by Anna Funder
As it was, the judge gave her one and a half years in Stauberg, the women’s prison at Hoheneck. And at the end of the three-day trial he said to her, ‘Juvenile Accused Number 725, you realise that your activities could have started World War III.’
They were all crazy and they were locking her up.
4
Charlie
‘When I got out of prison, I was basically no longer human,’ Miriam says.
On the first day at Hoheneck Miriam was required to undress, leave the clothes she came in and take in her hands the blue and yellow striped uniform. She was led naked down a corridor, into a room with a deep tiled tub in it. Two female guards were waiting. This was the Baptism of Welcome.
It was the only time she ever thought she would die. The bath was filled with cold water. One guard held her feet and the other her hair. They pushed her head under for a long time, then dragged her up by the hair, screaming at her. They held her down again. She could do nothing, and she could not breathe. And up: ‘You piece of filth. You little upstart. You stupid traitor, you little bitch.’ And under. When she came up the insults were what she breathed. She thought they would kill her.
Miriam is upset. Her voice is stretched and I can’t look at her. Perhaps they beat something out of her she didn’t get back.
Miriam says the prisoners were brutal to each other too. She says the criminal prisoners received privileges for abusing the politicals. She says that for eighteen months she was addressed by number and never by name. She says there was a hoard-and-barter system, in fact a whole economy, in sanitary napkins. I can’t stay focused on the awfulness of it all, and my mind wanders, disobediently, to sitcoms. I think of the old TV series ‘Prisoner’, set in a women’s prison: clanging metal gates before each ad break and a kindly lesbian in the laundry, steaming away.
But Miriam has found her stride again. She tells me at Hoheneck the prisoners worked in a sweatshop making sheets. An ordinary day started at 4.30 am with an alarm. When the warden’s key rattled in the door all the prisoners stood to attention against the wall. This was roll call by number. They were counted as well. They went to breakfast, and then to the workroom, where they were counted again. ‘To make sure no-one had run off between the cell and the canteen.’ If Miriam wanted to go to the toilet, she stood to attention and called, ‘Juvenile Prisoner Number 725 requests toilet permission.’ When she got back she stood to attention again. ‘Juvenile Prisoner Number 725 requests permission to resume.’ Before going to lunch they were counted. After lunch they were marched around a yard for exercise and then counted again. The prisoners were counted and re-counted from the moment they woke to the moment they went to sleep, and, as Miriam says, chuckling, ‘You know what?—the numbers were always right. Everyone was always there.’
‘Prison left me with some strange little tics.’ She has taken all the doors off their hinges in all the apartments she has lived in since. It’s not that she has anxiety attacks about small spaces, she says, it’s just that she starts to sweat and go cold. ‘This apartment is perfect for me,’ she says, looking around the open space.
‘How about elevators?’ I ask, recalling the schlepp up the stairs.
‘Exactly,’ she replies, ‘I don’t like them much either.’
One day, years later, her husband Charlie was fooling around at home, playing the guitar. Miriam said something provocative and he stood up suddenly, lifting his arm up to take off the guitar strap. He was probably just going to say ‘That’s outrageous’, or tickle her or tackle her. But she was gone. She was already down in the courtyard of the building. She does not remember getting down the stairs—it was an automatic flight reaction. Charlie came out to coax her back up. He was distraught. She surprised them both with her tics in the first years they were together.
All of a sudden I am very tired, as though my bones have gone soft. I look up and it is dark outside. I want someone to give her a rub. I want someone to give me a rub. I want the benevolent prison governess of TV land to have existed, I want the lesbian with the heart of gold to have protected the little girl, and I think of what is still to come.
When Miriam was released, in 1970, she was seventeen and a half. Her sister took her to a lake to bathe. The lifesaver asked her out but she was unable to respond. His name was Karl-Heinz Weber, but everyone called him Charlie. When Miriam didn’t answer, he pursued her through her sister. He thought she was so odd, and so quiet. He wanted to get to the bottom of it.
