by Leo Maxim
I can’t remember exactly when my parents first told me this story. It must have been after the Wall came down. We were talking about Stasi investigations, and Anne thought you ought to go on the offensive where your own story was concerned, and you couldn’t keep anything quiet. In Anne’s Stasi file there’s a personality profile of Wolf produced by the Reconnaissance Department of the Ministry of National Defence before the first contact had been made: “His fundamental attitude towards the GDR is positive. He actively participated in the social work in his residential area, and thus made a considerable contribution to the establishment of the house community. At particularly important socio-political events he made himself voluntarily available. L. is not yet a member of a party. He has a harmonious marriage with his wife and lives with her in orderly family circumstances. He has two children with her. L. was brought to the Reconnaissance Department’s attention by an official notification.”
Plainly they had seen something in Wolf that he himself did not want to see. The side they’d caught him on, in fact, which you just had to scratch a bit to bring something to light. He had that need to do something, to commit himself, not always just to be against, but also to be for something. If the comrades had been a bit cleverer, if they hadn’t startled him with their demands, Wolf might have been willing to do more than even he himself could have imagined.
These stories about the letter box and the telephone were probably just a test to see how far Anne and Wolf would go. My parents’ files are later passed on to Stasi Main Department II, the one responsible for counter-espionage. The Stasi find Wolf interesting too. “His attitude is critical, but not hostile,” reads one memo. Another attempt at recruitment begins. “Based on the experience of the Reconnaissance Administration of the Ministry of National Defence, unofficial contact should be made with the couple under false pretences. In the attempt to make an appointment it became apparent that the couple are not prepared to talk to the Security Ministry while preserving the conspiracy. They insisted on meeting on official Security Ministry premises. Wolf Leo spoke openly about his contact with the Reconnaissance Administration, describing it as an ‘unconscionable burden’. Under these circumstances no further attempts at contact were made.”
Wolf, 1976
I’m trying to imagine what would have happened if Wolf hadn’t dared to rebuff the Stasi. It would have gone on like that, step after step, little by little. Lots of people did that, and most of them felt they hadn’t really done anything bad. Just a few notes, a little bit of information that probably wasn’t important anyway. That didn’t hurt anybody, as they always say. You didn’t necessarily have to jump through hoops to work for the Stasi. They were keen on people who were different. The little rebels who wanted to change something but didn’t know how to go about it. The little know-alls nobody listened to. Wolf could easily have fallen for it. He would have become a Stasi man and still stayed himself. Everything would have made sense at first, and later on he wouldn’t have been able to make head or tail of it.
The Stasi files also refer to an “illegal round table (association)” in which Anne and Wolf had taken part in October and November 1977. This round table met once a month at the flat of an acquaintance of my parents in Treptow, and Anne says today that she had no idea at the time that things like that were illegal. Anne and Wolf went there twice. “Problems in journalism were discussed, with content directed against the policy of our Party and government. Wolf Leo was extremely negative in this regard, warning of the infiltration of the Security Ministry in groups of this kind,” it says in the report. So Wolf does know that it isn’t entirely safe to take part in such round-table discussions. And he’s right. As my parents would learn, of the ten participants in the discussions, four are working as Stasi informants. And there’s a bug in the chandelier in the sitting room where they meet. Such trouble! And, Anne says, everything was completely harmless, otherwise she wouldn’t have gone. Wolf just thought it was boring. A short time later the circle broke up, because the host was getting scared. There was a farewell party at which an incredible number of photographs were taken. A few weeks later the Stasi visit Anne. They want to show her a few pictures to clear up the identity of certain individuals “so that they don’t fall through our fingers”. Plainly the Stasi still believe that my parents are on their side.
Anne doesn’t look at the Stasi pictures. Two weeks later the host of the round table loses his job at the Academy of Sciences and is demoted to the city archive, to which a lot of other people have also been transferred for disciplinary reasons. Nothing happens to Anne and Wolf. They are amazed by all this, because their round table really was completely harmless. A friend tells them it’s not about what’s discussed in such a group. Forming a group is illegal already. Ten people in a flat are a crime against the state.
At this point Anne is working in the editorial office of the foreign-policy magazine Horizont. That was where she really wanted to end up after her studies. Here, she thinks, she can finally realize her dream of competent, incorruptible journalism. But she soon realizes that there are hardly any journalists working in the office. Most of them come from the Party and government apparatus, including many former Secret Service people. The various departments in the magazine are directly answerable to the relevant specialist departments in the Central Committee and the Foreign Ministry. That’s where they decide what’s going to be published and how it must be written. Compared to what Anne encounters here, the Berliner Zeitung was the voice of libertarianism.
