by Leo Maxim
This report could have put Gerhard in jail. Suspicion of sabotage, no real class consciousness, bourgeois weaknesses, contact with traitors, renegades and Trotskyists, and Jewish origin. Other people in those days were thrown out of the Party, arrested or sent to Siberia on the grounds of less serious accusations. The “cleansings” in the Party were in full swing at the time. Commissions were searching for “enemies” and “Western agents”. About 150,000 “deviationists” were excluded from the SED in the early Fifties, most of them former Social Democrats. In November 1952 Rudolf Slánský, the former General Secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, was sentenced to death in a show trial. In the GDR, paranoia is clearly mounting as well. Trials are prepared, members of the Politburo and the Central Committee are arrested. Even men like Franz Dahlem, until 1952 the second man in the GDR, or Wilhelm Zaisser, the Minister for State Security, are removed from their posts for “counter-revolutionary activities” and “involvement with imperialist agents”. Eugen, Gerhard’s closest comrade in the Resistance, whose name is actually Werner Schwarze, is suspected of being a traitor. During those years no one knows for sure, anyone could be an enemy from one day to the next. Suspicion prevails.
This suspicion by the new power-holders even towards their most loyal comrades probably has something to do with their own history. People like Walter Ulbricht and Markus Wolf trusted, if they trusted anyone, only people they knew from their exile in Moscow, who had been through the same things as they had. The others, living as émigrés in the West, who came from bourgeois or Jewish families, who only became Communists during the war, were suspect to them. People like Walter Ulbricht and Markus Wolf had learnt in the Soviet Union how Stalinist terror worked, how a people could be made docile and obedient. You have to imagine how they felt when they came home from Moscow after the war. They never forgot that the people they were now ruling were the very same people who had once driven them from Germany. It was clear to them that these people could be governed only by force and with strict controls. State security, the spy state, a society organized along military lines, were the consequences of deep mistrust towards their own people.
Strangely, not much happens to Gerhard. He is no longer able to work for the Secret Service, but he’s now a journalist with the ADN news agency, running their department for pan-German affairs. And the Stasi have their eye on him. In a report for Stasi Main Administration V, dated 4 December 1954, it says: “At ADN Leo has been saying negative things about measures of the Central Committee of the SED. He is calling for ‘press freedom’ in the GDR. Leo is a loose cannon. The KP ‘Elvira’ is given the mission, as she is in contact with Leo through her work, of pinning him down, establishing his contacts, so as to be able to introduce operational measures on our part.” At the end of the report is the note: “Leo was an émigré to the West and is a Jew.” Another observation about his Jewish origins. It makes me flinch every time.
Gerhard’s landlady in Friedrichshagen is questioned by the Stasi, and colleagues are asked to give assessments of his character on various pretexts. In June 1955 the Stasi Major Paul Kienberg observes: “Nothing suspicious has been discovered from the personal milieu. Leo is usually picked up by car very early in the morning, and doesn’t come home until late at night. Any free time he devotes to his family. The flat is well furnished, but not super-modern or extravagant. The furnishings are the bourgeois norm. Various colleagues in his ADN department are aware that Leo stays away from social life. The Party group and the central Party administration have spoken to Leo on several occasions, from which it has emerged that he is alienated from the Party. The Party leadership is considering releasing Leo from his job. The appropriate measures are also being contemplated in the Party.”
A loose cannon, alienated from the Party. In a report dated February 1956, Major Kienberg demands “the extension of operational measures”. At the top left of the first page of the report it says in black ink: “Do not share concerns. Immediately impose measures.” The signature is indecipherable. From that day Gerhard is no longer under surveillance, there are no further reports from people who have been put on his case. Who has been protecting him? It must have been someone with great influence, because the management of the ADN no longer want to fire him, and even the Party no longer sees a reason to punish him. Six words in black ink were enough to stop the machinery.
