The next day the phone calls start very early in the morning. I hadn’t thought it through—I hadn’t imagined what it would be like to have a series of military types, who had lost their power and lost their country, call you up at home.
I’m asleep. I pick up the phone and say my name.
‘
Ja
. In response to your notice in the
Märkische Allgemeine
.’
‘
Ja
…’ I fumble for my watch. It is 7.35 am.
‘How much are you paying?’
‘
Bitte?
’
‘You must understand—,’ the voice says. I sit up and pull the covers around me.
‘To whom am I speaking?’
‘That doesn’t matter for the moment.’ The voice is assured. ‘You must understand that it is very hard for some of us now to get jobs in this new Germany. We are discriminated against and ripped off blind from one minute to another, in this—this
Kapitalismus
. But we learn fast: so I ask you, how much you are prepared to pay for my story?’
‘I don’t know, if I don’t know what sort of story it is.’
‘I was IM,’ he says.
I am tempted. The ‘IMs’ were ‘
inofizielle Mitarbeiter
’ or unofficial collaborators. I know I probably won’t find many who will speak to me. They are the most hated people in the new Germany because, unlike the uniformed Stasi officers and administrative staff who went off to their bureaucratic jobs each day, these informers reported on family and friends without them knowing. ‘
Moment
,
bitte
,’ I say, and I put the phone in my lap. I remember Miriam telling me that informers routinely argue that their information didn’t harm anyone. ‘But how can they know what it was used for?’ she asked. ‘It is as if they have all been issued with the same excuses manual.’
I pick up the receiver and say no. How can I reward informers a second time around? And besides, I don’t have the money.
The phone keeps ringing. I make a series of assignations with Stasi men: in Berlin, in Potsdam, outside a church, in a parking lot, in a pub and at their homes.
My kitchen overlooks the yard. I often see movement behind the windows of the other apartments. Today in one of them a man stands, staring out absent-mindedly. He is naked. I’m on the telephone and I look away, hoping he has not felt observed. When I turn to put the receiver down he’s still there—for a moment I think he may not have seen me. But then I notice he has pulled the curtain across his penis, where he holds it in a gesture of static modesty, a polyester toga.
I need to get out of the house, and away from the phone.
Outside the cold is bitter and soggy. There’s no wind; it is as if we have all been refrigerated. In the stillness people trail comets of breath. I catch the underground to the national Stasi Headquarters at Normannenstrasse in the suburb of Lichtenberg. The brochure I picked up at the Runden Ecke shows a vast acreage of multi-storey buildings covering the space of several city blocks. The picture is taken from the air, and because the buildings fold in at right angles to one another the complex looks like a gigantic computer chip. From here the whole seamless, sorry apparatus was run: Stasi HQ. And, deep inside this citadel was the office of Erich Mielke, the Minister for State Security.
On 7 November 1990, only months after the citizens of Berlin barricaded this complex, Mielke’s rooms, including his private quarters, were opened to the public as a museum. The ‘Federal Commissioner for the Files of the State Security Service of the former GDR’ (the Stasi File Authority) has taken control of the files. People come here to read their unauthorised biographies.
I see through a window into a room where several men and a woman sit each at their own small table. They look at pink and dun-coloured manila folders and take notes. What mysteries are being solved? Why they didn’t get into university, or why they couldn’t find a job, or which friend told Them about the forbidden Solzhenitsyn in their bookcase? The names of third parties mentioned in the files are crossed out with fat black markers so other people’s secrets are not revealed (that Uncle Frank was unfaithful to his wife, that a neighbour was a lush). But you are entitled to know the real names of the Stasi officers and the informers who spied on you. For the moments that I stand there at least, no-one is crying or punching the wall.
I make my way to the main building like a rat in a maze. I want to get a sense of the man who ran the place, before meeting some of his underlings face to face.
The name Mielke has now come to mean ‘Stasi’. Victims are dubiously honoured to find his signature in their files; on plans for someone to be observed ‘with all available methods’, on commands for arrest, for kidnapping, instructions to judges for the length of a prison term, orders for ‘liquidation’. The honour is dubious because the currency is low: he signed so many. Mielke’s apparatus, directed largely against his own countrymen, was one and a half times as big as the GDR regular army.
