by Anna Funder
By the 1980s most people in East Germany watched western television, especially the news bulletins. No-one watched the GDR news, despite the fact that it screened daily on both state-run television stations, in a long and a short version. Julia smiles. ‘At that school every night without fail we were sat down and made to watch “Aktuelle Kamera” in the long version. It was hell.’
The news program was so long because each time Erich Honecker was mentioned, he was announced with every single one of his titular functions. Julia sits up straight with her hands on the table and puts on a media voice. In the flickering light and with her fly-away hair she is a newsreader from outer space, coming through static: ‘Comrade Erich Honecker, Secretary-General of the Socialist Unity Party of the German Democratic Republic, First Secretary of the Central Committee, Chairman of the State Council and of the National Defence Council, leader of the Fighting Groups bladibla—’
We laugh and she pushes back onto two legs of the chair. She is a relaxed and confident mimic. ‘And then the actual news item that came after all that would be null!’ She straightens up again. ‘—today visited the steelworks such and such and spoke with the workers about the 1984 Plan targets which they have over-over-over-achieved by so and so per cent’ or, ‘today opened the umpteenth apartment built in the new district of Marzahn’ or, ‘congratulated the collective farm of Hicksville this morning for their extraordinary harvest results, an increase of so-and-so-many-fold on previous years.’
We are laughing and laughing under the strobing light. ‘And the thing about it was,’ she slaps the table with her fine white hand, ‘it never told us anything that happened in the world!’ She shakes her head at the wordiness of no-news.
Worse though than the no-news, was the anti-news. The students also had to watch ‘Der Schwarze Kanal’ (The Black Channel), with Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler. I have heard about this man, the human antidote to the pernicious influence of western television. ‘At home,’ Julia says, ‘everyone called him “Karl-Eduard von Schni—” because that was how long it took before one of us could jump up and change the channel.’
Von Schnitzler’s job was to show extracts from western television broadcast into the GDR—anything from news items to game shows to ‘Dallas’—and rip it to shreds. ‘That man radiated so much nastiness he simply wasn’t credible. You’d come away feeling sullied, as if you’d spent half an hour atrociously badmouthing someone.’ Julia crosses her arms. ‘I mean you might have your doubts about the west—I sure did—but we also felt that our own country was feeding us lies and that our futures depended on seeming to agree with it all.’
One day in 1984 the headmaster made an appointment to see Julia’s parents at home.
‘We should have guessed something at that point. That was unheard of.’ The three of them sat for two hours with coffee and cake, quite formal. He had come to convince Irene and Dieter to influence Julia to break it off with the Italian boyfriend. People assumed, if they didn’t know Julia, that he was her ticket out. The state was using every avenue it could to stop that from happening.
Julia’s mother told the headmaster, ‘Look, the girl is seventeen, she’s just about an adult, and if she’s decided that this is the man for her life, so be it.’ But Irene also said, ‘To tell the truth, we’re not all that happy about it either. He’s a lot older than she is, and we don’t want our daughter to leave. But we will not stand in her way.’
The headmaster didn’t get very far. ‘He left dissatisfied,’ Julia says. ‘He was actually a nice man. It could be that he had been warned about the consequences for me, and was trying his best to help.’
In 1985 Julia matriculated with straight As. She went to Leipzig to sit the entrance exam for the university’s translating and interpreting course. She failed. ‘The written language exam was ridiculously easy and short. But then there was the political exam—’
‘What do you mean, “political exam”? You wanted to do language training!’ The light tube on the ceiling is still spluttering and hissing and I am bilious and annoyed. In this light, Julia’s face is marble and her lips blue-rimmed.
‘Well, we were asked about our political knowledge. It was intended that we’d work at the highest levels of government, even internationally. So I think that’s quite OK.’ Of course it is. It’s standard practice in the west too, I am just oversensitised.
I get up and find some tea-light candles in the cupboard so I can kill the fluorescent. I put the candles, thimbles of light around the kitchen—on the sink, on the table, and on the windowsill behind Julia.
