by Leo Maxim
Thomas Brasch and Bettina Wegner will later go to the West. Brash will become a well-known poet, Bettina Wegner a celebrated singer. But for now both of them are in prison in the GDR. Because they wrote on a few pieces of paper in felt-tip pen. “Hands off Red Prague” and “A Dubček for the GDR”, it said on the pieces of paper that Thomas Brasch put through letter boxes at night in Prenzlauer Berg. His own father denounced him to the police in the end. Horst Brasch, like Anne’s father, comes from a Jewish family, and he too emigrated to the West during the Nazi era. It’s the same story, the same conflict, except with dramatic consequences. Anne talks to her parents about the arrests. Gerhard says the invasion was necessary for the cause. If anyone doesn’t understand that, they aren’t part of it. Anne says, then she isn’t part of it, because she too would have been willing to distribute flyers. Her parents look at her in horror, as if she is a lost child. They never mention the subject again.
4
Accusations
ANNE WANTS TO STUDY HISTORY. She thinks it’s a good subject for a journalist. She wants to specialize, and once she’s a specialist in a particular area, she’ll be able to write about it in the paper and no one will be able to contradict her, because specialization is the most important thing, she thinks. She’s already repressed her experiences on the Berliner Zeitung to some extent. She tells herself you should always be wary of generalizations.
In September 1968 she begins her studies at the Humboldt University in Berlin. In the first week her seminar group is summoned to sign a declaration in favour of the Soviet Army’s invasion of Czechoslovakia. It’s a test of their sympathies. Anne sits in a little room with the other students. They hardly know each other, none of them knows how far they can go, how the group will react. Most of them seem rather clueless. The subject has been discussed for weeks, many people in the country are opposed to the invasion, but only a few dare to say so openly. Anne’s thoughts are tumbling around in her head. Only a little while ago she had claimed she would be prepared to distribute flyers against the invasion, and now she’s supposed to sign this declaration. Everything within her resists, she doesn’t want to give in just like that, betray herself. On the other hand she’ll have terrible problems if she refuses. She’ll be thrown out of university, she may never study again. It would all be over before it had even started. She feels that this day might bring a life decision. Anyone who gives in once will do it over and over again, and anyone who has been punished will never wash that stain away.
Anne suggests rephrasing the declaration. It said in the paper that the arrested Czech reformers had delivered a declaration along with the Soviet government in which they agreed to continue the reform process along Socialist lines. At that point Anne doesn’t yet know that the agreement amounts to a capitulation by the reformers. Anne writes that the seminar group emphatically supports the Moscow declaration. The passage about agreement with the invasion is deleted because it’s no longer about the past, it’s about the future. Everyone signs with relief. They haven’t agreed, and neither have they resisted. They have managed a small diplomatic feat that spares their careers and their conscience. But for Anne it’s still a defeat because she wasn’t brave, just cunning.
At the first Party conference at the university the lecturers ask Anne if she wants to become Party secretary for the first-years. The lecturers don’t know her, but they’ve read her political files. In them, under origin, it says: “progressive intelligence”. That’s the premium category, a kind of Communist mark of nobility. Her “Parteibürgen”—more or less her Party godparents—are listed as Rudi Goguel, a famous and highly respected comrade, composer of the famous “Moorsoldaten” song and her father’s best friend. Harald Hauser, a former French Resistance fighter and prominent author, and Ursel Herzberg, who lived in exile as a Jew in London and later became a state prosecutor. These first-class references are tickets into the young Party elite. In her final reference from the Berliner Zeitung it says: “Overall Annette should be seen as a cadre with the capacity for further development, who has the intelligence to grow into a useful cadre in our society if properly directed.” In plain language: here is somebody who has very respectable gifts but must still be trained under strict supervision.
The first Party assembly at the university is a dreadful spectacle. Two lecturers are told to stand at the front by the board. A comrade rises to his feet and declares that the two of them aren’t worthy members of the SED because they have attacked the Party and the working class with their hostile speeches. Their reactionary, revisionist behaviour discredits the whole university. A comrade whispers to Anne, telling her what’s going on. The two lecturers clearly dared to express doubts about the correctness of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. They hadn’t actually protested against the invasion, but just asked whether this action by Moscow was reconcilable with the peaceful partnership of the community of Socialist states. Now one comrade after another gets to his feet and hurls criticism and contempt at the two men. They stand there, heads lowered, as if petrified, and don’t dare say anything themselves. They look like rabbits acting dead so that the snake won’t eat them straight away.
Later, Anne often returns to that scene. In her imagination the two men are wearing pointed hats and signs around their necks with self-denunciations written on them. Anne finds this assembly so frightening that she undertakes to be even more careful from now on. She understands that conditions at the university are very different from those in the newspaper office where she’d been working. On the newspaper, no one demanded that you believe in what you do. It just needed to work. Here in the university even the purity of thought is checked. Anyone who doesn’t declare unconditional loyalty is isolated. Later she sometimes sees the two punished lecturers in the student canteen. They are always alone, no one dares to talk to them or even to join them. They still keep their heads lowered, they are penitents in perpetuity, a warning to the others.
