“Look, I’ll talk to the others, don’t worry about that. Everyone’s a bit on edge, we’re all a bit concerned that we might have bitten off more than we can chew. Give it a bit of time, let them cool off. You too.”
I let Nik woffle on. I wasn’t upset or stressed. Maybe the others were, but I certainly wasn’t.
“Are you taking all this seriously? Because I think you should.” Nik paused for a while, considering something, then he shook his head and continued: “You’ve heard about last night? In Jena? Really heavy stuff. The Dynamo hools went for an away match with their friends from Zwickau and a few casuals from Lobeda. They were organised, it wasn’t just a rampage—they went straight for the JG group. Fireworks, steel bars—the lot. Not really surprising—JG Stadtmitte have been a thorn in the fascists’ side since before the revolution started.”
I grunted, not really listening, just walking along the road, watching the tips of my shoes as they swung in and out of sight.
“Martin, you have to take this seriously—they’ve never tried anything this big before. And if Dynamo Dresden have done it then the BFC hools here in Berlin are going to do it too—it’s a question of pride for them. And you’ll be on the list, won’t you? They’ve already attacked Steinlein, who’s to say you won’t be next?”
Nik was still talking, we were still walking, but I was still thinking about my colleagues.
“What are you planning on doing? Because you can’t just ignore these threats. Martin, are you even listening to me?”
“Well I don’t trust the cops to catch whoever’s responsible. And I don’t trust them to protect me,” I snorted.
Nik nodded, agreeing with me.
We carried on walking in silence until we’d nearly reached home.
“Fancy a coffee?”
“Martin …”
I followed Nik’s worried gaze, over to the front door of the house where I have my flat. Red paint, same colour as had been used to daub the walls of the RS2 offices. The swastika was crude, badly drawn, the hooks on the cross bending the wrong way. And it was still wet.
“Fuck …” I breathed.
“Right, you can’t stay here.” Nik looked up and down the road before pushing me in through the door to the hallway.
We stood there for a moment, listening. The door creaked shut behind us, slotting back into the frame, the loud click echoing off the high ceiling. Putting a finger to his lips Nik started up the stairs, stopping just before the first bend and signaling that I should follow.
We made it to my flat door. It seemed intact, no signs of damage, no signs of forced entry. The little notebook and pencil still hung from their string—no notes, no threats. Nik put his finger to his lips again, then mimed a key turning in a lock. I gave him my key, and he opened up, peering into the dark hallway of my flat. No noises, nothing to be seen.
We went in.
After scouting through the flat, checking it was empty, Nik came back and closed the front-door, then pulled the bolt across.
“That’s it, Martin. You can’t stay. Pack some stuff, we have to get you out of here,” he whispered.
He followed me into the bedroom, and stood watching me pile some clothes into an old army rucksack.
That’s when it hit me. Delayed reaction, I thought glassily as I was pulling clothes out of my cupboard. I could suddenly see the flier that Demnitz had shown me. It was there, clear before my eyes, as if I had it in my hands and was reading it. What Nik had been telling me about, the events in Jena last night. The whole series of demonstrations. The nightly beatings in Lichtenberg, Pankow, Marzahn. The whole ghastly, scary array of actions that the hools, the skins and other bastards had been engaged in.
I was in shock. Not the wide-eyed, panting kind of shock—although I noticed that I was breathing in short gasps, my chest heaving, air bellowing through my throat—but a lost sort of shock, sensory perception reduced, not seeing or hearing very well, not even thinking particularly well. A bled-dry sort of shock.
I slowly finished packing, feeling detached, as if I were watching myself through a thick glass window. “OK, I’ll go somewhere, I’ll stay out of sight.”
“Where can we put you? We need to keep you safe for a few days while we work out what to do.”
