by Leo Maxim
When she comes home to the big empty flat, she walks around the table in the dining room over and over again, mumbling aloud the arguments that didn’t occur to her in class. It’s as if she has to reassure herself of her own attitude. She has no one she can talk to about it all, no one with whom she can share her insecurity and unease. Her parents are far away. Every week she sends at least one letter to Geneva, but she doesn’t write about that experience. Perhaps she doesn’t want to worry her parents.
I found Anne’s letters from those days in a cupboard at my grandparents’ flat. In neat, girlish handwriting she records all the important things that are happening in Berlin. Once, visiting her friend Monika Scharf, she sees a film on television telling the story of the resistance fighter Werner Seelenbinder. Anne writes: “In the afternoon they showed the film One of Us on television. Herr Scharf must have been annoyed that his children got a chance to see the truth. For example there was one scene in which Communists were beaten down by Nazis. Then Herr Scharf said: ‘Well, they’re exaggerating very nicely. This film is just a load of rubbish, because it wasn’t like that.’ And Frau Scharf said, ‘Now they’re turning everything around in the film, and people still believe it.’ Then the Hitler Youth marched onto the screen. Then Herr Scharf said, ‘That’s just like the Pioneers.’ But I said, ‘In the old days children had to join the Hitler Youth, and with the Pioneers it’s voluntary. And Pioneers are brought up for peace, the Hitler Youth weren’t.’ On Monday I looked at a few of Monika’s books. There was one book that was called the Young Girls’ Book. I came across one sentence: ‘The Young Girls’ Association is part of the National Socialist Movement.’ Then I said to Monika, ‘Hey, let’s cover up the words National Socialist so that no one can see them.’ And we did.”
It’s as if, at the age of fourteen, she already feels responsible for a state, for the historical truth. In another letter she writes, “I argue so much with Monika about political matters. I’m sure you’ve heard that the Yanks are trying to provoke people at the border, and whole units have already crossed the border and then went back. And an East German policeman was run over. We talked about that at school, and I asked Monika what she thought about it. She said she’d seen it on television and the Yanks only marched up to the border and the policeman hadn’t been run over. It turned out that she’d been watching Western television, and that’s not allowed.”
Two weeks later she writes to say that the Holzmanns, the Jewish family from their block, had escaped to the West. “This morning, just before I went to school, there was a knock on our door. I opened up, and standing outside were two men from a removals firm who wanted to collect something from the Holzmanns. They asked us if the Holzmanns were there, and Aunt Schenk said, ‘The boy’s already gone to school, and if no one opens the door, it means there’s no one there.’ Then, when the men had gone, she said to me, ‘I’m sure Frau Holzmann is still there. She just doesn’t open up when she hasn’t got dressed yet.’ When I came home from school, the door was bolted, because the Holzmanns are in the West now.” That the two men from the removals firm were actually from the Stasi and that Aunt Scheck might have made it easier for the Holzmanns to escape by telling a little lie, my mother didn’t know at the time. But she was very preoccupied with the subject of West-East flight. In a letter just before Christmas she reports that a classmate fled with his whole family. At the end of the letter she writes: “I don’t know why they would do that.”
3
Convictions
WHEN ANNE IS SEVENTEEN, she is sent by the school to a District Committee event organized by the SED, the Socialist Unity Party. They sit together in a big hall, are served ham sandwiches and coffee and listen to lectures by important comrades. Even the head of the Berlin SED is there. He says the city’s best and most mature students are gathered together that day because some serious and important issues need to be discussed. The mood is solemn, as if they are about to be initiated into the most confidential Party matters. Anne feels a certain pride rising up in her at the thought that she of all people is allowed to be here, among the best. She learns that the GDR faces big and important tasks that can only be mastered if young people actively help. The time of spectating is over, the Party head says, now something needs to be done for the country and for peace. The Party head pauses, looks right and left and says at last, in a muted voice, that the precondition for this is to become a member of the SED. When she hears this, Anne can’t help laughing out loud. A few students look at her in bafflement, and even she is shocked by her own reaction. But this attempted recruitment drive strikes her as so crass that all the pride she felt a moment before flees in a trice. Just now she would have been willing to do anything for peace and the country. Now she consoles herself with the fact that she is, after all, only seventeen, and only adults are accepted into the Party.
