by Anna Funder
I’m upset too. It’s the small things that make you cry. The idea of nurses and doctors in West Berlin trying to tell a little boy what a family was, to prepare him for one. The idea that in justifying her decision of more than thirty years ago to me here today, there is no peace for Frau Paul. I am scrabbling for tissues which seem to exist only in various embarrassing degrees of decay in the bottom of my backpack. I don’t even think about Torsten.
The doorbell sounds, and Frau Paul gets up to answer it. She comes back into the room with a man whose age is hard to tell, but I know immediately it’s him. When I stand up to shake hands I tower over him and his hand fits inside mine. His body is small and hunched and his arms and legs seem crooked, spidery. His head seems small too. He has bright deep-set dark eyes and prominent cheekbones. He’s wearing a jacket with a couple of badges on the lapel, casual cool. ‘Pleased to meet you,’ Torsten says genially, and he sinks down lopsided into the couch next to me. He does not seem surprised to see his mother has been crying.
Torsten is not sure whether he remembers meeting his parents for the first time. ‘I’ve seen the photos,’ he says, ‘and it’s hard to distinguish what I remember from what I’ve since seen. I know from being told that I addressed them with the formal “Sie” because I didn’t know what a parent was. Sometimes I have an inkling of the meeting, in the dark past like a fata morgana, but not consciously so, no.’ His voice is very soft.
I want to know if he thinks his mother made the right decision not to come to him, so I ask him directly. He is relaxed. ‘I have never looked at my parents and thought they made the wrong decision,’ he says, ‘or looked at them like the Stasi did, as criminals or anything like that—quite the opposite: I admire them for what they did.’ He seems to have learned to contain both longing and regret. ‘It doesn’t occur to me,’ he says, ‘to think that perhaps they might have done things differently and things might have worked out differently.’
‘But then again,’ I offer, ‘I suppose one visit wouldn’t have made much difference—’ I wasn’t trying to take any of her heroism away. I was trying to find a way of thinking about her choice that wasn’t such a drastic abandonment of him. But he gently cuts me off and thinks of it from his mother’s point of view. ‘Well yes,’ he says, ‘but if you think someone is dying you probably want to see them just one more time before they do. That would make a difference to you, even if it doesn’t change anything.’
Torsten supplements his invalid pension by working with bands in the electronic music scene. It is something he has done, in one form or another, since before the Wall fell. Back then, because of his invalid status, he was permitted to travel to the west once a fortnight. He would be commissioned by rock musicians in the GDR to smuggle back spare parts for them. Torsten was well known to the border guards, and was searched ‘about 90 per cent of the time’, he says, smiling. ‘I was frequently caught, but luckily the consequences weren’t so bad for me. They did accuse me though, of “dangerous trade with musical instruments and musical electronics,”’ he laughs.
Despite his family history, the Stasi went after Torsten to see if he would inform for them. First, they gathered compromising material on his smuggling. Then they brought him in for questioning. Torsten went mum, so the same material that would have been used to pressure him into informing became instead evidence of his unsuitability for it. A final report of 17 June 1985 is two sentences long. ‘R. is not suited for an unofficial collaboration with the Ministry. (R. participates in criminal activity).’ It was clearly not an option to write, ‘R. refuses, on principle, to collaborate.’
I ask Torsten whether he thinks of his life as having been shaped by the Wall.
‘I find it hard to tell exactly, in what sense my life has been shaped by the Wall—how it might have been different otherwise,’ he says, ‘but that it has been, I have no doubt.’
He has learned not to play the ‘if only’ game: if only there had been no Wall I might not have relapsed; I might have grown up with my parents; they might not have gone to prison; I might have had a healthy body, a job, a partner. He shifts in his seat to look at me straight on. ‘There are no people who are whole,’ he says. ‘Everyone has issues of their own to deal with. Mine might be a little harder, but the main thing is how one deals with them.’
‘And how do you?’ I am facing him, looking at his twisted body, and listening to him breathe through the tubes they placed inside him.
‘Well, it is an issue for me. I think life can end much too quickly, so I have no long-term aspirations. Whatever it is I want, I want it now, to experience it today. I have no patience for saving money, or building up some kind of enterprise. It makes me nervous. Other people say, “You have time, you’re still relatively young.” But I’m always so afraid that things can come to an end at any time.’ He pauses. ‘Or that politically, too, it could all change again, and then I’d have no chance to experience certain things.’
I remark that for something so big, that shaped their lives so brutally, it’s hard now to find a trace of the Wall. I am about to say I think it’s odd to let everyone forget so quickly, when Torsten says, ‘I’m happy that it’s gone, and I’m happy too that there’s so little of it left to see. It would remind me that it could come back. That everything that’s happened might be reversed.’
‘But that wouldn’t be possible!’ I laugh.
He looks at me soberly. ‘But anything is possible,’ he says. ‘One can never say that something is not possible.’
His mother agrees. ‘Who would have thought that a wall could be built!’ she says. ‘That was also impossible! And who would have thought at the end that it might ever fall! That was also impossible!’
People here talk of the Mauer im Kopf or the Wall in the Head. I thought this was just a shorthand way of referring to how Germans define themselves still as easterners and westerners. But I see now a more literal meaning: the Wall and what it stood for do still exist. The Wall persists in Stasi men’s minds as something they hope might one day come again, and in their victims’ minds too, as a terrifying possibility.
Torsten offers to give me a lift to the station. Frau Paul kisses him and takes my hand with both of hers. Then she shrugs her shoulders. ‘That’s it,’ she says, as though, when she added up the parts of her life, it was a smallish thing.
