by Anna Funder
‘And then at the checkpoints on their way home they’d change their west marks for eastern ones at a rate of five to one! Can you imagine?’ He says this as if rates of exchange were some kind of money voodoo. ‘They’d come back here able to buy up everything of ours. Not only that, but they’d buy up for friends in the west as well—in the mornings we used to see these people on their way to work with rucksacks full of our bread, our butter, our milk, eggs and meat. Something had to be done to stop people fleeing through this mousehole in the GDR.’
As well as leaving to work in the western sector each day, hundreds and later thousands of refugees started leaving the eastern sector for good. By 1961 about 2000 people were leaving the east each day through West Berlin.
Koch says his thinking was orthodox for the time. ‘These people were shirking the hard work that had to be done here in order to build a better future for themselves—they wanted to enjoy their lives right here, right now.’ It was as if that were a moral failure, a religious falling off the branch—who are these people who will reap where they have not sown?
The GDR was haemorrhaging. ‘And it wasn’t just the ordinary workers who were leaving! It was the doctors, the engineers, the educated people. The GDR had paid for their education and then they allowed themselves to be seduced by the lure of the west.’
So, according to Koch, Ulbricht, the head of state, decided he needed to build an ‘anti-fascist protective measure’. I have always been fond of this term which has something of the prophylactic about it, protecting easterners from the western disease of shallow materialism. It obeys all the logic of locking up free people to keep them safe from criminals.
On the night of Sunday 12 August 1961 the East German army rolled out barbed wire along the streets bordering the eastern sector, and stationed sentries at regular intervals. At daylight people woke to find themselves cut off from relatives, from work, from school. Some made a dash through the wire. Others who lived in apartments overlooking the borderline started to jump from the windows into blankets held out by westerners on the footpath below. Then the troops made residents brick up their own windows. They started with the lower floors, forcing people to jump from higher and higher windows.
Koch was called to the garrison on 13 August, the day the Wall went up. It was a state of emergency and they were to stay on alert. ‘Two days later, I was called in to the commandant. He looked at my boots and pronounced them too shoddy for the mission. He ordered me to accompany a group, including Honecker, along where they had rolled out all the barbed wire, where the Wall was starting to be. And he ordered me to get new boots.
‘It was an ordinary summer day. When we got to where Checkpoint Charlie was to be, there were crowds of protesters on the western side shouting at us. I had my left leg in the east, my right leg in the west, and I drew my white line across the street. I concentrated on the line, and not on what was happening around me. I thought to myself that those in the west were enemies, looters and profiteers.’ Koch then walked with Honecker and the others the length of the border through the city, nearly fifty kilometres. I’m surprised he doesn’t have more to say about this day, which one might consider the beginning of his life’s obsession. ‘I was only twenty-one years old,’ he says, ‘I just concentrated on my job of drawing the line.’ Then he adds, ‘The next day I could hardly stand. You know how it is with new boots.’
He leans forward. ‘People ask me why I didn’t cross the line when I was drawing it along the streets? Why didn’t I just step over to the west and keep on walking? Because I was in love! I’d been married three weeks. So of course I went back to my young wife, it’s only natural. Just like my father: he went back to his wife, and I went back to mine.’
But his father went back to his family under threat of deportation to a POW camp. Koch didn’t need to be threatened: trained by his father, he had become Socialist Man.
Koch says he is the only person alive who can represent, in his documents and photocopies and photographs, the Wall from the eastern side. Perhaps this is because most people on that side want to forget it. In fact, it seems now most people on both sides want to pretend it was never there. The Wall has been erased so quickly that there is hardly a trace of it in the streets. Only a small part of the most colourful section remains, like a gaudy headstone.
In 1966 Heinz Koch traced his biological father, who lived in Holland. The grandfather came to the GDR on a day visa to meet his son. He came as an ordinary tourist. ‘And because I was with the Stasi,’ Hagen says, ‘my dad, aged fifty-four, was thrown out of his job.’
‘Because he was a close relative to you, so he was not allowed to have Westkontakte?’
‘Because I hadn’t told them about the visit.’ The Stasi had to know everything about the extended families of everyone, but most particularly about their own. ‘That was when my father first told me about his illegitimacy, about running for mayor, and about the threats to him if he didn’t make me into a good socialist.’
I wondered what it would feel like to find out that you had been brought up by your parents as a paragon of a regime they did not believe in.
Koch said to his father, ‘Dad, if that’s the way it is, I’ve had it. I want out.’ He thought: if my working here is a reason my father can’t meet with his father, I don’t want to be here any more. ‘I handed in my letter of resignation,’ he says.
The same day he was arrested and put into a cell. Criminal charges were laid. They were: ‘Preparation and Reproduction of Pornographic Material.’
‘What?’
He enjoys my surprise, and reaches once more into his box. He pulls out a stapled handmade pamphlet. It has roneo-purple handwriting on it, and cartoon pictures. Koch made a dozen copies of the booklet to celebrate a friend’s wedding. In traditional German style, it sent up the groom, the bride and the in-laws. It showed caricatures of them (fully clothed) with speech balloons, and was very far from being pornography. It was, however, illegal. In this country any kind of printing was forbidden unless authorised. The Stasi had even developed a science of connecting individual typewriters to the print they made, as if to fingerprint thought. Koch had used the machines at his office.