After the lectures they are all supposed to write a poem on the subject “I must make a decision”. This is followed by individual discussions. Suddenly Anne is sitting opposite five comrades who ask her if she could imagine becoming a candidate for the SED, the Socialist Unity Party of Germany. Anne says she can imagine that very easily, but as she is only seventeen she will have to postpone that decision by a year. One of the comrades looks at her seriously and says they might make an exception in her case. There’s the possibility of applying for special authorization from the Party Central Committee. Anne feels her heart beating faster, she’s excited about this possibility. Special authorization from the Central Committee! She imagines how amazed her father will be, how amazed everyone will be. She signs immediately, leaves the room in a state of elation, has a sense of having experienced something great. At the end, the Party head from Berlin speaks again. In his speech he quotes from the poem that Anne wrote. She sits there blushing to her roots, it’s like a dream. On the way home she looks at her reflection in the shop windows. She feels so different, and thinks that people must somehow be able to see that too. She tells herself that from now on she’ll never again suffer from lovesickness or any other silly problems. Because she will soon be a comrade.
For Anne, the Party is more than an organization, more than the people gathered together in it. The Party is like a supernatural being, something terribly big and remote from normal life. When Anne hears her parents talking about the Party, she senses their respect, faith and devotion. When he talks about the Party, her father’s voice assumes a particular tone. He speaks more quietly, cautiously, articulately, as if the Party might somehow be listening, and might rebuke him for a false thought, for a slip of the tongue. The Party is absolute truth, absolute wisdom, which is why only enemies of the Party would even think of criticizing it or imagining they’re cleverer than it is. Individual Party members might fail, might make mistakes. The Party never makes mistakes. This belief in the great Whole, in the “cause”, as they call it at home, is her comfort later on, when she sometimes despairs of banal everyday life in the GDR. Anne says she was prepared to put her life at the service the Party in those days, to be absorbed into it.
When Anne talks to me about these things today, she sometimes starts crying. Perhaps out of rage, because she was so naive, but perhaps also out of disappointment that it didn’t work. That this state and this Party, which cost her so much energy, simply disappeared like that. I think my mother’s relationship with that state was like an unhappy teenage infatuation. She had fallen for the GDR as a young girl, and it took her a lifetime to break free of it again. It’s hard for me to understand all this, to see that my cool, intelligent mother is still grieving for that first great love even twenty years after the end of the GDR. How deeply embedded inside her it must still be, that hope, that unconditional desire to be there when it came to freeing the world from evil. I myself wasn’t really aware of her faith. That may have something to do with the fact that it was no longer strong enough when I reached the age at which politics started to become important. But it could also be that she deliberately spared me from it be
cause she knew how hard it is to resist your parents’ convictions.
It’s strange interviewing your own mother. Seeing her fighting back the tears. Anne sat in her study, in the armchair that used to have a brown and yellow pattern and is now covered with a grey woollen fabric. She wanted to say something, but her voice broke, immersed in the feelings that cling to her memories. Normally I wouldn’t have probed, I’d have left her alone. Children get used to being cautious, to reining in their curiosity. Children don’t want to see their mothers crying. I had to remind myself not to be a child, but a genealogist interviewing one of his major characters. I couldn’t give her a hug, however much I might have wanted to. Anne took deep breaths, wiped away her tears. I saw the little wrinkles around her mouth, the grey hair which she only dyes a little bit because she doesn’t want to look like her mother, who has had raven-black hair for forty years. That afternoon, Anne seemed older to me than she usually does. That might be partly because we were talking about her youth. I have those photographs in my head, her girlish face, her big, dark eyes. It struck me that, to me, Anne has actually always stayed the same age. A timeless woman. “OK, let’s go on,” Anne said, and resumed her story.