I asked Anne if she felt guilty because she’d played along. She nodded mutely, stared past me, clung to the arms of the chair as if she would fall to the ground if she wasn’t careful. It was silent in her study and after a few long seconds Anne said she had somehow held such considerations at arm’s length. It had preoccupied and depressed her, but at the same time she had sensed that she had to protect herself against too much sympathy, because she couldn’t have borne it otherwise. She was twenty-one, she wanted to study and have fun, she still believed in the great Whole, even though she had quiet doubts.
Anne makes friends with a few students who are already in their third year. They are intelligent, witty lads who seem much braver than she herself feels. These lads want to develop a new form of FDJ (Free German Youth) work. Not as ideological, more transparent, more open. They invite Anne to join in. There are to be regular meetings in a flat. Anne finds the offer weird, she senses danger. A month later the third-year FDJ group is dissolved, and the lads are suspended from university. One of them has to work in a power station for two years, and is only allowed to continue his studies after that. Another is luckier. Because his father is head of a department at the Academy of Sciences, he is allowed back after a year. Anne talks to one of the excluded students. He says he hadn’t expected that they would respond so harshly to these harmless discussions. He says he wouldn’t do it again, it was a mistake. This witty boy is now a broken man.
The professor in charge of Anne’s seminar group tells the students to condemn the suspended men. A declaration is prepared, speaking of hostile individuals who want to pervert the spirit of the FDJ. This time Anne speaks out, because she knows very well that the accusations are false. She gets up and says she knows these students, they aren’t enemies at all, so it would be a mistake to condemn them. The professor is surprised to hear these words from the Party secretary. She throws him. All of a sudden other students who are also opposed to a condemnation speak out as well. One says that not all criticism needs to be deemed hostile, because then no one would dare
to say anything at all. The professor explains that the suspended students had collected signatures against the demolition of the Garrison Church in Potsdam. “As students of history you will know, of course, that Hitler signed a pact with the clergy in that church. Anyone opposed to the demolition of that church is making common cause with Fascism.”
No one knows what to say to that, not even Anne. She does sense that the professor’s argument is perfidious, because it assumes certain things that none of the punished students had even thought of. On the other hand, of course there’s nothing worse than being suspected of making common cause with fascists. Only later did she work out that for the Party ideologists Fascism is always the last argument if nothing else works. Her father did the same thing if he didn’t know where to take an argument, if the madness he was defending became too mad. “I risked my life for that,” was the sentence that silenced Anne at home. It was a killer argument which drew a line that she didn’t dare to cross.
I too remember a citizenship lesson in which the teacher explained to us that the song ‘Special Train to Pankow’ by Udo Lindenberg was forbidden in the GDR because it was fascist. The teacher quoted part of the lyrics in which Udo Lindenberg accused our General Secretary, Erich Honecker, of sometimes wearing a leather jacket and listening to West German radio in the toilet. “This is a clear reference to the leather jackets of the Gestapo, and Lindenberg is thus defaming a man who spent years in prison under National Socialism. We don’t want to hear this Nazi song.” Even at the time I knew that this account was complete nonsense. But I didn’t dare to say anything. Because “Nazi song” sounds so dangerous.
Anne’s experiences at university make her cautious, but not silent. On 11 December 1968 she reads an article in the newspaper Junge Welt that infuriates her. It is about the songwriter Wolf Biermann, who was violently attacked by the media in the GDR because he said negative things about East Germany at concerts in the West. The article quotes sentences from poems by Biermann, to prove the indefensible hostility of his attitudes towards the GDR. Anne sends a letter to the editor. She writes: “You are reviewing poems that no one knows. You back up your criticism with scraps from his poems. That is inadmissible, because the next line of the poem might say the opposite. You want young people to accept your opinion without resistance, and without having any independent thoughts of their own (after all, they can’t read the poems you are attacking for themselves). I don’t think this makes any sense for us. I think you are right to criticize his attitude. But you are achieving precisely the opposite with your article, which is full of clichéd and unfounded expressions. You are driving our young people onto Biermann’s side, as most of them are opposed to Party slogans and won’t believe you.”
I think this letter gives a very good account of Anne’s attitude at this time. She doesn’t criticize the fact that a songwriter isn’t allowed to express his opinion in the GDR. She accepts that, because she too thinks Biermann’s opinion is dangerous. On the other hand, she also thinks it’s intolerable that someone like Biermann should be countered in this way. She writes: “You engage in diatribes against Biermann that do not correspond to your superior and commanding position. You write about ‘his big mouth’. Do you need to do that? I don’t think it’s good to abuse someone with expressions such as this.” In the end she is essentially true to the core of the matter, and only has reservations about the form. Because enemies are also human. A few decades later Anne finds that letter in her Stasi file. She learns that an operational procedure had been launched against her. But the case is dropped a short time later. “Father of the woman in question is a member of the Central Committee of the SED,” it says in the file. And this is an end to the matter, because investigations aren’t usually carried out into important Party workers and their families. Where would Anne’s life have gone if she hadn’t had her father to protect her?
