by Anna Funder
Koch is talking, dipping into his document box, talking. Then he leans forward as if to tell me a weighty piece of information. I smell his aftershave. ‘On 1 September 1945,’ he says, ‘the Soviet command issued Heinz with a Permission to Ride a Bicycle.’
‘Why did people need a permit to ride a bike?’ I ask.
‘Because they could bring messages! Pass on news!’ Koch cries. ‘There was no other transport. People on bikes could evade checkpoints, they could have secret meetings.’ Clearly the atmosphere of paranoid control had set in early under the Russians. All the same, I have started to worry about the level of detail we are sinking into. I steal a look towards his bottomless box, wondering whether we are descending into the morass for the sake of it, or whether there was some point to the bicycle tale. Then, as he turns away from me to put the document back in his box, he says, ‘But beforehand, you realise, they had to vet his record to check that he wasn’t an evil person.’
Was this the point? Was Koch using the available evidence—in this case a bicycle permit—to construct or confirm a story of his father’s innocence during the war? There’s clearly a portion of the past here that cannot be pinned down with facts, or documents. All that exists is permission to ride a bike.
Immediately after the war ended the Allies divided up their conquered enemy. The English, Americans and French took over the western parts of Germany and the Russians took the eastern states of Thuringia, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, Mecklenburg-West Pomerania and Brandenburg. Berlin was divided among the victors in the same way: its western suburbs to the English, French and Americans, its eastern ones to the USSR. But, because the city lay deep in the eastern zone, its western suburbs became an odd island of democratic administration and market economy in a Communist landscape.
In their zones, the western powers set about catching prominent Nazis and establishing democratic systems of governance: a federated system of states, the division of political, administrative and judicial power, and guarantees of private property. In 1948 they handed over these institutions to the newly created Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) together with massive injections of funds from the Americans’ Marshall Plan.
The Russians ran the eastern parts of Germany directly until the German Democratic Republic was established as a satellite state of the USSR in 1949. Production was nationalised, factories and property turned over to the state, health care, rent and food were subsidised. One-party rule was established with an all-powerful secret service to back it up. And the Russians, having refused the offer of American capital, plundered East German production for themselves.
They stripped factories of plant and equipment which they sent back to the USSR. At the same time, they required a rhetoric of ‘Communist brotherhood’ from the East Germans whom they had ‘liberated’ from fascism. Whatever their personal histories and private allegiances, the people living in this zone had to switch from being (rhetorically, at the very least) Nazis one day to being Communists and brothers with their former enemies the next.
And almost overnight the Germans in the eastern states were made, or made themselves, innocent of Nazism. It seemed as if they actually believed that Nazis had come from and returned to the western parts of Germany, and were somehow separate from them—which was in no way true. History was so quickly remade, and so successfully, that it can truly be said that the easterners did not feel then, and do not feel now, that they were the same Germans as those responsible for Hitler’s regime. This sleight-of-history must rank as one of the most extraordinary innocence manoeuvres of the century.
In Dresden once, on a blue bridge over the river Elbe, I saw a plaque commemorating the liberation of the East Germans from their Nazi oppressors by their brothers the Russians. I looked at it for a long time, a small thing dulled by grime from the air. I wondered whether it had been put there immediately after the Russians came into a vanquished Germany, or whether a certain time had been allowed to elapse before things could begin to be rewritten.
To start a new country, with new values and newly minted socialist citizens, it is necessary to begin at the beginning: with children. Schoolteachers in the eastern regions were immediately dismissed because their job had been to educate children in the values of the Nazi regime. Socialist teachers had to be created. The authorities established six-month training schemes for ‘People’s Teachers’, who then went into the schools. By February 1946 Heinz Koch, who hadn’t finished school himself, was a fully qualified teacher in the village of Lindau, thirty kilometres from Dessau.