I nodded again, trying to think clearly. Nik was right, my flat was no longer a place of safety; I couldn’t stay here—they obviously knew where I lived. I could go to Katrin’s, in West Berlin, but I didn’t want to endanger my daughter. Thinking about Katrin made me think of her mother. There was a little hut on a small plot of land, on a lake out to the east, it belonged to the family of Katrin’s mother, except they were all gone now. I hadn’t been there for years, but I knew where the key was kept, in a little nook under the cover of the well. I could go there.
“Yes, there’s a Datsche in the woods, the other side of Storkow. It’s on a lake. I’ll go there.”
Nik thought about it for a moment. “OK, that sounds good. Where’s your phone?”
I pointed through the door to the hallway, and he went out. I could hear him punching the buttons, then silence as he waited.
“Laura? Listen, I’m at Martin’s … Yes, yes, I know, he told me. Listen, this is important: bring the office Trabant round to Martin’s, no, wait, not here. Bring it to the supermarket, leave it on Kernhofer Strasse near the supermarket. Martin’s in more danger that we thought, we need the car.”
He put the phone down, and gave me a worried smile. “Got everything? Good, let’s go.” Nik opened the front door and held it open for me before double locking it behind us and giving me the key.
We got to the bottom of the stairs, and we paused in front of the house door.
“Right, we’re going to the car, and you’re going to go to your Datsche. I’ll call the cops and get them to put a patrol outside your house. Phone me every evening at 9 o’clock, OK? Find a phone box and ring me to let me know you’re OK. I’ll tell you when it’s safe to come home. Right? Let’s go.”
We walked out onto the street, past the supermarket and up Kernhofer Strasse until we reached the Trabant. Laura was nowhere to be seen, but the car door wasn’t locked, and the keys were on the seat under a blue book of road maps.
“Thanks Nik, but I’m sure we don’t need to go to all this effort-”
“Just go, Martin, just go. I’ll let you know when it’s OK to come back.”
I pulled the choke out, opened the fuel cock and turned the key. Pressing the accelerator, I listening to the undulating clatter of the engine racing. Satisfied that it wouldn’t die on me, I let up the pressure on the throttle. Giving Nik a brief, nervous smile I pulled out on to the road, heading for the countryside.
Day 12
Friday 25th March 1994
Berlin: An anti-fascist demonstration will take place in the capital this afternoon. The call for the demonstration has been supported by over four hundred Works Councils and Round Tables across the country.
Karo
If the fascists march, so will we!
If the fascists fight, so will we! The anti-fascist bloc calls on all residents of the GDR to defend our Republic against racist hate-speech, against fascist and imperialist threats and to demonstrate for a society of solidarity and respect.
No state, no nation, no borders, no capitalism!
The anti-fascist bloc supports the emancipatory struggle for dignity and freedom, we reject the nationalist and capitalist logic of repression!
This means:
We will stop the race-hate and the marches of the fascists in East Berlin and throughout the GDR!
We support the anti-fascist struggle here and everywhere!
We show solidarity with Roma and Sinti and with refugees from Russia and from the wars in the Balkans! We support their struggles and their right to stay!
We are determined to reject, hinder and obstruct the programmes of the political parties which support unification with capitalist West Germany!
Let the city
rebel! Collectively organise against political policing!
Organise in the work place, in the neighbourhoods, for the independence of the GDR as the basis of social renewal!
Long live the Round Tables and the Works Councils!
That was when Schimmel flipped.
He totally lost it. He was shaking, foam flecking his mouth, eyes wide—I could see the whites of his eyes, all the way round—and shouting. I couldn’t make out the words, it was just white noise, a background to the chanting and slogans coming from both sides of the demo. It was really fucking freaky, and then it got worse. I was standing next to him, looking at him, thinking what the fuck is going on? and he just lunged, he just went straight for a gap in the line of cops. They hadn’t clocked him until then, but they must have thought he was going to jump them or something, and the line of cops tightened, the batons and shields held towards us, one of them struck out, catching Schimmel on his forearm. He didn’t even notice, just kept trying to push through the cops, trying to get to the Nazis beyond. We held him back, it took three of us, he was flailing around, still shouting as we dragged him back into the crowd behind us.