After the Wall fell the German media called East Germany ‘the most perfected surveillance state of all time’. At the end, the Stasi had 97,000 employees—more than enough to oversee a country of seventeen million people. But it also had over 173,000 informers among the population. In Hitler’s Third Reich it is estimated that there was one Gestapo agent for every 2000 citizens, and in Stalin’s USSR there was one KGB agent for every 5830 people. In the GDR, there was one Stasi officer or informant for every sixty-three people. If part-time informers are included, some estimates have the ratio as high as one informer for every 6.5 citizens. Everywhere Mielke found opposition he found enemies, and the more enemies he found the more staff and informers he hired to quell them.
Here, at Normannenstrasse, 15,000 Stasi bureaucrats worked every day, administering the activities of the Stasi overseas, and overseeing domestic surveillance through each of the fourteen regional offices in the GDR.
Photos show Mielke to be a small man with no neck. His eyes are set close together, his cheeks puffy. He has the face and the lisp of a pugilist. He loved to hunt; footage shows him inspecting a line of deer carcasses as he would a military parade. He loved his medals, and wore them pinned over his chest in shiny, noisy rows. He also loved to sing, mainly rousing marches and, of course, ‘The Internationale’. It is said that psychopaths, people utterly untroubled by conscience, make supremely effective generals and politicians, and perhaps he was one. He was certainly the most feared man in the GDR; feared by colleagues, feared by Party members, feared by workers and the general population. ‘We are not immune from villains among us,’ he told a gathering of high-ranking Stasi officers in 1982. ‘If I knew of any already, they wouldn’t live past tomorrow. Short shrift. It’s because I’m a humanist, that I am of this view.’ And, ‘All this blithering about to execute or not to execute, for the death penalty or against—all rot, comrades. Execute! And, when necessary, without a court judgment.’
Mielke was born in 1907, the son of a Berlin cartwright. At fourteen he joined the Communist youth organisation, and at eighteen the Party. Through the 1920s and early 1930s, the political situation in Germany was volatile—there were street fights between the Communists and the Nazis, and the Communists and the police. The 1931 death of a Communist in a skirmish in Berlin prompted the Party to order revenge. On 8 August, at a demonstration at Bülowplatz, Mielke and another man killed the local police chief and his off-sider by shooting them in the back at point-blank range.
Mielke fled to Moscow. There, he attended the International Lenin School, the elite training ground for Communist leaders, and worked with Stalin’s secret police, the NKVD. In January 1933 the Nazi Party came to power in Germany. Some of the Communists responsible for the Bülowplatz murders were sentenced to death, others to long jail terms. A warrant was issued for his arrest.
Mielke stayed out of Germany. In the late 1930s he was active in the Spanish Civil War; by his own account, he was interned in France during World War II. But afterwards Stalin decorated him with medals for service: it seems clear that from the mid-1930s, wherever he was, Mielke was a hatchet man in Stalin’s secret service.
When the war was over he returned to the Soviet sector of Berlin, where he was safe from prosecution. He worked in the internal affairs division of the Soviet-run police force. In 1957 Mielke engineered a coup against its leader, and then he took over as Minister for State Security. He proceeded to consolidate his power within the Party and over the country. In 1971 he helped organise the coup which brought Erich Honecker to power as Secretary-General. Honecker rewarded Mielke with candidacy for the Politbüro, and a house in the luxurious Party compound at Wandlitz. From that time on the two Erichs ran the country.
Mielke was an invisible man, but Honecker’s picture was everywhere. It was in schools, in Free German Youth halls, in theatres and over swimming pools. It was at the universities, in police stations, at holiday camps and in the border guards’ watchtowers. He always wore a suit and tie, large dark-rimmed glasses and his hair, first dark then grey, combed back off a high forehead. Other than being small, Honecker was unremarkable-looking, except for his strange, full-lipped mouth which seemed to widen, only partially, for a smile.
