Red Love

by Leo Maxim

  There are other tables in the file, showing how bad things were for workers in the past, and how marvellous they are now, how terrible the living conditions of people in Russia were before the October Revolution, and how much of a paradise it became afterwards. I learnt it all off by heart and then wrote essays in class and then I forgot it again. Just as I have forgotten the most important characteristics of the domestic pig and the leaves of the ten most familiar deciduous trees. In later school years there were many more tables. The three determining factors of a revolutionary situation, ten reasons for the superiority of Socialism, the five most important points of the first SED Party programme. Listless teachers wrote the tables on the board, listless pupils wrote them in their notebooks, listless parents signed off the classwork. That was Socialism as it reached me. Phrases in table form.

  At break we swapped Bravo posters and Duplo stickers and talked about the most recent episodes of Gunsmoke. I don’t think any of us gave a thought to how it all fitted together. The American television series, the West German Bravo posters and the superiority of Socialism. It was somehow clear that there was one truth at school and another in real life. You just had to switch over. Like on television.

  Later we moved to Karlshorst, where it was quieter and greener than in Prenzlauer Berg. We lived in a two-family house and had a small garden. Upstairs was old Frau Kaiser, whose house it was. We only had to cross one street to get to school, which had been important to Anne and Wolf since my accident. In the new school there was a flag ceremony once a month. Just before it began, we put on our FDJ shirts, and as the last sounds of the GDR national anthem faded away we took them off again. I don’t think it was a protest, it was just that it was extremely uncool to wear an FDJ shirt.

  I remember how surprised my grandfather Gerhard once was when I told him how it was at our school. The subject arose because he had seen the West German plastic bag in which I hid my FDJ shirt in my schoolbag. Gerhard told me about his time in the Red Falcons. They had worn blue shirts at the time too, and he liked going to the gatherings with the others and suddenly being in the middle of a blue sea. I liked this image of a blue sea, but I knew gatherings like that would scare me.

  One day in November 1982 our headmistress Frau Reichenbach hurried into our changing room. We had just finished games. Frau Reichenbach had tears in her eyes and said, “Something terrible has happened. The Soviet General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev is dead.” For a moment there was silence, and then we couldn’t help giggling, because Kai Petzold was standing naked behind Frau Reichenbach, desperately looking for his underpants. Frau Reichenbach didn’t understand what was going on, she could just hear us giggling and furiously left the room. In the class after that we were supposed to have maths, but Frau Reichenbach came into our class and said that after what had happened each of us had to write an essay about Leonid Brezhnev. It turned out that few of us knew who he was. And then Frau Reichenbach started crying again, and she shouted that there would be consequences. But nothing at all happened, except that another Soviet leader died a few months later and nobody at school told us.

  A few people from our class went to Scripture classes every week. One of them was a girl I was slightly in love with, so I decided to go too. In the church there was a room fitted with thick carpets. In the middle of the room there were five big candles, and we sat in a circle on the floor and listened to the vicar, Irene, telling us stories about Jesus. They were nice stories, and everyone listened intently, not at all like in school. There were prayers at the end of the class, which was always a little unpleasant because I didn’t actually believe in God. But there was something attractive and mysterious about it. I told my mother, who was startled because she didn’t know why I was suddenly interested in religion. I noticed that Anne had a problem with it, which gave my interest in Scripture classes a real boost. Once I even prayed in bed at night. I can’t remember what I said, but I was quite excited because I didn’t know if there was someone somewhere listening to me.

  In Scripture classes Irene explained that you had to love your neighbour as yourself. Beside me was a fat girl from the other class who always sweated terribly, and with the best will in the world I couldn’t imagine how I was supposed to love that girl. Other Christian principles that Irene talked to us about struck me as strange. That you’re not supposed to fight back if somebody starts hitting you, for example. That made about as much sense as the Socialism tables at school. Scripture classes were on Tuesday. And Wednesday was FDJ afternoon. In year seven Frau Reichenbach decided to move the FDJ afternoon to Tuesdays, because she thought the children at her school should make their minds up. Church or FDJ. The result was that the following Tuesday half of our class went to Scripture lessons, whereupon the old timetable was immediately reinstated. Then Irene said that faith had won, but I thought we’d actually won.