In October of that year, the first ‘free democratic’ elections were held in East Germany. In fact, throughout the life of East Germany, elections were regularly held. On the ballot paper there were representatives of all the major parties: mirror-image replicas of the parties that existed in West Germany. There were centre-right Christian Democrats (CDU), Liberal Democrats (later the FDP), and Communists (SED). Election after election for forty years, the results would be broadcast on television: and always, overwhelmingly, the Communists were voted in. The majorities stretched credibility: 98.1 per cent; 95.4 per cent; 97.6 per cent.
None of this, though, was evident in 1946. At that time, it was possible, just possible, that somehow a socialist state would emerge which lived up to the ‘democratic’ of its name. They’d all been through hell on earth; didn’t they deserve heaven? People’s dreams had been honed by suffering, whittled into sharp and definite shapes.
Heinz Koch founded the Lindau branch of the Liberal Democrats and stood for election as mayor. September there is a month of long sunsets, late light falling through the leaves, still on the trees. Even in this land of rubble and dust there was room for hope. This was, after all, an election: there were parties, there were candidates, there were local campaigns and there were polling stations.
And there was a ballot paper on which the Communist Party candidate’s name was top of the list. It might have been a coincidence, except that next to this candidate’s name, ‘Paul Enke’, was written not ‘SED Candidate’, but, already, ‘Mayor’.
Nevertheless, when the vote came in, it was clear Heinz Koch had won the election. Lindau was a tiny place: the Liberal Democrats got 363 votes, the SED 289 and the CDU 131. People no longer wanted right or left—they wanted middle-of-the-road. ‘But Enke the Communist,’ Koch says, ‘was chairman of the Electoral Commission.’ Enke immediately called a meeting in the town hall, ‘for the evaluation of the vote’.
Koch tells me that the hall was full of women, some with children. There were several old men, but there were scarcely any young or middle-aged ones. Enke welcomed them, and then addressed the room: ‘So where are all your men?’
There was a silence, shuffling.
‘Fallen in war,’ came one answer.
‘Missing in action,’ said another voice.
One woman said quietly, ‘I don’t know.’
Then a voice came from the back of the hall. ‘My husband is a prisoner of war in Russia.’
Enke seized his moment. ‘How many of your men are in POW camps?’ he asked. The hands started to go up, at first slowly, but then there were many. ‘So how long did your husband serve in the forces?’ Enke asked a woman sitting near the front.
‘One year,’ she said. The answers started to come from all over the room: five years, three years, seven years.
‘And for that they were taken prisoners of war?’
‘That’s the way it happened,’ said the women.
‘Well, I ask you,’ said Enke, ‘do you think it right that your men, who served three years, five years, seven years in the armed forces, are in prison, when Master Sergeant Koch on my right here, who served that fascist imperialist army for sixteen years, gets off scot-free? Not one single day’s punishment?’
‘So in this way,’ Koch says, ‘my father was sentenced to seven years in a prisoner-of-war camp.’
‘What? Just like that?’ I ask.
Koch is agitated now. ‘The Russians
came and took him into custody. That was just the way it worked. And the people said that it’s right that it should be so. If my husband is sitting it out over there, then so should he.’
Between 1945 and 1950 the Russian secret police imprisoned POWs, Nazis, and others like infantryman Heinz Koch who might have got in their way. They re-used the Nazi concentration camps of Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald and other places, and when they were full they built new prisons, or sent people to Russia. It is estimated that some 43,000 of these people died from illness, starvation or violence after the war. In Lindau, the people helped the victors punish their fellows and called it fair.
After nearly a month in custody, on 22 October 1946, Enke came to visit his prisoner. Heinz thought his time was up. Enke started in on an unusual tack.
‘It’s your wife’s birthday today, I gather,’ he said.
‘Yes.’
‘Wouldn’t it be a nice birthday surprise for her if you came home? What would you say to that?’
Heinz was confused. He had been steeling himself for transportation. ‘Is that…possible?’ he asked.
‘Sure it is. I am mayor, after all, and what I say goes.’
There was a pause, then it became clear. ‘What are the conditions?’ Heinz asked.