She wants to be a journalist. She knows the profession from her father’s work, and she think it’s great that you can be paid for being curious. As far as she’s concerned, journalists are people who know an incredible amount and can also write brilliantly. Her model is Egon Erwin Kisch, the famous reporter who was always in search of the truth and usually found it.
In 1966 she starts work as an intern on the Berliner Zeitung, at the age of nineteen. And again she’s something special, because everyone knows her father, who is admired not just as a resistance fighter but also as a journalist. That doesn’t make things particularly pleasant for her, because no one really takes her seriously. She’s only ever the daughter. But much worse is her disappointment with the way the newspaper works.
On her second working day she takes part in a meeting in which the editor-in-chief explains what’s not to be written about right now. The meeting is called an “argumentation assembly”, and it always takes place when the editor-in-chief has just been to see the Central Committee, and been informed of the latest prohibitions and censorship measures. It isn’t just a matter of how to place and understand certain events in Party terms. They are also told what words are henceforth undesirable because the enemy has appropriated them, what products can’t be mentioned because they’re defective. There are months in which no one is allowed to write “washing machine” or “car tyre”. “Social Democracy” is expunged for two years, “parliament” and “the Angolan People’s Front” only for six weeks.
Lists are drawn up, with daily updates of what may be written and what not. But if someone writes a wrong sentence, uses a suspect turn of phrase or an unusual word, there is a meeting in which the colleague in question has to explain himself. At which remorse is required. Once an elderly editor from the local section writes that soot is produced when lignite is burnt. This essentially harmless statement is severely castigated by the editor-in-chief, because it might be read as a criticism of air pollution from lignite stoves in the GDR. Again and again it is dinned into the journalists that the enemy never sleeps, and the censorship department in the Central Committee certainly doesn’t.
At first Anne works in the political section. Most of the articles printed here are Party press releases supplied by the ADN news agency and just have to be pasted in. None of the press releases can be shortened or altered in any other way. Even spelling mistakes are left as they are, because no one dares to phone the Central Committee about something like that. Anne notices that most of the bosses aren’t really journalists at all, but Party officials doing their duty on the paper. The good journalists aren’t in the Party, which she finds strange, because the Party is, after all, supposed to be the elite. Because there is hardly any room for independently written articles, most of them have hardly anything to do. They start drinking in the office at midday. The bosses drink most of all. The journalists try to do the dirty on each other. There are plots, denunciations, smear campaigns. And a paper is produced along the way.
Anne is shocked by this state of affairs. She tells her father, who is currently running the foreign-politics section of the central Party organ Neues Deutschland. She asks if things like that happen on his paper as well. As always when he finds a particular topic disagreeable, Gerhard doesn’t reply. And as always, Anne doesn’t press him. A friend of her father’s explains to her that that’s how it is almost everywhere in the East German press. “Where people lie, they also have to drink,” he says and smiles sadly.
On the evening of 8 May 1968, Anne puts her first lie in the paper. She’s on the late shift, and is sitting at a long table in the news department. The telex machine is ticking away next to her. The department manager hands her a sheet of light-blue paper of the kind usually used for the official communications of government offices. But the sender’s name is missing from this particular piece of paper, and it isn’t clear where the report comes from. The department manager says she should quickly stick the page onto manuscript paper and take it to the typesetters. Anne sticks the story on, reads it quickly through and gives a start. The headline is: American Tanks in Prague. According to the short piece, observers had seen American tanks in the streets of Prague. Anne knows about the things that are currently happening in Czechoslovakia, about the reform movement that will later be called the “Prague Spring”. She knows the official line. The East German papers are writing that anti-Socialist forces are at work, trying to remove the power of the people under cover of reform. She herself isn’t entirely sure what to make of events in Prague, or whether it’s really as dangerous as people claim. But she knows that this report can’t actually be true. If the American Army really had invaded Prague, it would have been massive news, it wouldn’t have been a small story on page two. She goes to the department manager and asks what the article is supposed to be. “Don’t ask,” he says, “write it up and send it down.” Anne insists that there must be something wrong with the story. But the boss waves her away. “Send it to the typesetters, that’s all that concerns you.” She’s gloomy and uncertain, but she does as she’s told.
