einheit: Deutschland seit Mitte der Achtziger Jahre’
, p. 15.
p. 62 The Stasi File Authority’s report on Stasi preparations for the incarceration of citizens on ‘Day X’ is ‘
Vorbereitung auf den Tag X—Die Geplanten Isolierungslager des MfS’
by Thomas Auerbach and Wolf-Dieter Sailer, BstU, 1995.
p. 64 Honecker’s words were, ‘
Den Sozialismus in seinem Lauf, wie man bei uns zu sagen pflegt, hält weder Ochs noch Esel auf
,’ Erfurt, 14 August 1989, and again in his address to the parliament on 6 October 1989, the GDR’s fortieth anniversary: see ‘1989–40 Jahre DDR’ at http://ddr-imwww.de/Geschichte/1989.htm
See the same site for Gorbachev’s famous admonishment. For Honecker’s order to ‘nip the counter-revolutionaries in the bud’ see
Der Spiegel
40/1999 (4 October 1999), ‘
Wende und Ende des SED-Staates
(2)’ at http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/0,1518,44895,00.html
For the Stasi taking notes on the protesters’ cries against them, see
Der Spiegel
46/1999 (15 November 1999), ‘
Wende und Ende des SED-Staates
(8)’, at http://www.spiegel.de/druckversion/0,1588,52264,00.html
p. 65 Günter Schabowski’s press conference speech of 9 November 1989 featured in the TV documentary
Die Stasi-Rolle: Geschichten aus dem MfS
, Spiegel TV, 1993. The same program also has Stasi border guard Herr Jäger admitting that passports were to be stamped in such a way as to refuse certain people re-entry. Schabowski’s speech is available at ‘1989–40 Jahre DDR’ at http://ddr-im-www.de/Geschichte/1989.htm
p. 69 On the numbers of Stasi informers participating in the
Runden Tisch
negotiations, see
Der Spiegel
49/1999 (6 December 1999), ‘
Wende und Ende des SED-Staates
(11)’ at http://www.spiegel.de/druckversion/0,1588,52264,00.html
p. 84 Frau Neubert of the
Bürgerbüro e.V. Verein zur Aufarbeitung von Folgeschäden der SED-Diktatur
told me of porn and ticking-package deliveries; the Neuberts’ car’s brake leads had been cut; the writer Jürgen Fuchs told the puppy story, and his daughter was detained after school. For the threatened acid attack on the border guard, see Koehler, p. 29. Koehler also quotes Manfred Kittlaus, director of Berlin’s Government Crimes Investigation Unit, calling the associations of former Communist functionaries a ‘classic form of organized crime’, p. 30.
In 1998 a federal government parliamentary inquiry found that, in the weeks of the fall of the SED regime in 1989, somewhere between three and ten billion westmarks disappeared. See reference to
Untersuchungsausschuss ‘DDR-Vermögen’
at
Der Spiegel
50/1999 (14 December 1999), ‘
Wende und Ende des SED-Staates
(12)’ at http://www.spiegel.de/druckversion/0,1588,52264,00.html
p. 100 Although most people were able to watch western television, the western signal could not penetrate a geographically inaccessible area that included Dresden. The region came to be known as the ‘
Tal der Ahnungslosen
’, the Valley of the Clueless.
p. 119 Surveys conducted in the immediate postwar years showed that the Hitler period of German history (1933–45) was assessed positively by about 40 per cent of the German population: ‘
Umfrage des Instituts für Demoskopie Allensbach
1951’, in Alfred Grosser,
Die Bonner Demokratie: Deutschland von draußen gesehen
, Rauch, Düsseldorf 1960, p. 22.
In a 1971 survey of the German people, the majority still held that Nazism was a good idea, which had gone wrong in its implementation: Max Kaase, ‘
Demokratische Einstellungen in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland
’ in Rudolf Wildenmann (ed.),
Sozialwissenschaftliches Jahrbuch für Politik
, vol. 2, Olzog, Munich, 1971, p. 325.
pp. 130–31 For Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler’s own account of his life, see
Meine Schlösser oder Wie ich mein Vaterland fand
,Verlag Neues Leben, Berlin, 1989. For more of his views see
Provokation
, Edition Nautilus, Hamburg, 1993.
p. 191 The Stasi File Authority’s report on the use of radiation against ‘oppositional’ elements is its
Bericht zum Projekt: Einsatz von Röntgenstrahlen und radioaktiven Stoffen durch das MfS gegen Oppositionelle—Fiktion oder Realität?
’ by the Projektgruppe Strahlen: Bernd Eisenfeld (Leiter), Thomas Auerbach, Gudrun Weber and Dr Sebastian Pflugbeil. Published by BstU, 2000.
p. 200 I later found instructions to operatives on ways of crippling ‘oppositional’ people, which gave more detail than Herr Bock’s little lecture. It comes from the Directive ‘Perceptions’ (‘
Richtlinien, Stichpunkt Wahrnehmung’
). It aims:
To develop apathy (in the subject)…to achieve a situation in which his conflicts, whether of a social, personal, career, health or political kind are irresolvable…to give rise to fears in him…to develop/create disappointments…to restrict his talents or capabilities…to reduce his capacity to act and…to harness dissentions and contradictions around him for that purpose…
On 18 January 1989—long before anyone could foresee the October demonstrations of that year—the state issued a further refined Directive called ‘
Zersetzungsmassnahmen
’. The German word
Zersetzung
is harsh, and has no direct English equivalent.
Zersetzung
, as a concept, involves the annihilation of the inner self. The Directive recommended these methods:
[the] targetted spreading of rumours about particular persons with the aid of anonymous and pseudo-anonymous letters…making compromising situations for them by creating confusion over the facts…[and] the engendering of hysterical and depressive behaviours in the target persons.
See Jürgen Fuchs,
Unter Nutzung der Angst
2/1994, published by the BstU, and ‘
Politisch-operatives Zusammenwirken und aktive Maßnahmen
’ in
Bearbeiten–Zersetzten–Liquidieren Analysen und Berichte
3/93 of the BstU, pp. 13–24. For the Stasi’s own definitions see also
Das Wörterbuch der Staatssicherheit: Definitionen des MfS zur ‘politisch-operativen Arbeit’
, Siegfried Suckut (ed.), Christoph Links Verlag, Berlin, 1996.
p. 227 None of the torturers at Hohenschönhausen has been brought to justice. See Ritchie, p. 877.
pp. 237 and 242 Articles on Herr Bohnsack include
Der Spiegel
29/1991 pp. 32–34 (in which Bohnsack confirms that West German politicians’ votes were bought by the Stasi), and
Der Spiegel
30/1991, pp. 57–58. On disinformation see also
Der Spiegel
49/1991, pp. 127–30. Despite the Stasi vote-buying, Brandt’s term as chancellor was short-lived. Two years later Brandt fell when it was revealed that one of his closest advisers, Günter Guillaume, was one of Wolf’s agents.