‘Relax, comrade, relax. It’s simple, really. All you need to do is quit the Liberal Democrats and come over to us. Become a member of the Socialist Unity Party. Just as soon as that happens I can take you home. In fact, I could take you home today.’
Koch is looking at me closely. ‘What would you do?’ he asks. ‘How should my father decide?’
‘For the wife and life, of course,’ I say.
Koch is pleased, smiling and nodding and waving the mike. ‘So,’ he says, ‘on his wife’s birthday Heinz changed parties and went home.’
In this way the Lindau Communist Party annihilated its opposition and at the same time installed one of their own as the local primary school teacher, under threat of deportation to a POW camp. They had him where they could keep an eye on him: there was only one school, and the children of all the Party members were there.
Later that same year Hagen started school. Heinz taught all his pupils the doctrine of Communism, including his little boy. He found himself educating good socialist citizens for a regime that had tried to ruin his family, and his life.
In late 1946 the Communists founded the Pioniere, a youth organisation designed to instil in young children a love of Marx and country. For the older ones the Free German Youth was established. The scheme mirrored exactly the Nazis’ Pimpfe for small children and the Hitler Youth for adolescents. People joked that the Free German Youth and the Hitler Youth were so similar that only the colour of the neckerchiefs distinguished them. In both, there were meetings, torches, oaths of allegiance and a confirmation ceremony for thirteen-year-olds, complete with candles and prayer-like incantations.
All small children were required to join the Pioniere. But this came too soon for the villagers of Lindau. They baulked at seeing their children once more in line and marching and refused to put them in uniform again for the powers that be. Heinz Koch was arrested and taken into custody.
Enke said, ‘Why should the other children join up if the teacher’s own son does not?’ It was necessary for Heinz Koch to set an example through his son. He was released and given one more chance to show why he should not be deported.
Koch turns to his box and pulls out a small blue scarf. ‘So, as a result, on 13 December 1946 I was the first child to wear this kerchief around my neck.’
This is how Hagen Koch became a Musterknabe, a poster boy for the new regime. My gaze has wandered to the wall behind him. Next to the gold plate hangs a girly calendar displaying a naked woman’s torso in a forest. The photographer has cut off her head and her legs below the knee. The caption reads, ‘Wilderness Area’.
Hagen Koch turns back to his box, his collection of strange talismans from a bygone world. ‘Let me show you this beetle,’ he says, pulling out a poster. He unrolls it: ‘STOP THE AMERICAN BEETLE!’ is written in large capitals across the top. Below there’s a drawing of a child holding a magnifying glass to the ground. Under it is a beetle with a human face and big human teeth. The beetle wears a jacket in the colours of the American flag, and its face is the face of President Truman. ‘These were all over our school,’ he says, and explains why.
In 1948 the Russians decided they had had enough of the small island of capitalist imperialism that was West Berlin. It seethed with the spies of enemy countries. It was a toehold for the Allies on socialist soil. In a modern siege, Stalin’s forces cut off the land supply routes through East Germany to West Berlin. On the night of 24 June 1948, they switched off the eastern power plant that supplied the city. The West Berliners were to be starved out in the dark.
But the Allies would not give up the two million West Berliners. For almost a year, from June 1948 to October 1949, they kept the city alive by plane. In that time American and British planes made some 277,728 flights through Soviet airspace to drop bundles of food, clothing, cigarettes, medicine, fuel and equipment, including components for a new power station, to the people of West Berlin.
In the west, the aircraft came to be known as the ‘Rosinenbomber’, or ‘raisin bombers’, because they brought food. But in the east, Koch and his classmates were told the enemy planes sprayed potato beetles over East German crops as they flew over, in order to spoil the harvest. ‘Lindau was virtually under the flight path—the planes flew day and night,’ Koch says. ‘This is how they gave us a picture of the enemy: in a place where people get no news from outside, they have nothing else to believe.’
‘Why was it credible that the Americans would do this?’ I ask. It seemed improbable that a nuclear superpower would be loading up planes full of live beetles on leaves and setting out across the Atlantic with them.