They kept him in the cell for two nights and didn’t tell his wife where he was. He was permitted no outside contact, no lawyer, no phone calls. Standard procedure. On the third day, the Stasi and the DA searched his apartment for more ‘pornographic’ material as evidence. They didn’t find any. They questioned Mrs Koch, who experienced a strange mixture of relief and focused terror: so that’s where he is.
‘They asked her’—Koch’s voice goes soft with distaste—‘they asked her about our sex life. They told her that, if there was something wrong in that department, they would understand and “it might account for why your husband has taken up as a pornographer”.’
‘No, no,’ she started to cry. She said there was nothing wrong.
The DA said, ‘Well, then, in that case, Frau Koch, I put it to you that your husband would only have prepared this pornography—’
‘What pornography?’ She was desperate.
‘—this pornography,’ he ignored her, ‘at your instigation.’ The only sound was of the other men rifling through the apartment. ‘It seems you have nothing to say,’ he went on. ‘Let me ask you something. Is there anyone who could look after your little boy for the next five years or so?’
‘What? Why?’
‘Because I’m afraid, Frau Koch, that, as the instigator of a pornographic scheme, the penalties for you are severe.’
She started to cry. ‘I don’t understand! What do you want from us? What do you want from me? Don’t take my child from me, please!’
‘Frau Koch,’ the DA said, ‘the way I see it, the only chance for you would be if you credibly, and I mean credibly, distance yourself from your husband and what he has done. Only then would it be possible for me to recommend lenience to the judge in your case.’
‘What do you mean? What i
s it you want me to do?’
‘It’s quite simple,’ he said, opening his briefcase. ‘All you need to do is sign this application for divorce.’
I feel a mild physical shock.
Koch says an application for divorce was put on the table, and it was already filled out with each of their names in full, their dates of birth, identity numbers and address. ‘She signed it,’ he says quietly. ‘She signed it out of fear they’d take the child away. Then they came to me in prison with this—this thing.’ He is disgusted again even in the telling. ‘They said, “Have a look at this here. It would appear your wife wants nothing more to do with you.”’ Koch lowers his voice. ‘At that moment my world broke apart.’
‘Three days later my Party secretary came to see me in the lock-up. He was a man in his fifties with yellow hair and a red face. He said, “Koch my friend, I haven’t been able to sleep for three nights! For God’s sake what is going on here? You were always so punctual and reliable. So diligent and orderly. We have got to get you out of this mess.” He walked up and down in the cell. “The thing is, if you leave, knowledge leaves with you. Operational knowledge goes with you! And knowledge must stay! Either you understand you have made an error in thinking by trying to resign, or you will be locked up for four and a half years so that your knowledge stays here anyway.” He spread his hands in a gesture of sympathy. “You know Koch, you’ve really only got one chance left: you have to take back your resignation, and, as proof that you have understood the error in thinking you have made, you will renew your pledge to lifelong service.” He put two documents on the table, already filled out: a retraction and another pledge. “Oh, and what’s this I hear about your wife leaving you? Terrible. You know, it’s times like these that we, the Party, we will stick by you, comrade.”’
‘Did you believe your wife would leave you?’ I ask Koch.
‘I had it in writing!’ he shouts. ‘I had it in writing!’
‘Yes, but did you believe it?’
‘I had it in writing!’ This is a man who believes in documents. ‘Oh, and another thing,’ he says, ‘they said to me: when you’ve got rid of this wife, this negative influence—then you can probably be promoted.
‘I was sitting in the prison. There was no-one to talk it over with. So I said, “Can I go into the cultural division then?” and he said “Yes.”’
I wonder how it worked inside the Stasi: who thought up these blackmail schemes? Did they send them up the line for approval? Did pieces of paper come back initialled and stamped ‘Approved’: the ruining of a marriage, the destruction of a career, the imprisonment of a wife, the abandonment of a child? Did they circulate internal updates: ‘Five new and different ways to break a heart’?
When Koch came out of the lock-up he was deaf to everything but his distress. It clearly upsets him to be telling me. ‘I wanted nothing more to do with that woman,’ he says. ‘She thinks she can just leave me in the lurch like that! And then come back and be my wife?
‘We were divorced. Our boy Frank was five and he went to live with her.’
I try to think myself into his place. I think what I would most want to hear would be an explanation from my beloved that it was all a terrible mistake. I ask him why he didn’t ask—
‘Because I wouldn’t hear it! I wouldn’t hear it!’ He shouts, imitating how he cut off his wife. ‘How dare you tell me to listen after what you’ve done?’
But he did listen to his son. Months later, taking Frank for an ice-cream, the story came out. Frank had been in the apartment and heard the officers threaten to take him away. Koch spoke with his ex-wife. A year after his imprisonment and six months after their divorce, Mr and Mrs Koch remarried.
The Stasi subjected him to disciplinary proceedings on account of ‘inconstancy’, and in their files attributed the remarriage to ‘the repeated negative influence of Frau Koch’.