  From year seven onwards we had a class called “Productive Work” once a week. We went to a metal plant that made parts for gas boilers. The people there probably didn’t know what to do with us, so we had to spend hours sorting screws which, once we had gone, were all jumbled again to keep the next class busy. After a while, instead of going to the plant, a few of my mates and I sometimes went to the wood that started just behind our park. On the edge of the wood there was a Soviet barracks. The soldiers who patrolled in front of the barracks walls gave us cigarettes with a cardboard filter so strong that I couldn’t even smoke them without inhaling. The soldiers were always pleased to see us. They said, “Home far, children far, women far,” and we understood that they felt rather lonely here. Lots of Russians lived in Karlshorst. You could spot them immediately when they came towards you on the pavement. The women wore lots of make-up and wore thick fur hats on their heads even in spring. The men wore sand-brown uniforms, which were usually too big. The soldiers in the wood were sometimes drunk. They offered us some of their vodka, but we didn’t dare try it. The people in Karlshorst said the Russians drank alcohol that made you blind. Once on New Year’s Eve drunk Russian soldiers threw grenades into a campfire. One of them was said to have lost both legs and both arms. The others were beaten by their superiors and ended up in jail. People said the Russian soldiers were poor bastards, and yet they were probably happy to be in Karlshorst because things were even worse in Russia. I didn’t understand that because the Russians had won the war. There were films on television showing the heroic struggle of the Red Army. I knew that Hitler would never have been defeated without the Red Army. That they’d liberated us. But the soldiers in Karlshorst didn’t look like victors.

  When I was fifteen the boys from our year were supposed to go to a pre-military training camp. The girls were allowed to stay at home and train as paramedics. My mother thought it was terrible that we were supposed to be drilled for the army at such a young age. She got hold of a medical certificate declaring me physically unfit. But I didn’t like the idea of staying at home with the girls. I wanted to go to the camp and kept on at Anne until she let me go. We went to a garrison village near Berlin. On the first day we had to lock our clothes in a cupboard, we were given green uniforms and told that over the next two weeks they would make men of us, which didn’t strike me as bad at all. But at the time I didn’t know that men get up at six in the morning and run three kilometres before they have breakfast. The rest of the day we crawled through the wood, learnt to march in time and to protect ourselves against a nuclear flash. It was all very easy: you just had to throw yourself on the ground and cover yourself with a tarpaulin, and nothing could happen.

  Our woodwork teacher Herr Krück, who took us to the military camp, turned out to be a man who values discipline and order over everything else. Every evening we had to polish our black military boots until they gleamed, fold our uniforms neatly and stand by our beds. In normal life Herr Krück was a small, quiet man who sat in his workshop in his blue overalls and was happy to be left alone. Now he strutted about like a general and barked orders. I thought about the easy time I coul
d have had with the girls in Berlin, and swore always to listen to my mother from now on. Twice a week politkommissars from the People’s Army came and told us about the military situation. The officers demonstrated possible front lines and war scenarios. The starting point for these reflections was always a night-time ambush by imperialist Nato troops. I hadn’t been aware until then that we had so many enemies, all just waiting to destroy us in a moment of weakness. The only reason, the officers explained, why the enemy hadn’t risked an attack before, was the strength of our troops. But that strength couldn’t be taken for granted, at that difficult time more than any other the Republic needed young people who were prepared to defend their country. Lists were distributed, on which we could apply to volunteer for a longer period of military service. I don’t know whether it was the fact that I’d just spent two weeks crawling around the area in uniform, or because the politkommissars talked to us in such a friendly, serious way, but I actually considered signing up. Then it occurred to me that three years in the army might also mean being sent to the border, and I wanted to avoid that under any circumstances.