Did Gerhard not feel the noose tightening around him? Did he know about the accusations, about his reprieve? He probably didn’t know anything at all. That’s the only explanation for why he went on talking quite blithely and openly. For example on 17 September 1956 in the Berlin press café with two colleagues. One of them is a secret member of staff (GM) of the Stasi, and he informs Major Kienberg about the conversation. Kienberg writes in his report: “Leo said we must, as in Hungary, collect signatures to bring about a change in the Party leadership. In answer to the GM’s question of who, in his opinion, should be considered as new members, Leo replied evasively that there were quite enough people.”
Gerhard clearly wasn’t used to suspecting his own people. He’d never had that before. In France the comrades had been people he could always depend upon, to whom he had entrusted his life because the important thing was to defeat the Nazis. In Düsseldorf the enemy was the Americans. Now, in Berlin, the battles were different. This time it wasn’t partisans, but functionaries. It was comrades versus other comrades. There were impenetrable power struggles, intrigues, propaganda campaigns. It’s actually impossible that Gerhard knew nothing about any of this, that he was unaware of the fear that prevailed everywhere.
And Gerhard? In August 1956 he went to Hungary on official business, and met people from the Petőfi Circle in the evening. This was a discussion group of young Hungarian literati substantially involved in the preparation of the popular uprising that would break out only two months later. The Stasi learnt of Gerhard’s contact with the enemy. Several informal colleagues reported on the evening in Budapest. A report dated 6.12.1956 says: “During a stay in Hungary he made contact with the Petőfi Circle and also took part in political discussions in the Petőfi Club. Leo introduced himself there and welcomed the political debates. He thanked a speaker who was highly critical of Hungary’s politics for this discussion, and thought it was correct.” A memo signed by one Lieutenant Reuter reports on a Party assembly at the ADN which took place a few weeks later. “Leo openly put forward the opinion that the counter-revolutionary events in Poland in 1956 had been provoked not by the enemy, but by discussions within the Polish Workers’ Party. He is thus clearly and deliberately defying the Party line, which does not seem to matter to him in the slightest.”
Was Gerhard being particularly brave or particularly gullible, or both? Did he know that someone was protecting him, and did he therefore take more liberties than most other people? Or was that normal for him? Did the Stasi deliberately create a bogeyman who didn’t really exist? Did they turn him into a renegade so that they could punish him more easily later? I don’t know, and will probably never find out. But when I read these reports and assessments I feel proud of my grandfather. I’ve always wondered why he was so brave in France and later, in the East, didn’t open his mouth. Now I know that at least he wasn’t one of the ones who simply went along with everything. That he defended himself when the lies and the stupidity became too obvious. But why weren’t his family allowed to know anything about this, why did he always act the model comrade? Why did he not allow his children to have the doubts that he had himself? Perhaps he was afraid of showing weakness. After all, he had been taught always to maintain his composure, and to express criticism, if at all, only within the Party, so as not to play into the hands of the enemy. Eventually he probably confided more to the Party than he did to his children.
And he probably wasn’t quite as gullible after he’d understood how the big idea worked in the little GDR. The Stasi files contain the record of a Party discussion held with Gerhard. The paper isn’t dated, but since it
is about events in Poland and Hungary, I assume it must come from 1956. The comrades accuse Gerhard of not toeing the Party line sufficiently, of putting forward his own opinion when he should really be representing the views of the Party. According to this report Gerhard says: “I agree that in critical situations only one thing matters in work: discipline. That in work you sometimes have to implement things that you’re not currently convinced about, or, as Comrade Müller once said in a situation that was critical for me, that one must obey. But we have the Party, to which you can tell your concerns and whatever’s making you unhappy.” Did they give him a nudge, or did he really think that? Obeying, doing things you don’t believe in. Was that what he had fought for? How did he cope with it, with that constraint, with that suspicion? Why did almost all of them play along with that horrible game, the brave fighters who came back to the GDR after the war?