Honecker’s background was not dissimilar from Mielke’s. His father was a miner, and he joined the ‘Jung-Spartakus-Bund’ at eleven, and the Communist Youth at fourteen. He was apprenticed as a roof-tiler, before spending 1930–31 at the Lenin School in Moscow, then working underground for the Communists against the Hitler regime. In 1937 he was arrested by the Gestapo and sentenced to ten years imprisonment for ‘preparation of high treason’. He escaped shortly before the end of the war, when he began, steadily, to make his career in the Party running East Germany.
The Stasi’s brief was to be ‘the shield and sword’ of the Communist Party, called the ‘Socialist Unity Party of Germany’ (
Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands
) or SED. But its broader remit was to protect the Party from the people. It arrested, imprisoned and interrogated anyone it chose. It inspected all mail in secret rooms above post offices (copying letters and stealing any valuables), and intercepted, daily, tens of thousands of phone calls. It bugged hotel rooms and spied on diplomats. It ran its own universities, hospitals, elite sports centres and terrorist training programs for Libyans and the West Germans of the Red Army Faction. It pockmarked the countryside with secret bunkers for its members in the event of World War III. Unlike secret services in democratic countries, the Stasi was the mainstay of State power. Without it, and without the threat of Soviet tanks to back it up, the SED regime could not have survived.
The foyer of Stasi HQ is a large atrium. Soupy light comes through the windows behind a staircase that zigzags up to the offices. A small woman who reminds me of a hospital orderly—neat hair, sensible white shoes—is showing a tour group around. The visitors are chatty, elderly people, who have just got off a bus with Bonn numberplates. They wear bright colours and expensive fabrics, and have come to have a look at what would have happened to them had they been born, or stayed, further east.
The group is standing around a model of the complex, as the guide tells them what the demonstrators found here on the evening of 15 January 1990 when they finally got inside. She says there was an internal supermarket with delicacies unavailable anywhere else in the country. There was a hairdresser with rows of orange helmet-like dryers, ‘for all those bristle-cuts’. There was a shoemaker and, of course, a locksmith. The guide crinkles her nose in order to push her glasses up its bridge; a reflex which doubles as a gesture of distaste. She explains that the neighbouring building—the archive—was invisible from outside the complex, and a copper-lined room had been planned for it, to keep information safe from satellite surveillance. There was a munitions depot here, and a bunker underneath for Mielke and a select few in the event of a nuclear catastrophe. She says Berliners used to refer to this place as the ‘House of One Thousand Eyes’.
I start to look about the atrium. An arrow points towards a library, another up the stairs to an exhibition room. It smells of dust and old air.
Then I hear the guide say something about a ‘biological solution’. The westerners are silent. She says instead of waiting for a revolution she and her friends had pinned their hopes on the old ‘
Marxisten-Senilisten
’ in power dying off. After all, she says wrinkling her nose, the GDR had the oldest leadership in the world, ‘We have got to have broken some kind of a record there.’ But unlike in China, where the leaders were wheeled out virtually dead for display, the old men here showed remarkably little sign of physical decay. ‘They were up to it all,’ she explains, ‘injecting sheep cells, ultra-high doses of oxygen, you name it. Those blokes wanted to live forever.’ She starts to talk about the beginning of the end.
Mielke and Honecker grew up fighting the real evil of Nazism. And they kept on fighting the west, which they saw as Nazism’s successor, for forty-five years after the war ended. They had to, as a Soviet satellite state, and the Eastern Bloc’s bulwark against the west. But in East Germany they did so more thoroughly and with more pedantic enthusiasm than the Poles, the Hungarians, the Czechs, or the Russians themselves. They never wanted to stop.
When Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the Soviet Union in 1985 he implemented the policies of
perestroika
(economic reform) and
glasnost
(‘openness’ of speech). In June 1988 he declared a principle of freedom of choice for governments within the Eastern Bloc and renounced the use of Soviet military force to prop them up. Without Soviet backup to quash popular dissent, as there had been at the workers’ uprising in Berlin in 1953, in Hungary in 1956, and in Prague in 1968, the GDR regime could not survive. The options were change, or civil war.