  On the second-last day in the army camp we were allowed to fire a sub-machine gun. Each of us got five cartridges, the gun had to be set to single fire, and we had to shoot at a picture of a soldier about fifty metres away. I was so excited that all my shots missed, but I was still proud. When I got home I told Wolf about shooting practice. He got incredibly agitated because he hadn’t known that we were doing such dangerous things in the camp. I said it had been great and he should calm down, but the next day Wolf ran to my headmistress Frau Reichenbach and yelled that this bloody school was forcing children to use guns. That got Anne worked up in turn, because the selection procedure for Abitur delegation was going on at the time. “You’ve just fucked up your son’s future,” she said. And Wolf told her it was this bloody state that was fucking up people’s futures.

  It was through my parents that I found out how things really worked. It was just a bit confusing because the two of them rarely agreed about anything. Wolf said the GDR was a dictatorship of civil servants who had betrayed Socialism. Anne said there were definitely big problems, but they could be overcome. As a rule political discussions with me turned into an argument between the two of them, in the course of which Wolf ’s position became considerably more radical. He started talking about the “criminal state” and the “GDR prison”, and Anne said in a tone of warning that he only made things harder if he said things like that. So I had a pretty good idea what I had to say and where if I wanted to avoid getting into trouble. I always got top marks in citizenship because we had all those tables. I went to FDJ propaganda meetings and at home I read copies of Der Spiegel that my mother sometimes secretly brought home from work. I was proud to have been initiated into my parents’ secrets without my teachers noticing. My mother particularly liked to tell me about historical connections, because she herself thought they were the most important thing. She said she wanted me to have it easier than she had, and if possible know the truth before other people told lies. I knew for example that on 17 June 1953 there had been a workers’ uprising in East Berlin, which had been brutally suppressed by the Soviet Army. And in class I wrote that it had been counter-revolutionary provocateurs and West German agents who had wanted to damage the working class of the GDR. And I didn’t even have to fight with myself to do it, I didn’t feel like a traitor or a coward for saying what other people wanted to hear from me.

  Perhaps it was because none of it was really very important to me. Not important enough to take a risk or put myself at a disadvantage for. Today I know how much pain every genuflection, every compromise, must have caused Anne, because she felt connected to the GDR, because she wanted to change things. For her, every lie was a defeat, because she wanted to be honest with the state. Even my father says he’d always hoped that something would happen in this country, because the situation had never really been hopeless. I didn’t feel that way. I had more of a non-relationship with the state. After everything my parents had told me about the GDR, after everything I’d seen of it myself, I had stopped caring about it. I don’t think I was ever really aware of that. But thinking about it today, it strikes me that I didn’t actually have any real feelings about the country. There was neither hatred nor love, neither hope nor disappointment. Just a kind of numb indifference.

  That might sound strange, because everybody feels something about his home. But I had separated my feelings of home from the GDR: the birch tree outside our summer house in Basdorf, the swimming spot on Lake Liepnitz, the lake park in Karlshorst, the street where I was born, had nothing to do with this state as far as I was concerned. The GDR was other people. My headmistress Frau Reichenbach, the civil servants who stood on the stage at the May Day demonstration, the policemen with the Saxon dialect and the presenter of Aktuelle Kamera. The GDR was the prohibitions, the idiotic rules, the red banners in the street saying “My hand for my product” or “As we work today, so shall we live tomorrow”. My parents taught me to have as little contact as possible with that GDR, to keep my distance. We didn’t need to talk about it, it was clear enough already. I saw how Anne and Wolf lived, how they kept the state off their backs. It’s only now that I’ve really understood how attached Anne was to the GDR. She says she didn’t want to pass that feeling on to me because it had caused her so much suffering.