The next day letters of protest and angry phone calls come flooding in. Even the Czech Embassy complains. The editor-in-chief passes the calls on to Anne. She, the intern, is supposed to explain to these furious people something that cannot be explained. She doesn’t dare distance herself from the report. When it’s over, she feels miserable. She still doesn’t understand what’s actually happened or what’s going on. Two days later there’s another report. This one says that filming is currently under way in Prague for a film about the city’s liberation from fascist occupiers. The American tanks seen in the streets were part of the historical setting. It’s only much later that Anne understands the purpose of the strange reports. She understands that they were intended to spread uncertainty, to suggest danger, to provoke. She understands that she was, that evening, a small cog in a big propaganda machine. Today Anne says she should really have bidden farewell to her dream job right then, because she could have realized that journalism in the GDR was impossible without a lie. But she hadn’t got there yet.
These stories of my mother’s seem ghostly to me. I can’t imagine how she could spend two years working on that paper without losing her faith in goodness. Thirty years later I myself started work as an editor on the Berliner Zeitung. It was my first real job as a journalist. By then the newspaper belonged to a big Hamburg publisher, and everything was exactly as Anne had dreamt it would be. Because now you could actually write what you wanted. Because now it really was all about knowing something and getting the most exciting stories possible into the paper. There were colleagues my mother’s age who had been on the paper for thirty years, and who had had to go through the same things as she did. I would have loved to know how they dealt with the lies, how they co
ped with suddenly being free journalists. But I didn’t dare to ask, I would have felt like a self-appointed judge asking questions for which there may not be any answers.
In August 1968 Soviet tanks roll through Prague, and this time it isn’t a film that’s being made, it’s reality. Anne is working as a child-carer in the Berliner Zeitung’s company holiday camp. The camp director calls a meeting and passes on the official declaration that the Czech government has called upon the Soviet Army for help. Anne believes this version, and only learns the true course of events from West German radio a few days later. That the government of the ČSSR had been ousted in a Soviet military coup. That the head of government, Alexander Dubček, and his ministers had been arrested. That the reform movement had simply been defeated. On Western television, Anne sees the pictures of bloody demonstrators in Prague, bravely defying the tanks. She hears about people being killed, injured, taken prisoner. During those days something inside her dies, something that she can’t yet quite name. She feels betrayed, cheated. Not only by GDR propaganda but also, much worse, by the GDR’s big brother in Moscow, whom she had seen as a just and peace-loving ally. In the editorial office in Berlin she reads L’Humanité, the French Communist newspaper. She learns that the comrades in France are protesting against the invasion, and she is a bit relieved, because you can clearly be opposed to the invasion even as a Communist.
Anne also learns that friends of hers in Berlin have been arrested for distributing flyers against the invasion. These are Thomas Brasch, with whom she went to school, and Bettina Wegner, whom she has known for ages. Both come from similar families to her own, she’s often sat down with both of them and talked about Communism and the GDR. She knows that neither of them are enemies. And she wonders if she herself would have helped to distribute the flyers. If she had been in Berlin, if they’d asked her. She’s pretty sure she would have joined in. Not because she’s particularly brave, but because she wouldn’t have believed that anybody could be locked up for something like that. She thought things like that happened to other people, people on the side of the bad people. Now she doesn’t feel quite as sure as before, when she was convinced that nothing could actually happen to somebody like her. She understands that when it comes down to it the state doesn’t differentiate.