I’m surprised that the Stasi wasn’t clever enough to recognize my mother’s loyalty. Others would later be mistaken about her as well. That may be because she was a very unusual case. A fiery fighter for Socialism, who said heretical things. The daughter of a prominent Party member who allowed herself her own opinion out of the security of her faith. Which was in the Party, but also in truth. She thought the two things actually belonged together. Anne says she was always rather alone in her political attitudes. She wasn’t faithful enough for the faithful, too uncritical for the critical. She wanted to belong somewhere, but it didn’t work.
Wolf says he sometimes almost despaired at her naivety, her unshakeable convictions. He sees how much she suffers from her faith, how she struggles with it. When the West German Chancellor Willy Brandt comes to Erfurt in March 1970, they both sit in front of the television. On East German television you see the Chairman of the GDR Council of Ministers, Willi Stoph, and the people of Erfurt shouting, “Willi, Willi”. On West German television you see that the people only start shouting when Brandt steps to the window. This outright lie by GDR propaganda makes Anne furious. She sits there and can’t do anything but cry. Wolf says obviously they lie in the East. She mutely shakes her head.
Anne and Wolf ’s first real argument is about whether people who escape across the GDR border are traitors and should be punished. Anne thinks the border must be defended, and if people who don’t respect the border aren’t punished, then you might as well knock it back down again. During this conversation Wolf stays quite calm by his standards, even though he can’t quite believe what she’s saying. Maybe it’s just that he’s horrified. He thinks you can’t actually live with a woman like that, but at the same time he has the feeling that not living with her would be just as impossible. He remembers standing with his friend Manfred by the border checkpoint at Teltow, aged nineteen, at the end of August 1961, two weeks after the building of the Wall, and wondering whether he should leave or not. The barbed-wire fence was two and a half metres high, it isn’t even a proper fence yet, strictly speaking it’s just five wires half a metre apart. You would just have needed to lift the wire in the middle a bit and you’d have been through. Tall weeds grow behind the fence, and the next border post is a long way away. There isn’t actually a risk, just the fear of doing something wrong, leaving his mother alone, interrupting his training as a retoucher. But it could also be that these were nothing but excuses, that he didn’t actually know what he wanted. That he lacked courage. And it was all so clear. He knew the GDR, he must have known what to expect if he stayed. Most of his friends had left already. Why did he hesitate? Later Wolf often wondered whether it had been the biggest mistake of his life. He doesn’t even know to this day.
Anne, 1970
After Wolf and his friend Manfred have been standing by the fence for half an hour, lost in thought, two border soldiers come by and arrest them. They are questioned, have to spend the night in a barracks cell and are then released again. Perhaps the guards believed that they didn’t want to escape, that they were just daydreaming. Wolf says he didn’t believe at the time that the border would really last. A month later he is called up to the National People’s Army. He is among the first year of recruits, one of the first men to take up arms in the service of the GDR. Now he is in, and won’t be getting out again.
When the Wall went up, Wolf was nineteen years old, the same age as I was when the Wall came down. It’s possible that he had just as little understanding of the historical significance of the moment as I did when I stood by Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin on 9 November 1989. The first thing I thought of when I stepped onto the soil of West Berlin was that I’d left my cigarettes at home. I was really annoyed about that, because I always smoke when I’m excited. I had no Western money to buy cigarettes, and I didn’t dare ask anyone for one. I thought about what the Westerners would think of me if I started begging as soon as I’d taken three steps into freedom. I wondered if I should quickly go back to the East, fetch my cigarettes and come back later. But I wasn’t sure they’d let me out a second time. And it struck me that I didn’t r
eally know if they’d even let me back in again. If a Western reporter had asked me at that moment what I felt at the time, I’d probably have said that this Wall coming down was really stressful. And I didn’t spend that much time in the West because I had to go to work very early the next day. Even today I’m embarrassed that I turned up at exactly seven o’clock in my lab at the Academy of Sciences on 10 November 1989, where the only other person was a colleague who hadn’t seen the news.
5
Street Children
IWAS SITTING WITH WOLF in his attic room, at the circular dining table. It was quiet, only the occasional noise from outside drifted in through the open window. Wolf seemed to be agitated. He slid back and forth on his chair, trying to find a beginning. A beginning for his life, which he was now going to relate. He spoke slowly and with great concentration; sometimes he closed his eyes for a moment, tracked down his memories, became the boy who ran through the ruins in Freienwalder Strasse with his mates. Like Anne, Wolf was born in the West. In Berlin-Gesundbrunnen. He talked about streets overgrown with grass and weeds, of the smell of lovage filling the air. American soldiers played football with their steel helmets, and in the untended allotments there was a Gypsy camp with an old fortune-teller, who read your future in your palm for twenty pfennigs. Grandma Sigrid, Wolf’s mother, had her fortune told there. Apparently there had been an argument about payment, and the fortune-teller put the evil eye on Grandma Sigrid and told her that her husband was going to leave her. Unfortunately a few years later the old Gypsy was proved right, which is why even today Grandma Sigrid can’t stand anyone who looks remotely like a Gypsy.