“Becker! Becker you arse, I’m going to fucking get you!”
I could make out bits of what he was shouting now, he was still pointing at the crowd of fashos hiding behind the cops. It was a load of skins, but one of them, standing at the back, was a bit older, early forties, short-back-and-sides, a snide grin on his face. He was staring at Schimmel, egging him on.
I dragged Schimmel further back into the crowd, and made sure our affinity group went with us. As soon as we were out of sight of the cops Schimmel just collapsed, he just lay on the wet road, crying, shaking.
“We’ve got to get him out of here, he’s flipped!” I said to the others, and we literally picked him up off the floor, and got him out of the demo, out the other side. He was still crying and shivering. Man, he was totally broken.
“What the fuck’s going on, Schimmel?” I kept saying to him, but he didn’t answer, just moaned.
We got him to the nearest squat, and we put him on a mattress. It was really scary, and I had no idea what to do, I just pushed the rest of our team out of the room, and went to the kitchen. Somebody had already put some water on to boil, and I filled a tea-egg with peppermint leaves, put it in a cup with loads of sugar.
“Is he going to be alright?” somebody asked me.
“How the fuck should I know? Am I his fucking mother?” I poured hot water into the cup, taking it up to Schimmel. Playing mother.
He had got off the mattress and was crouched in the corner, crying, still shaking. I knelt down next to him, put one arm around his shoulders, holding the cup in front of him with my free hand.
“Here’s some tea,” I said, as calmly as I could.
There was no reaction, it was like he hadn’t even noticed I was back. Then suddenly his arm shot out, spilling the hot tea over the floor.
“Fuck’s sake Schimmel! You trying to get me burnt?” I shouted, then tried to calm down again. “Fuck’s sake,” under my breath this time. “Fuck’s sake …”
“Becker,” Schimmel moaned, “it was Becker.”
“Who’s Becker? What you on about?” I asked him, thinking of the Nazi, grinning. How did they know each other, these two?
I went to the door and shouted down the stairs for another cup of tea, then went back to Schimmel, put my arm around him, pulled his head onto my shoulder and rocked us both, back and forth, back and forth.
It was ages before I could get any sense out of him. The fresh cup of tea had arrived, and I made him take sips of the hot sweet drink. Then more hugging, rocking, making shushing noises. It started trickling out, strings of words, all knotted up, snarled in memories and emotions, mixed with tears and shivering.
He was 13 when he ran away from home: Lössnitz. Some dump down in Karl-Marx-Stadt district. Edge of the world kind of place, near the uranium mines. No wonder he ran away. He got as far as Berlin before the pigs picked him up. A night in the cells, the next day they took him to a secure home on Stralau. First he was beaten, then he was thrown into solitary for a week. The way he told it, it might have been more than a week—no way of knowing: no light, just a cold brick floor, a musty mattress thrown into his cell in the evening, taken away in the morning, and a bucket to shit in. Dry bread, thin broth, nothing to drink. Shit, he was thirteen! All he did was run away from home, a young punk trying to find somewhere to fit in and they put him in a kids’ prison!
But it got worse, it must have done, that’s where this Doctor Becker comes in, and Schimmel just started shaking and moaning again, the name Becker coming up again and again. I couldn’t get any more out of him, fuck, I didn’t want to. What did they do to you, Schimmel?
And then this Becker turns up, at a Nazi demo. Not one of the bovver boys, either, he looked neat, a suit, tidy haircut. He looked like someone with a bit of clout.
I was going to get this Becker bastard, whatever he’d done to my friend, whoever he was, I was going to get the fucker.
I left Schimmel at the squat. I didn’t feel too good about that, but I reckoned he was going to be OK now, and I really needed a break. The others were looking after him. He’s just in shock, I told myself.