‘I don’t know with any certainty that it was organised by them that I fail,’ Julia says. ‘There were an awful lot of applicants, and I have to admit that I did pretty crap in that exam.’ She says she didn’t know things, ‘things that were not just faux pas, but really serious mistakes.’ She starts to laugh again.
She couldn’t name, for instance, the political parties in the GDR. There were political parties other than the ruling Socialist Unity Party but they were parties in name only and the names were remarkably similar to those of the political parties that existed for real in West Germany: the Christian Democrats, the Liberals and so on. Julia says, ‘I was terrified of getting them wrong. If I put a name that was actually a western party, I might well have failed.’ She gives the loose table lino a flick. Julia was being asked to repeat her knowledge of socialist catechism, her belief in things that were hard to remember, because they were not real.
After the results were announced a former student of Dieter’s took him aside. The man’s wife and father-in-law were on the university board of examiners. ‘Between you and me,’ he said to Dieter, ‘there’s no point Julia trying again next year. I would strongly suggest to you she do something else. Get a job.’
‘Maybe,’ Julia says, ‘like the headmaster, he was trying to do me a favour. Save me the trouble of reapplying.’ She has started to look away from me, focusing her attention towards the dark corner of the room. ‘But the strange thing was,’ she says slowly, ‘that afterwards I simply couldn’t get a job. Any kind of job at all…’ She fiddles with the scarf wrung around her neck. ‘That was when it got hard for me.’
Julia thought she might work as a receptionist in a large hotel. That way, she could practise her languages. She applied to Berlin, to Leipzig, to Dresden. She was a top student who spoke English, Russian, French and a smattering of Hungarian. She always got an interview. She would present in her neat clothes, and accept the compliments of management. The hoteliers were invariably excited and impressed. They would send her away for a routine medical, shake her hand warmly, and say they looked forward to seeing her soon.
Sometimes a letter would come in the mail a week later: ‘We regret to inform you that the position has been filled. Thank you for your interest…’ Other times she would call up herself to be told that she had just missed out. Sometimes she didn’t hear at all. In the end, she stopped ringing to be told the same, uncomfortable excuses. She tried to find a position as a waitress, also without success. Julia assumes now that every hotel and every restaurant was required to check the names of all new employees with the Stasi.
Her options were running out. She decided to enrol in a night course for a certificate as a Stadtbilderklärerin (‘a Town Plan Explainer’).
‘A what?’ I have never heard this word. Julia says that it means a ‘tour group leader’, but that in the GDR the word ‘leader’ (Führer) was forbidden after Hitler, der Führer. Because ‘führen’ also means ‘to drive’, this meant there were no traindrivers (a Lokkapitän or ‘Locomotive Captain’ instead) and no drivers’ licences (but a Fahrerlaubnis or ‘Permission to drive’). Being a Town Plan Explainer was an occasional way to earn pocket-money. It was not a living.
Julia went to the Employment Office, took a number and stood in an interminable line. She was among people who might have had similar experiences, both explicable and not, to her own. She turned to the man behind her and asked, �
�So how long have you been unemployed?’
Before he could answer an official, a square-built woman in uniform, stepped out from behind a column.
‘Miss, you are not unemployed,’ she barked.
‘Of course I’m unemployed,’ Julia said. ‘Why else would I be here?’
‘This is the Employment Office, not the Unemployment Office. You are not unemployed; you are seeking work.’
Julia wasn’t daunted. ‘I’m seeking work,’ she said, ‘because I am unemployed.’
The woman started to shout so loudly the people in the queue hunched their shoulders. ‘I said, you are not unemployed! You are seeking work!’ and then, almost hysterically, ‘There is no unemployment in the German Democratic Republic!’
In my mind I tote up further GDR fictions: that der Führer was excised not only from their history but also from their language; that the news was real on television; and, contrary to Julia’s lived experience, that there was no unemployment. By no fault of her own, Julia Behrend had fallen into the gap between the GDR’s fiction and its reality. She no longer conformed to the fiction. Loyal and talented as she was, she was now being edged out of the reality.