I once had a conversation with Gerhard about it. That is, it wasn’t really a conversation, it was an interview that we both gave to a French magazine years after the fall of the Wall. It was about grandfathers and grandsons in the GDR. In that interview Gerhard spoke for the first time about guilt, and he explained why people like himself were so attached to the country. He talked about the hope he had after the war. About the hope of building a new society in which the Nazis would never again have a chance. He had seen, he said, that there were war criminals in the government in West Germany, and that mass murderers were drawing high pensions. That could never have happened in the GDR. It would have been more important than anything else. His hope had allowed him to put up with some things that were actually unbearable. That was the price of the new, those had been the necessary sacrifices, and in the end the cause was always more important than the individual, he always used to say.
It must have been like a litany, a constant attempt at self-persuasion. And would his whole struggle not have been in vain if he had suddenly stopped being involved? Because that GDR was the result of the struggle, the reward. The point of life. He couldn’t get out of it without losing himself. “That was my country,” he said in that interview. And it sounded sad, but also a bit proud. And I reflected that it couldn’t be my country for precisely that reason. But I said nothing. And everything was exactly as it had been before.
I think that for both my grandfathers the GDR was a kind of dreamland, in which they could forget all the depressing things that had gone before. It was a new start, a chance to begin all over again. The persecution, the war, the imprisonment, all the terrible things that Gerhard and Werner had been through could be buried under that huge pile of the past. From now on all that mattered was the future. And trauma turned to dream. The idea of building an anti-fascist state had a beneficial effect on both of them. Gerhard could devote himself to the illusion that GDR citizens were very different Germans from the ones that had once driven his family out of the country. And Werner could act as if he had always believed in Socialism. All wounds, all mistakes were forgotten and forgiven if you were willing to become part of this new society.
New faith for old suffering: that was the ideal behind the foundation of the GDR.
That is the explanation for the unbounded loyalty with which Gerhard and Werner were bound to that country until the bitter end. They could never unmask the great dream as a great lie because the lies they needed to live would have been exposed at the same time.
And their children? They were hurled into their fathers’ dreamlands, and had to dream along whether they wanted to or not. They didn’t know that founding ideal. And because they had nothing to overcome, nothing to hide, they found faith difficult too. They saw the poverty, the lies, the claustrophobia, the suspicion. And they heard their fathers’ phrases as they raved about the future. Much of the power and the euphoria had gone. And the grandchildren? They were glad when it was all over. They didn’t even have a guilty conscience at kicking the state. What did I get from the great dream? Small-minded prohibitions, petty principles and jeans that looked like elongated Youth Front shirts. The energy of the state had been used up in three generations. The GDR remained the country of old men, of the founding fathers, and their logic no longer made sense to anybody.
17
Collisions
WHEN I WAS SIX, I had my first brush with the Stasi. A crash, in fact. I was on my way back from playing with a friend, I ran across the road and was hit by a car. Wolf later told me that the impact had knocked off the car’s number plate, revealing a second one underneath. It was all very unpleasant for the driver. Not only had he hit a child, he also had to explain to the traffic policeman and the witnesses why there were cars with two number plates in the GDR. Wolf said that jerk of a Stasi had been driving far too fast. At the time I didn’t know what Stasi meant, but I can say that my relationship with them wasn’t a good one from the outset.
I was taken to the A & E hospital in Prenzlauer Berg and had to have an operation on my spleen. I spent six weeks in a room on the ground floor, with barred windows, although that had nothing to do with the Stasi. My parents were only allowed to visit me once a week. To keep me from getting too excited, the doctors said. Wolf came more often, he climbed up the bars and waved at me from outside. I can’t remember if I thought that was nice or sad. Or whether it was exciting. But I’ve kept that image of my father behind the barred window. It’s one of my very earliest memories. When I told Westerners about the GDR after the fall of the Wall, the barred window always came up. The Westerners loved that story, because it was exactly the way they imagined the GDR. A child being hit by a Stasi car and separated from its parents, alone in a barred room.