Once she writes an article about the crimes of Pol Pot in Cambodia. The article is held back by the Central Committee, because Cambodia is still officially counted among the brother states. Anne complains and asks if the GDR really wants to fraternize with dictators who massacre their own people. There is sympathy within the Central Committee, but the piece is still put on hold for weeks. Until eventually a call comes through. The article is to appear immediately, as a matter of urgency. Anne is delighted, and thinks that honest journalism, exposing crimes, is about to assert itself. Until she works out that that isn’t what’s happening at all. A week previously, the Chinese had launched an attack on Vietnam, and Cambodia is one of China’s supporters. And because solidarity with Vietnam is more important than solidarity with Cambodia, the article can now appear. Once again Anne feels she’s being used as part of a political campaign. She thinks about what Wolf is always saying. That everything in this country is nothing but lies and propaganda. And she starts to think about abandoning journalism completely.
The final blow comes at a meeting in which the Party heads of the editorial board are to be re-elected. As always, it’s been decided in advance. When the chair of the meeting asks if anyone wants to suggest a candidate, the ones who speak up are the ones who have been told to. All of a sudden Anne has the idea of suggesting a colleague that she values very highly. Everyone’s flabbergasted, because nothing like that has ever happened before. The chairman doesn’t know if he’s even allowed to accept the proposal, so a vote is held. Thirteen colleagues spontaneously decide to support Anne’s suggestion. But most are opposed, and everything goes exactly as planned. As far as Anne is concerned, that’s that. But a month later, at the next Party meeting, a man from the Central Committee is there, and all the people who voted for Anne’s suggestion have to stand up one by one and castigate themselves for their lack of Party discipline. They accuse themselves, demanding punishment for their own unworthy behaviour. Worst of all is the performance of the colleague that Anne suggested as a candidate. He subjects himself to the most severe self-criticism, begs for forgiveness, promises never again to try to be cleverer than the Party. At the end of the meeting fourteen broken men leave the room with their eyes lowered and their shirts drenched in sweat.
Only later Anne finds out that immediately after the Party leadership election an investigating commission in the Central Committee questioned all the dissenters for hours on end. They’re talking about a coup, an attack on
the Party. But why was she not questioned? Why was she alone spared? A colleague familiar with such matters later explains to her that this tactic is a well-known way of isolating provocateurs. If everybody is punished but the provocateur himself, the others will never want to have anything to do with the person who made life so difficult for them. And from that day onwards none of the people punished ever speak to her again. It’s as if she’s ceased to exist.
19
Heckling
WOLF EXPERIENCES ALL OF THIS from a distance. When Anne talks about her problems in the kitchen in the evening, he sits there with a questioning expression and can’t understand how she puts up with it all. These lies, this anxiety, this strange world that he only knows from her stories. He doesn’t understand why she keeps working for that newspaper, in that factory of madness. He tries to shake her awake, to encourage her to risk doing something else. But it doesn’t work, he can’t get through to her. It’s as if there were a wall between them, a border that they can’t cross. Today Anne says that that pressure from Wolf made everything even harder. She defended things to him that she had long since stopped believing herself. It was about the principle. She didn’t want to swap her father’s opinion for her husband’s. She wanted to make her own decisions about what she had to do. Wolf says, “The GDR was always there in bed with us.”
In our house in Karlshorst, Wolf has set up a studio for himself in the attic. He sits there at his desk, drawing bedtime stories for children which will be shown on GDR television. They’re about funny frogs, blonde princesses and bears that stand on their heads. He illustrates books of Russian fairy tales, makes posters for Karl May western films and colourful postcards covered with nutcrackers and Santa Clauses.
I often went up to see him after school. Nothing ever changed in Wolf’s studio. It smelt of glue, paint and coffee. In winter Wolf wore a lambskin waistcoat, in the summer a blue-and-white-striped removal man’s shirt that he bought in a professional clothing shop. Sometimes I did my homework up there. It calmed me down to be with him, to hear the scratch of the steel nib on the watercolour card, and the music coming faintly out of the radio. I think he was contended in those days. Whatever was happening outside, here, in the attic, everything was just as he wanted it to be.
In the early Eighties Wolf starts his own artistic projects. It gets started with postcards that he prints himself and sends to friends. The cards are commentaries on the world around him. They are heckles, signs of life in grey and black. A card from 1983 shows a tower of building blocks. A noose is wrapped around one of the legs of the tower. The tower clock stands at just before twelve. On another card a man is crashing his head against a wall until his skull breaks. “Something to think about,” is the caption. His New Year card for 1985 shows a GDR sleeping car. “Have a good trip,” Wolf writes. On the facade of a new-build block of flats a window is circled. “House arrest” is the title.
It’s a long way from funny nutcrackers to cracked skulls. From the colourful cards to the grey ones. They’ve all been made at around the same time. They belong together.
Wolf has his first exhibition in a bookshop in Karlshorst. In the middle of the room a figure hangs, turning on its own axis. On one wall there are silhouettes of travellers approaching a door that has no handle on the inside. The cross of a window frame casts a shadow, and black crows flap in the darkness. Behind a grating stands a Stasi man with a pointed hat. “Leo has a very gloomy view of the present,” it says in the Stasi report on the exhibition. In a gallery in Pankow Wolf stages a “non-conversation” between two cardboard figures. A young man slouches casually in a chair, legs crossed, opposite him his pinched father with his legs drawn up. The old man with the hat and the rectangular glasses could be his own father, or he could equally be Gerhard.