Thing is, I’d decided to go to to the meeting at the Lohmühle Wagenburg. I’d told Martin I wasn’t going to do it, there was no way I was going to talk to them about jumping the Wall. I’d told Martin that I was against all borders, end of. I didn’t agree with Martin and his tactical case for keeping the Wall, but I wasn’t 100% sure he was wrong either, and I wasn’t comfortable with the fact that the Nazis wanted to get rid of the Wall too. They wanted to get rid of it for different reasons, I know, but it still didn’t feel right. So I’d talk to the Lohmühle people, give them Martin’s message. I’d do that for him, but I wouldn’t argue the case for him. If he wanted that to happen then he’d have to come down here himself.
I walked down Puschkin Allee as far as the concrete flower pots that were at the end of the road, just before the checkpoint by the bridge to Kreuzberg, then I picked my way through the scrubby wasteland between the road and the camp. I could see a chain of paper-bag lanterns and tea lights in jam jars. Figures showed up black against the flames of a camp fire and on the far side faces wobbled in the smoke. It looked really homely.
They’d already started the meeting, and someone was speaking when I found a space to sit on a half-knackered deck chair. It was still free because it was downwind of the smoky fire.
“Smoke follows beauty,” some guy leered at me.
I ignored him, and looked around me, trying to work out who was facilitating, and what people were talking about. It seemed to be the usual stuff—people getting pissed off with each other for things that don’t really matter: who’s using too much firewood, who’s leaving fag butts where the kids play.
Finally there was a pause in the flow of the discussion and a woman turned to me, asking if I was there for the meeting. She was small, and even though it was getting chilly she was wearing just a vest and some army work trousers. Her bare feet were burrowed in the sand. I was dead embarrassed, and I wondered why the hell I was doing Martin this favour.
“I’m here for a friend, I said I’d ask you about jumping the Wall, you know, because you’re not going through the Border Crossing Point.” I vaguely waved over my shoulder to the sentry box by the gap in the Wall, maybe a hundred metres away. The people at the meeting behaved themselves: I could see a few of them pull a face, but nobody interrupted me. “Look, I don’t agree with him, but this friend of mine asked if I’d have a chat with you about it. See, it seems there’s a problem with smuggling going on, and that’s going to hurt all of us-”
“Is this about those brew-crew smackheads over on the East Side?” A vague giggle came from somewhere in the dark.
I told them about how Martin reckoned people jumping the Wall was distracting the border guards from concentrating on catching the
fash smuggling stuff, and this guy with a Bavarian accent started having a go at me for supporting the system.
“So what if we’re going to the Køpi—how’s that fucking helping the fash?” he asked, and some idiots nodded along with him.
The thing is, I didn’t really know either. I was just here because I was doing Martin a favour, I didn’t agree with him, but here I was putting across his opinions. Before I had a chance to answer, the discussion had somehow moved on, and I sat down again, waiting to see which way it would go.
There already seemed to be two sides—a few people were saying that we had to fight the fascists, and that meant we had to sometimes do stuff we didn’t want to. The other side were saying that borders and passports were fascist, and you can’t fight fascism by giving up your freedom!
I sat there, listening to people getting more and more pissed off with their neighbours. What was the fucking point of coming? I’d just split this group straight down the middle. I sat there feeling sorry for myself. Then I looked over to the person doing the facilitation, she looked younger than me and she was struggling. She was trying to get people to calm down and listen to each other, but they were just ranting away and ignoring her. That made me even more pissed off with everyone. But then I thought about the stuff I’d been practising, this course I’d been doing—the neighbourhood facilitator stuff. Dunno why I didn’t think of it before, but I knew how to deal with people having arguments and dissing each other.
I had a quick think, hands over my ears to shut out the ranting, then went over to the facilitator and had a chat with her. She nodded, and we talked for a bit as the meeting fell apart around us. Then she got up, walked over to the middle, right next to the fire, and shouted as loud as she could.
“Shut the fuck up! Shut up for a fucking minute will yous?”
Thoughts Are Free Page 16