Maxim on his first day at school, 1976
Childhood pictures came to me whose meanings I only understood later on. There was the road in Wandlitz on which cars weren’t allowed, which was why we could have slalom bicycle races with our hands off the handlebars. The street led through a beech wood to Lake Liepnitz. In the forest there was a green painted wall, hung with signs saying “Wild Animal Research Area”. Wolf said that big, dangerous animals lived behind the wall. I thought of lions and dragons, and was always slightly scared when we cycled to Lake Liepnitz. I wasn’t sure if the wall was high enough to keep the monsters away from us. Eventually Wolf explained that the big animals were the people who governed the country, and the wall in the forest was only there to protect them from us. I asked who could be afraid of us, and Wolf said the men who lived in the forest were afraid of everything. On Lake Liepnitz there was a peninsula where no one was allowed to go because, it was said, only Erich Honecker was allowed to swim there. Our swimming spot wasn’t far from that peninsula. I’d have liked to see what Erich Honecker looked like in swimming trunks. But he was never there. The big jetty lay deserted in the sun. Anne said Erich Honecker probably had no time to go swimming, because he always had to make sure that everything in our country was going according to plan. I felt sorry for Erich Honecker, because it was really a lovely spot to go swimming. Once two boys swam over, trying to get to the jetty. But before they reached the shore, soldiers with sub-machine guns were standing there, shouting at them to turn around straight away because the peninsula was a restricted area.
I thought restricted areas were exciting. There was one on the Baltic as well. In the May holidays we often went to Prerow, where there was a camping site in the dunes. The nudist block which Anne and Wolf always wanted to go to was bounded by a barbed-wire fence. Beyond it the border area began. Once, when the weather was bad, two friends and I dug a deep hole in the sand of the dunes not far from the barbed-wire fence. By the end the hole was deeper than we were tall. We needed a rope ladder to get back out. The next day there was great agitation. Soldiers with Alsatians stood by the hole, demanding to know who had dug it. My friends and I said nothing, and the soldiers filled the hole with their shovels. Wolf was agitated too. He told us not to dig our holes by the fence in future, because the soldiers might think we were trying to escape to the West.
Escape to the West.
That was one of my favourite games. It took at least four of you. Three children lined up by the climbing frame; they were the border guards. The fourth had to try to get past the border guards and climb the frame. Once you’d made it to the other side, you had to shout “West”, and you’d won. Once we went to the Brandenburg Gate with our class. I was eight years old. The teacher wanted to show us the “Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart”. While our teacher was talking about the Socialist fight for freedom, we wondered about the easiest way of getting over there. With a crane, somebody suggested, or with a glider, said somebody else. The next day we write a local geography essay on the subject of “Why the State Border Must Be Protected”. Anne has kept my local geography exercise file from the third class of primary school. I have in front of me the lined page with the pre-printed question. I wrote: “Because otherwise everybody would run away and because there are fascists over there.” I only got a Three for it. The correct answer is written next to it in red ink: “So that freedom is secured.”
Flicking through that file today, the memory comes flooding back. The leather smell of my schoolbag, the hairdo of my class teacher Frau Pankratz, the loudspeaker voice of Headmaster Griebsch at the flag ceremony, my first Pioneer card and the face of Peggy Sadzinsky, who sat two desks in front of me. I find dried leaves, a piece of paper listing the most important features of the domestic pig, photographs of Sigmund Jähn and Valery Bykovsky, who had just come back from space, and my Pioneer mission, in which I undertook to participate in the Week of Socialist Solidarity, and to stop spitting in Ninette Reinel’s face. One page is headed: “What we have achieved since the foundation of the GDR”. It is a list in table form: “Everything belongs to the state, and the state is us. Everyone has the right to participate. Life is good and very good. No job worries. The capitalists and warmongers are disempowered. More and more new apartments, Saturdays off.”