Julia could either think she had failed at everything she had tried, or that they were out to get her. Or, she could try not to think at all. ‘It is true to say that from then on I sort of withdrew from things.’ She slept later and later each day. ‘I think I was depressed.’ She enrolled in another night-school course, this time in Spanish, but it seemed to her more and more like learning secret codes used outside your cave, spoken in places you would never see. After class she went, ‘nearly every night’ to the local nightclub. ‘My parents just sort of let me go. There wasn’t much else they could do. I think they felt sorry for me.’
It was at this time her younger sister Katrin noticed it. The car was white. She watched it three days in a row outside the house before she said anything. Julia hadn’t seen it. ‘As I said’—she looks at me—‘I knew that car was there for me.’
She knew, too, that getting on with her life would mean leaving it behind. She was going to have to marry the Italian boyfriend and get out. The idea frightened her. ‘That was part of my attraction for him—that I would be utterly dependent on him, in his home and his country and his language. At his mercy.’
She went to meet him for a holiday in Hungary. At the airport she was taken aside and her luggage searched. They unscrewed the hairdryer and emptied her boxes of tampons over the examination bench. In Hungary she told him it was over. ‘He was so controlling, so jealous.’ Now Julia had withdrawn from him, withdrawn into her home, and withdrawn from hope. This was more than internal emigration. It was exile.
11
Major N.
Then a card came in the letterbox. ‘It seemed normal enough—a standard printed card as if I had to report to the police to have my ID renewed. It had spaces in it for them to handwrite my name, and the date and time of the appointment.’
She’s not looking at me. She’s hardly talking to me. Her eyes move around the room although there’s not much to see: behind me the hot-water cistern over the sink with its little blue flame, to my left the door to the hall. Candlelight catches her face, etches cheekbone and chin. She is remembering as I watch, summoning presences more real than mine.
‘There are some things—’ she stops. ‘I don’t think I’ll be able to remember this. I haven’t remembered this.’
I stick to small facts. ‘Did you know what the card was about?’
‘I thought I had overstayed my visa in Hungary. Usually they would just restamp your ID at the border and let you back in. I started preparing excuses in my mind. At the same time I said to myself: look, it can’t be that bad! What can they do to me? I mean I wasn’t afraid they’d collect me in the night and lock me up and torture me.’
Julia analysed the situation from every angle. In its later stages the regime stopped, for the most part, direct action (arrest, incarceration, torture) against its people. It opted instead for other ways of silencing them, methods that Amnesty would find harder to chronicle. ‘The typical thing that could happen to you in my day in the GDR—that your career was broken before it was begun—that had already happened to me! And now that I didn’t even have the Italian boyfriend any more—what else could they want?’
The police station had a vast waiting hall. People stood silently in two long queues curled around the room, each one joined to a counter. The lines hardly moved. ‘I took a number but then I realised I didn’t know which queue was the right one,’ she says. ‘So I went up to the policewoman who was overseeing things. She looked at my card and said straight away: “Ah Miss Behrend. You don’t need to queue at all. You are to go directly to Room 118.”’
Julia laughs at herself. ‘I was pleased at first! I thought I had got out of standing in line.’
Then she noticed that all the people in the queues were going into one of two rooms behind the counters, but neither of those was Room 118. ‘I had to go by myself up several flights of stairs and down a long corridor, left around a corner and then left again. There were no other people around. I saw no-one enter or leave any of the rooms I passed. Room 118 was way over on the other side of the building.’
She knocked.
‘Come in.’
There was a man alone behind a desk. The first thing she noticed was that he wore a western suit and a good tie. He stood up straight away, a small nod, his feet clicking together.
‘Miss Behrend, I am N., Major,’ he smiled and extended his hand. And then, clear as a bell, ‘Ministry of State Security.’
She felt fear, she says, ‘like a worm in my belly’.