18
The Plate
In 1985 Heinz Koch died. His sister, who lived in Hamburg, West Germany, received permission to attend the funeral. Because she was coming, Hagen was forbidden to attend. This was more than he could take.
He applied to leave his regiment. He would have liked this to be a final small defiance, a little signal of ‘up yours’ at a time when no harm could come to his father, and he didn’t have much to lose. But it was merely a transfer out of the Stasi and into the regular army, under condition of maintaining Stasi secrecy. They were going to let him leave, and it made him feel empty.
He sat in his office. There are strange moments where the present already belongs to your past—your last day at work, for instance, when problems and politics there become a tale told in the third person. Koch looked around his office as if it belonged to someone else.
Everything in the room was to stay there. His replacement would come in, and no-one would know the difference. He was interchangeable with any other uniform and bad crewcut. It made him angry to think he would leave no mark here, and it made him angrier still that, even if he had his time again, he suspected he wouldn’t have had the guts.
The wall opposite him had an unhealthy sheen of old paint, and so did the plate pinned on it. It was an award for cultural work by his unit, third place. It shone like gold but it was made of plastic, covered in metallic paint like a cheap toy. It was not something he could say he himself had won. Nevertheless, Koch closed his office door, got up on his chair and slid the plate from its hooks. He was surprised how light it was. His briefcase wouldn’t close over it, so he took off his vest, draped it over the bag and held the handles together. He walked out of his office, said goodbye to the assistant and didn’t come back.
‘My little private revenge,’ he says. ‘That plate’—he looks straight at me—‘was all I had the courage for.’
Three weeks later, there was a knock at his apartment door. The head of Koch’s old Stasi section stood in the passageway. He was still being collegial. ‘The plate is gone.’
‘What?
‘You heard me, comrade, the plate is gone. The commandant wants the plate back.’
‘What do you know?’ Koch said to him, leaning on the open door. ‘As soon as I’m gone, the whole place falls apart. As long as I sat in that chair, that plate hung on the wall.’
‘Come on, Koch, it can’t have just disappeared. At the Ministry for State Security nothing just disappears!’
‘I’m afraid I can’t help you.’ Koch closed the door.
The commandant established a ‘Working Group on Plate Re-Procurement’. Koch was summoned back to headquarters for interviews and required to give a statement. He hid the plate in his kitchen.
A short time later they sent in bigger guns. The district attorney came by. ‘Where’s this plate?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I’ll need a sworn affidavit to that effect.’
‘Fine by me.’
Nothing further happened. Nineteen eighty-nine came, the Wall came down, and Koch started to build up his archive. He retrieved the plate from behind the sink pipe and pinned it up in his study. Now, it was a real trophy.
In 1993 a television crew came to interview him. Germany was reunited, and East Germany was a place in the past. The interviewer went through his questions before they started to shoot, so Koch would be prepared. But he was already prepared, because they were all the usual questions: Do your regret your time with the Stasi? What is your connection to the Wall? Is that what made you establish this ‘Wall Archive’?
Koch could see the strapline already: ‘Stasi man keeps Wall alive at home…’ He thought how easy it is for an interviewer to assume moral superiority by virtue of the fact he gets to ask the questions. Even in this new Germany, these weren’t really questions about how the regime possessed people, and his weren’t really answers. Koch would dutifully tell the story of his upbringing.
The interviewer was ready to roll and had started the cue-in when the cameraman called, ‘Stop!’ The crew relaxed their shoulders.
�
�What’s up?’ asked the interviewer.
‘I need that plate down. It’s reflecting in my lens.’
The interviewer motioned for an offsider to step around Koch and take it down, but Koch stood up. He tells it to me as a moment of glory. ‘No,’ he said. The room fell silent. ‘I don’t care what you want from me,’ he continued slowly. ‘I will do whatever you ask—I will turn everything in this apartment upside down, I will sing the national anthem if you want. But that…plate…stays…there.’
The interviewer was puzzled. Here was a man who had worked for the Firm for twenty-five years and who now had the gall to try to make a living talking about it; a shameless moral gymnast re-performing his capitulations for the camera. And he was drawing the line at a plate?
Koch remained standing. ‘That plate,’ he said again, ‘stays there.’
‘OK, OK.’
Koch sat down. The interviewer knew when to say nothing. Koch started to tell the whole story: his theft, the establishment of the Working Group on Plate Re-Procurement, the interviews and statements, the threats and fuss. Koch says he didn’t realise that the camera was rolling. The way he tells it, he didn’t mind that it was.
The program was made and broadcast. Several days later, the doorbell rang at Koch’s apartment. Two men showed their wallet passes: Treuhand. This was the body set up after the regime collapsed to oversee the fire sale of East German state-owned enterprises to the private sector. ‘Herr Koch, we’ve come for the plate,’ said one of them.
‘What?’ This was unified Germany, westernised and democratic Germany, and still someone wanted that plate.
‘Pursuant to the Treaty of Reunification between the Federal Republic of Germany and the former German Democratic Republic, all property belonging to the latter is vested in the former. That plate was rightfully property of the GDR and is now property of the Federal Republic of Germany. We are charged with its collection.’