‘Because they had just bombed Dresden flat!’ he cried. ‘That beautiful centre of German culture! Senselessly! And they even dropped two atom bombs on Japan! They were clearly truly evil! What more proof do you need?’
Bombs, atomic weapons, and now a biblical pestilence.
‘I am telling you how propaganda works!’ he continues. ‘That is how I grew up.’
At this time, there was still rationing. Sugar was scarce and boiled sweets were a luxury. But there was an incentive scheme for the children. ‘For every beetle we collected we could redeem a penny. For a larva, a halfpenny. And for every hundred, we got ten ration cards for sugar! So we children went into the fields every spare minute we had, collecting beetles and larvae, beetles and larvae. We handed them in and we got more sweets than we could eat!’
In Koch’s mind, the sweet taste of reward is connected with foiling the American plot to spoil the potato crop and starve his people. This story—of insects and sweets and the making of an enemy—is the story of the making of a patriot.
17
Drawing the Line
‘So it was that I came on 5 April 1960 to the Ministry of State Security.’ Hagen Koch nearly swallows the words. ‘Four days later,’ he says, ‘this photo was taken.’ The photo shows a young man in his grey Stasi uniform spruced and tense behind a huge lectern. Koch was giving his maiden speech: why I want to protect and defend my homeland. He took the oath: ‘By order of the workers’ and farmers’ state, I promise if necessary to lay down my life…to protect against the enemy…obediently and everywhere…’ All the top brass were there. Mielke was there.
Afterwards, Koch stood in a loose group with his commandant. The other recruits were pretending to relax and trying to be noticed at the same time. Suddenly Koch felt all eyes on him, a hand on his shoulder. He turned around. It was Mielke.
‘What is your training, young man?’
‘Technical draftsman.’
Mielke addressed Koch’s commandant. ‘I want you to look after this one. His career. This is the kind we need.’
‘And so,’ Koch says, ‘that is how I w
as lifted out from the great grey mass.’ He was immediately made director of the Drafting Office for Cartographics and Topography. ‘I didn’t have a clue,’ he tells me. ‘My training was as a technical draftsman for machines. I knew nothing about maps.’
In the summer of 1960, shortly after joining the Stasi, Koch fell in love with a girl from Berlin. She hadn’t been in the Pioniere or the Free German Youth, and she certainly wasn’t in the Party, but she wasn’t radical either. Koch smiles and sort of half-winks. ‘I chose my wife by her outside, not her political convictions.’ I find myself looking away, and the girly calendar catches my eye. It can’t meet my gaze because its head is cut off. I look at its map of Tasmania in the forest.
The Stasi knew everything. Koch’s boss called him in and told him, ‘That girl is inappropriate. We have plans for you, and that little one, she is GDR-negative.’
For their part, her parents were horrified: he was one of them. As soon as she turned eighteen they eloped. It was 21 July 1961.
Koch turns around and flicks a hand at the calendar. ‘You noticed that did you?’ he chuckles.
‘Hmm.’
‘Do you know what it is?’
‘What do you mean?’ I ask.
‘That is the calendar for the border troops of the GDR,’ he said. ‘Do you know what is special about it?’
‘No.’
‘That calendar was printed in mid-1990. After the Wall came down. It was printed because, even at that late stage, people here could not believe that the nation would simply cease to exist. Despite all the evidence, they thought the GDR would go on as an independent country, with an army and a border guard of its own. And that border guard would need its own girly calendar.’
‘When the Wall was built in 1961 I thought it was something we had to do because they were robbing us blind,’ Koch says. ‘The GDR was compelled to protect itself from the swindlers and parasites and black marketeers of the west.’
Because of subsidisation, prices were lower in the east, but so were wages. ‘Before there was a Wall,’ he says, ‘people thought: why should I work in the east when I could earn more in the west? So they went across to them each day and offered them their labour, when we so badly needed it here to rebuild.