The man was not yet forty, with a wide face, and receding hair. He wore small round eyeglasses. He had a glowing suntan. He was friendly—in fact for GDR standards, exaggeratedly polite. ‘Please,’ he said, ‘do sit down.’ They sat. She thought it might still, perhaps, be about the overstayed visa.
But N. began, ‘Such an attractive, intelligent young woman as yourself, Miss Behrend, perhaps you could explain to me why it is,’ he smiled, ‘that you are not working?’
This was it. Up until this moment it could all have been a product of her imagination: the boarding school, the headmaster’s visit, the constant street searches, the failed exam, the ‘friend’s’ warning, the cruising Lada, the extraordinary unemployment.
She was in shock. She spoke slowly.
‘You must know why I have no job,’ she said.
His voice was soft. He did not stop smiling. ‘How would I know that, Miss Behrend?’
Her mind flew. She could see where this was going: she was going to be kicked out of the country. ‘I thought it was my last chance to stay home,’ she says. So she told him, straight out, ‘Look, please, I don’t want—I don’t want to go to the west. But I think you people are forcing me out.’ She realised she was imploring him. ‘I must work somewhere. I am, after all, unemployed.’
‘But Miss Behrend,’ he said, ‘how can that be?’ He laced his fingers together on the desk. ‘There is no unemployment in the German Democratic Republic.’
She could not answer.
He reached across his desk to a pile of papers and pulled them to him. ‘First, I have some questions,’ he said, ‘about these letters.’
Julia looked at his hand and saw, under it, her own handwriting. She was confused. She looked closer.
They were copies of her letters to the Italian boyfriend.
Julia had imagined all along that her mail might be being read. Sometimes letters she received from overseas had been brutally torn and taped back together with a sticker: ‘Damaged in Transit.’ ‘It was ridiculous really,’ she says. But, like all the other things, she had never thought about it for long.
Major N. laid the first letter flat on the desk and smoothed it out with both hands. He cleared his throat. To Julia’s horror, he started to read it aloud.
I think of the shame I would feel sitting o
pposite Major So-and-So in his office with these intimate things in his fingers. Shame at hearing your words turn into the universal banalities of love in his mouth.
Julia and her boyfriend wrote to one another in English. Major N. had underlined in each letter the words he had not been able to find in his German-English dictionary.
‘He sat there and he—’ Julia stops and takes a sip of tea. It must be cold by now. It goes down the wrong way. She coughs and coughs, but puts her hand out to stop me helping, ‘—and he asked me,’ she says in a choked voice, ‘what they meant.’
The hairs on my forearms stand up. I have stopped looking at Julia now because in this dimness she ceased addressing her words to me some time ago. I am humbled for reasons I cannot at this moment unravel. I am outraged for her, and vaguely guilty about my relative luck in life.
Major N. took his time perfecting his translation. The words that were not in the dictionary were, mostly, the words of their private lovers’ language. He asked her, ‘what is the meaning of this?’ and again, ‘would you mind, please, explaining this term?’ One long forefinger on her handwriting, or her lovers’. ‘What about this?’ he asked, touching the word cocoriza in a letter from her boyfriend.
‘Cocoriza,’ Julia told him, ‘is the Hungarian word for corn.’
‘What does this mean then, Miss Behrend, when your friend writes, “I want my little cocoriza”?’
She had to explain. On their holidays her hair had lightened to the colour of corn. Cocoriza was his pet name for her.
‘Thank you, Miss Behrend.’ Then, in his western suit, with his foreign manners and his exaggerated courtesy, Major N. proceeded through her relationship, one letter at a time.
‘It took quite a while,’ Julia says in a faraway voice. Her eyes are fixed in the middle distance. Major N. was thorough. There was a pile of her letters to the Italian. There was a pile of his letters back to her. This man knew everything. He could see when she had had doubts, he could see by what sweet-talking she had let herself be placated. He could see the Italian boyfriend’s longing laid bare, and his invention, for his own pleasure, of his faraway girl.