‘What were you like?’ I ask her.
‘Well, you’d really need to ask him that,’ she says. ‘He was the one who brought me round again.’ Miriam crosses the room to a worn suitcase, which spills her photographs onto the floor. She finds one of Charlie. It is of a man in his twenties, with light brown hair and a neat face, looking straight at the camera. He is positioned oddly close to the left-hand edge of the photo.
‘Oh, that’s because I cut myself out of it,’ Miriam says. Then she says, ‘That was our wedding photo.’ I want to ask but I sit tight.
Miriam and Charlie moved in together. Charlie had trained as a sports teacher, studying physical education and biology. In the GDR, sport was closely linked with politics. The government screened youngsters for their potential and fed them into training institutes for the glory of the nation.
‘Did he know about the doping?’ Children at sports schools were given hormones under the guise of vitamins. In a scandal that has come to light since the Wall fell, the pills accelerated growth and strength, but turned the little girls halfway into boys.
‘Yes, he knew from two different people about that. I remember he once told friends of ours to keep their daughter out of one of those institutes. But that wasn’t why he left teaching.’
In his early twenties, Charlie and a friend holidayed up on the Baltic Sea. When a Swedish boat came near the coast, they decided to swim out to it just to see how far they could get.
‘I don’t think they wanted to board it or anything,’ she says. ‘It was a bit provocative, but it was just a game.’
The authorities brought them in on suspicion of wanting to leave the country. That was the beginning of Charlie Weber’s pursuit by the Stasi.
Charlie didn’t feel that he could represent to his students the state that was doing this to him. He left teaching and started to write. He wrote articles for the underground satirical publication Eulenspiegel, and treatments for television programs. He had jobs as a line producer on films, and some work in the theatre. He wrote ‘a small book’, Miriam says, called Gestern Wie Heute (Yesterday, Like Today), ‘about the way that one dictatorship here is the same as another’. He sent it to West Germany where it was published.
‘After we started living together—me, an ex-criminal, and he under surveillance—they would come over and search the house from time to time,’ she says. ‘When our neighbour, an old woman, saw this happening she offered to keep a trunk of our books and Charlie’s manuscripts at her place, because they’d never suspect her. We made some mistakes though. I remember one time they were here, young blokes going through all our drawers, everything on the desks, the record collection. One of them was up a ladder searching the bookshelves when he found Orwell’s Animal Farm, which, of course, was blacklisted. We held our breath as he pulled it off the shelf. I remember the cover clearly: it was the pigs, holding a red flag aloft. We watched as this young man looked at it, the pigs and the flag. Then he put it back. Afterwards we laughed! We could only think that he saw the pigs—that was bad—but that they were holding a red flag, and they seemed to be on a collective farm—he must have thought that meant it was all right!
‘I was prohibited from studying. And I couldn’t get any kind of job at all,’ Miriam says. ‘Everything I applied for, the Stasi made sure I was turned down. Employers had to check my personal file and the instruction was always “not her”. I used to take a lot of photographs. Eventually, all I could do was to send them to magazines with friends’ names on them, and my fr
iends would pass on the money they got for my work.’ She ruffles her hair. ‘In a way though, how we lived was quite good—we didn’t have to submit ourselves to the sorts of structures and authority that we couldn’t trust here. We managed.’
In 1979 Miriam’s sister and her husband tried to escape to West Germany concealed in the boot of a car. Charlie drove them to meet the courier who was to smuggle them over the border. The Stasi followed every move; the couple received prison terms, and Charlie was placed on a type of probation.
In September 1980 the West German chancellor Helmut Schmidt was scheduled to visit the GDR. At that time the Solidarity movement in Poland was a source of tension for Eastern Bloc governments, because it was a focus of hope for many under their rule. Then Schmidt’s visit was cancelled because of East German government concern that it would lead to demonstrations for democracy in front of the western television cameras.