  Anne talked to me seriously and often, as if talking to an adult. She never tried to convince me, she wanted me to be able to know, to understand, to classify. Once I told her about my feeling in the army camp, when I was on the point of signing myself up for a longer period of military service. It was a very strange feeling, a need to belong. Today I would say it was an urge to arrive in the GDR. Anne said at the time that there were various ways of living in this country. You could join in or you could resist. You could also join in a bit and resist a bit. Anne said she would always support me, whichever option I went for. But I should clearly understand that you had to be very strong to defend yourself seriously. And that it’s hard to stop once you’ve seriously joined in. Then she looked at me sadly. Perhaps she was thinking about how absurd it is to have to explain things like that to your children.

  Maxim and Wolf, Lake Liepnitz, 1971

  All of these are moments which, telling them now, assume a meaning that I don’t think they had for me at the time. The truth is that my life was mostly normal. As normal as it might have been in Hamburg, or Bonn. So normal that you could simply forget the GDR. That life was played out at home, in the garden, by the sea, at friends’ houses, at the football pitch. It was about jumping from a climbing frame, catching a fish, smoking your first cigarette and snogging girls in the park. It was only later, when I found it harder to avoid the GDR, when it got too close to me, that I started seeing it with different eyes.

  18

  Trivia

  IN WINTER 1976 Anne and Wolf start getting visits from a young man who introduces himself as a member of staff from the Education Department of the National People’s Army. The man is called Rainer, and Wolf says he immediately struck him as sympathetic. Rainer says they had made some enquiries and knew that Wolf was a critical but committed citizen. So he has a question. Rainer talks about his work, about the scouts in the West who provided his office with information about the military situation in the Federal Republic. He said that information was important to protect the GDR from attack. To preserve peace. The comrades, who were taking great risks with their work, need support, Rainer says. It’s a trivial matter, but lots of trivia can produce something big in the end. To cut a long story short, would Anne and Wolf be willing to make their letter box available in case the comrades in the West had an important piece of information to pass on. Anne asks how that would work, and Rainer explains that they wouldn’t have to do anything but call him up if a postcard from a stranger in the West turned up in their letter box. Then he would come and collect the card himself.

  *

  At
that moment something happens that Anne and Wolf haven’t really been able to explain, even today: they don’t refuse, they hesitate, they’re willing to think about it, to meet up with Rainer again. When Wolf walks Rainer to the door he says it’s actually the least they can do. They bid each other a cordial farewell, as if they were friends from now on.

  On his next visit Rainer brings a colleague along. He asks if he could make a call to the West from their house. Just a very quick one. Anne and Wolf feel as if they’ve been ambushed, but don’t dare refuse the request. Rainer’s colleague registers a long-distance call, but it doesn’t happen. After that they don’t hear from Rainer for a while, and no postcards arrive. A few weeks later Rainer calls again and asks if he could have the key to their flat so that his colleagues could use the telephone when they’re not at home. Today Wolf says that by this point the whole thing had started feeling far too weird. When Rainer asks about the key again, Anne explains that they don’t want to do that, because it’s not what they originally discussed. To her astonishment there are no problems or reproaches. Rainer comes once more. They have to sign a piece of paper, undertaking not to say a word about these contacts. Then it’s over.

  What happened to my parents in the winter of 1976? What made them do things that they didn’t actually want to do? They’re both embarrassed about the story because it’s so inexplicable, because it doesn’t fit with the image they have of themselves. Wolf most of all, the rebel, who was never afraid of doing what he thought was right, is still surprised at himself. “They caught me on a side that made it hard to say no,” he explains. “That man was nice and discreet, and I didn’t feel as if I was dealing with the enemy. And I thought that if you’re not going to escape to the West, you have to do something where you are.” Anne says she was above all relieved that they didn’t want anything more from them. If they had wanted her to spy on people, she’d have turned the idea down flat. But she thought helping scouts in the West was actually OK. “Perhaps we were worried about looking like enemies if we didn’t go along with it,” she says.