Wolf’s first exhibition in Karlshorst, 1986
But eventually these hidden signs aren’t enough for Wolf. He wants to do something, change something. In May 1986 there are elections for the section directors in the Artists’ Association. There is a big meeting in the House of Soviet Culture on Friedrichstrasse. On that day Wolf agrees with a few other commercial designers to put up a list of candidates of their own. Just as the steering committee is about to announce the official election proposal, he gets on stage, heart thumping, and makes his own counter-proposal. Wolf tells the assembled colleagues that it’s time for them to take control of democracy themselves. He talks about change, of the necessity to start something new with new people. Everyone is so surprised that the suggestion is passed unanimously. And Wolf is as surprised as everybody else that it’s all so easy. “You just had to blow, and over everything went, that was a nice experience,” he says.
But it isn’t without its dangers. Anyone who wants to vote also has to join in with this world of civil servants, and soon the question arises of who’s actually changing whom. Wolf is commissioned to design the stage sets for Berlin’s 750th anniversary celebrations. This anniversary isn’t just any old event. It’s one of the highlights in the battle between the systems, because there’s a party in West Berlin as well. It’s important for the GDR government to present its part of Berlin as a worthy capital of the East German state. And Wolf has become a kind of designer-in-chief of the East Berlin shop window. He says he hasn’t really thought much about it. And nobody had talked him into it either. He could do what he liked. He’s kept his designs from those days. The stage sets look wild and modern. Red, white and black shapes intersect, flash like thunderbolts over the canvases or link to form long waves. This powerful performance is the opposite of the gloomy world of the GDR that Wolf showed in his exhibitions. Somewhere in between is the country where he lives.
And Wolf hasn’t got an entirely free hand either. A poster that he designs for the Party is not printed. The poster shows a pair of sunglasses in which two halves of the city of Berlin are reflected. That’s taking things too far for the comrades. Two weeks after the celebrations Wolf is to be awarded the Berlin Prize by the mayor for his work. But Wolf doesn’t go to the ceremony. He senses that he’s crossed a line, that he’s got too close to the powerful men. It’s a delicate business, walking the tightrope between acceptance and refusal. “The principle of seduction was always there,” says Wolf. “The question constantly arose of how far you can go, how much conformity you can bear without it hurting.”
20
Companions
IN MAY 1978 ANNE HAS HAD ENOUGH. She leaves the newspaper office. She applies for a doctorate at the Humboldt University. Historical research strikes her as a protected area. Today she says it was an escape from reality. The subject of her thesis is the history of the Spanish trade-union movement. She didn’t choose the subject herself, but it strikes her as innocuous enough. She doesn’t want to have any more aggravation. Anne is working in the library of the Institute for Marxism–Leninism. At some point she orders a book which the librarian tells her can only be borrowed with a special permit. Anne learns that there’s a whole department in the library containing works banned in the GDR. Anne’s tutor procures the permit, and one winter afternoon in 1979 Anne is allowed for the first time to enter the “poison room” in which the dangerous books are catalogued. To her surprise the banned books aren’t by bourgeois historians, but all by left-wing dissenters. The whole of Trotskyite literature is collected here, along with the works of theorists of the labour movement decried by the Party as “Eurocommunists”, “appeasers” and “revisionists”. These are the books the Party is most afraid of, the ones to which they are most vehemently opposed. This secret library is a kind of traitors’ crypt.
Anyone with access to the “poison room” can order whatever they like. No one checks whether the borrowed books are connected with the academic project on which the person ordering the book is working. Anne orders whatever she can get her hands on. Books by renegades, by apostates she had only known by name, are suddenly on the table in front of her. And because work on her doctorate is progressing far too quickly anyway,
or so her colleagues think, she uses the time to fill herself up with forbidden knowledge. She reads Trotsky, Bukharin and Solzhenitsyn. A whole cosmos of ideas and thoughts opens itself up to her. She finds questions that she’s often asked herself, and answers that leave her speechless because they’re so different to the ones she’s grown up with. She understands that the certainties and dogmas she’s been dealing with until then are only one possible interpretation of Marxism–Leninism. That there is an unlimited number of possible ways of thinking about Socialism. The proscribed theorists who often had to pay with their lives for their thoughts strike her as much more honest and courageous than the ideologists of “really existing Socialism”. For them, Socialism is not the dictatorship of a party but the dreamlike vision of a new society in which freedom and Socialism are not a contradiction. With every book she reads, she becomes increasingly convinced that the GDR is actually preventing Socialism, instead betraying and perverting it. For Anne this is at once a relief and a burden because she knows that she believes in the right cause, but unfortunately lives in the wrong country.