Nevertheless, the East German authorities had prepared for the visit. They had rounded up and locked away anyone who might protest, or might in some way embarrass the government.
By this time Charlie stood under formal suspicion of the crime of ‘Attempting to Flee the Republic’. He and Miriam had put in applications to leave the GDR. Such applications were sometimes granted because the GDR, unlike any other eastern European country, could rid itself of malcontents by ditching them into West Germany, where they were automatically granted citizenship. The Stasi put all applicants under extreme scrutiny. People who applied to leave were, unsurprisingly, suspected of wanting to leave which was, other than by this long-winded and arbitrary process, a crime. An ‘application to leave’ was legal, but the authorities might, if the fancy took them, choose to see it as a statement of why you didn’t like the GDR. In that case it became a Hetzschrift (a smear) or a Schmäschrift (a libel) and therefore a criminal offence. On 26 August 1980 Charlie Weber was arrested and held in a remand cell.
At first Miriam’s only contact with him was by letter. She was permitted no visits, and he could not call. Eventually, a half-hour visit was scheduled for Tuesday 14 October. The day before, Miriam’s most recent letter to Charlie came back to her, marked in handwriting: ‘Postal Permission Terminated.’ With it there was a Stasi card in the letterbox: ‘Visit Authorisation for 14.10.1980 Withdrawn.’
On Wednesday 15 October, an ordinary policeman in his green uniform knocked on their apartment door. ‘Is this the house of Herr Weber?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you are Frau Weber?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, you need to report to the district attorney’s office and collect your husband’s things, because he is dead.’
He was gone before Miriam could find any words.
The German Democratic Republic paid lip service to the institutions of democracy. There were district attorneys, whose job it was to administer justice, and lawyers, whose job it was to represent clients, and judges, whose job it was to pass judgment. There were, at least on paper, political parties other than the ruling Socialist Unity Party. But really there was just the Party, and its instrument, the Stasi. Judges often got their instructions from the Stasi which, in turn, passed them on from the Party—right down to the outcome of judgment and the length of the sentence. The connection of the Party, the Stasi and the law went from the ground up: the Stasi, in consultation with school principals, recruited obedient students with an appropriately loyal attitude for the study of law. I once saw a list of dissertation topics from the Stasi Law School at Potsdam, which included such memorable contributions to the sum of human knowledge as ‘On the Probable Causes of the Psychological Pathology of the Desire to Commit Border Infractions’. There was no room for a person to defend themselves against the State because all the defence lawyers and all the judges were part of it.
Miriam went to Major Trost, the district attorney who was responsible for investigating Charlie’s death. Trost told her Charlie had hanged himself. Trost said he was very sorry, in fact they were all deeply, deeply shocked. He said he had been called to the cell immediately.
Miriam asked what Charlie had hanged himself with. What had he hanged himself from? ‘I know those cells,’ she tells me, ‘there are no exposed pipes. Everything is smooth inside. There are not even bars over the windows—they are too small.’
Trost said he didn’t know.
‘But you were called to the cell. How can you not know? You must have seen what a man is hanging from.’
‘No.’
Miriam shakes her head imitating his dismissiveness. ‘Well, what with, then?’ She would not give up. That day Trost told her Charlie had hanged himself with the elastic from the waistband of his trousers. Miriam didn’t believe it. She kept going back to his office, and kept asking. They were being surprisingly gentle with her. Trost’s deputy told her Charlie had hanged himself with his underwear. Another time Trost said it was a torn-up piece of bedsheet.
She confronted him. ‘Underwear or bedsheet? Underwear or bedsheet? The least you people could do is get your story straight.’
Major Trost lost his cool. He said if she didn’t leave the room he would have her arrested.
Miriam found out Charlie’s body was being held in forensics at the morgue. She went there, but no-one would let her in. She felt she was being followed.
She went to see Charlie’s lawyer Herr X, who was the Leipzig representative for Dr Wolfgang Vogel in Berlin. Vogel was the government lawyer responsible for trade in people between East and West Germany. He ran a list of names, and negotiated with the West German government the prices at which they would be, as it was called, ‘bought free’ (freigekauft). There was a scale of prices which varied, apparently according to the education of the person being bought. A tradesperson or clerical worker came more cheaply than someone with a doctorate. The exception was for clergy—a pastor cost nothing because they were often independent anti-regime thinkers, and it was worth it to the regime to be rid of them. For East Germany, trading in humans was a source of hard currency and at the same time a means of getting rid of those who would not conform.
One way of getting on to Vogel’s list, and thereby having a chance of getting out of the GDR, was to become a client of one of his regional representatives. That is why Charlie Weber had engaged X. By the time Miriam went to see him, X had had the Weber matter (now the investigation of a death in custody) for eight weeks. Miriam sat down in his office and asked him to tell her what he had found out.
When he opened his file on the desk, it contained only a single sheet of paper: the delegated authority from Vogel to take on the case. Instead of telling her anything, he asked, ‘Mrs Weber, why don’t you tell me what you know?’
Miriam was wild. For days, she says, she had experienced the kind of anger that makes you not care any more, say things you would usually put a brake on. She replied that it was his job to investigate, so he should really be finding out and telling her. If he had done nothing for Charlie while he was in prison, she said, he could at least find out how he died.
‘Do I look insane to you?’ the lawyer said, very cold. ‘Do I? You don’t truly think I am going to trot down there and ask what happened, do you? For that you had better find yourself another fool, young lady.’
Miriam is upset again. Here, across the desk, was the face of the system itself: a mockery of a lawyer, making a mockery of her.
On Tuesday 21 October 1980, a Stasi man came to the door to tell Miriam that the corpse had been released from forensics, and that the ministry would like to be of service to her with the funeral arrangements. Miriam said she could manage on her own.
‘Of course, Mrs Weber,’ the man said, ‘but do you have a particular funeral parlour in mind?’
She told him to go to hell, and found a smallish funeral establishment. The woman behind the desk was old and kind. She said, ‘You know, Mrs Weber, you would really be better off going to the Southern Cemetery, because they will organise the whole thing from start to finish, and fill in a
ll the forms on your behalf and so on. It would mean much less running around for you.’ Miriam didn’t think anything of it. She left, and went to the Southern Cemetery offices. She knocked on the door, and was told to come in.
‘You’re late—we were expecting you earlier,’ the man behind the desk said.
‘What? Who told you I was coming? I didn’t know myself I was coming here until half an hour ago.’
‘Uhh, I don’t know, don’t remember.’
First of all, he suggested cremation instead of burial.
Miriam said no.
Well, actually, they said, it was going to have to be cremation, because they had no coffins left.
Miriam bluffed: ‘I will bring you a coffin.’
The man left the room for a moment, then reappeared. ‘Today, Mrs Weber,’ he said, ‘is your lucky day. We have one last coffin left.’ Unfortunately, however, he added, it was not going to be possible to lay out the body for mourners to pay their last respects. He gave no reason.
‘If that’s the way it is,’ Miriam said, ‘I’m going to another funeral establishment and another cemetery.’
‘No, no, no, Mrs Weber, no need for that, we’ll see what we can do about a laying-out then.’
The day before the funeral Miriam and a friend took some of the wreaths she had received to the gravesite—there were too many to carry them all the next day. She noticed a fellow standing around, smoking, doing nothing much, watching.
A woman in the uniform of a cemetery official came up to her. ‘Are you with the Weber funeral?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, I just wanted to say, don’t you get too upset tomorrow if there’s no laying-out, because it may just be that there isn’t.’
Miriam got her in full view, the smoker within earshot. ‘Let me tell you now, if there is no laying-out, there will be no funeral. I will call the whole thing off with everyone standing around here—I will make the kind of ruckus you have never seen. DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME?’