Torsten’s car is an old-style BMW with a high seat custom-built behind the steering wheel. He puts on some music with a Latin beat, and it keeps strange, syncopated time with the windscreen wipers. We chat and he takes me past the station, nearly all the way to Alexanderplatz. Then he lets me out with a wave and drives on, crooked and crippled and living for the day.
24
Herr Bohnsack
I walk around to pick up my last Stasi man. In his street new tramlines are being laid, lengths of steel are strewn like licorice down the median strip. It’s lunchtime and the workers are nowhere to be seen. I ring the buzzer where it says ‘Bohnsack’. A man comes out putting on a smart tan overcoat. He’s tall and slightly stooped, thickset through the chest. His face is pleasant, with receding hair and full cheeks. He looks me straight in the eye and smiles a warm smile.
‘Let’s go to my local,’ he says.
The pub is a traditional Berlin Kneipe. It has a bar in dark wood with mirrors behind it, booth seats and lacy white curtains to shield people from the street. A shaft of light slips past them on an angle, slow afternoon light of lazy particles and beams. Two regulars watch their glasses. There are little pubs like this in both East and West Berlin, where everyone knows everyone else. I have occasionally walked in—for directions, or cigarettes—and each time I felt I had walked into someone’s living room uninvited. When a stranger enters, the hum of conversation breaks while people look up and hunch their shoulders. Here though, when the regulars see Herr Bohnsack, they nod. The publican smiles like a brother. ‘How are we?’ he asks, rubbing his hands together. ‘What it’ll be today then?’
‘We mi
ght go into the side room,’ Herr Bohnsack says, ‘if that’s all right. For a chat.’
‘Of course, of course.’ He shuffles out from behind the bar in his socks and slippers and shows us in. There are old advertisements for beer on the walls, pictures of glowing-cheeked maidens and horses and hops. I look at Herr Bohnsack. In the light from the windows at his back he seems to have a bit of a glow about him, too.
‘What can I get for the lady and the gentleman?’
‘I’ll have a wheat beer and a Korn,’ he says, ‘and you?’ It’s early. I order a beer and forgo the schnapps. Günter Bohnsack’s voice is deep and slightly slurred, like a person with ill-fitting crowns, or a man who has been drinking. His eyes are bright and he is relaxed with me. He is not, as it turns out, a man with anything to prove. He is fifty-seven years old, and the only Stasi man I have ever met who outed himself. A lieutenant colonel, he worked in one of the most secret divisions of the overseas spy service, the Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung (HVA). Herr Bohnsack was in Division X, responsible, as he put it on the phone to me, for ‘disinformation and psychological warfare against the west’.
The HVA was the overseas espionage service of the Stasi. Its director, Markus Wolf, the son of a Jewish doctor and playwright, is intelligent and urbane, and was the model, apparently, for John le Carré’s spymaster Karla. Wolf’s HVA was subject to its minister, Mielke. But Wolf and his men always saw themselves as a breed apart. Although they were organised according to military rank like the rest of the Firm, they wore suits instead of uniforms, were highly educated and enjoyed a privileged existence. ‘Because we were responsible for the west,’ Herr Bohnsack explained to me, ‘we could travel and we were quite different. Our diplomats could speak languages and were cultivated. We all scorned Mielke; we had our Wolf, the tall slim elegant intellectual.’
Herr Bohnsack trained as a journalist and worked for twenty-six years in disinformation. Much of Division X’s work was directed against West Germany. It collected sensitive or secret information from agents in the west and leaked it to cause harm; it manufactured documents and spliced together recordings of conversations that never took place in order to damage persons in the public sphere; and it spread rumours about people in the west, including the devastating rumour that someone worked for them. Division X men fed ‘coups’ to western journalists about the Nazi past of West German politicians (several major figures were brought down this way); it funded left-wing publications and it managed, at least in one instance, to exert an extraordinary influence over the political process in West Germany itself. In 1972, the Social Democrat head of the West German government Willy Brandt faced a vote of no-confidence in parliament. Division X bribed one and possibly two backbenchers for their votes in order to keep him in power. Colonel Rolf Wagenbreth, the head of Division X, described its work simply as ‘an attempt to turn the wheels of history’.
Herr Bohnsack starts with a joke. He told it at lunch back in 1980 to a group of his colleagues at the restaurant reserved for the highest ranks of the Stasi. He leans back and smiles, like an uncle with a secret. ‘The USA, the Soviet Union and the GDR want to raise the Titanic,’ he says, lifting his eyebrows. ‘The USA wants the jewels presumed to be in the safe,’ he nods, ‘the Soviets are after the state-of-the-art technology; and the GDR’—he downs his Korn for dramatic pause—‘the GDR wants the band that played as it went down.’
We laugh. ‘Was it normal to tell jokes like that?’ I ask.
‘Yes, yes,’ he says, ‘quite normal, but it depended who was there. As soon as I’d told that one I thought: oh brother, that was a bit foolish of me because there was a general at the table.’ He runs a hand over his head. ‘After lunch the general took me aside and said, in a quiet voice, “Next time Bohnsack, I wouldn’t tell a joke like that.” And that was way back in 1980! They were sensitive about the whole thing going down even then.’
‘Were there Mielke jokes?’
‘Yes, lots,’ he says. ‘But the worst Mielke ones weren’t jokes, they were true.’
Herr Bohnsack was invited to the party the Stasi threw for themselves and their Russian comrades to celebrate the forty years of the GDR. It was 3 October 1989, the height of the demonstrations and unrest. ‘There were about two thousand people at the party,’ he says. ‘Mielke made his entrance’—he raises one arm behind his ear and does a two-fingered walk through the air—‘down some stairs in the corner surrounded by his generals. Like a ghost, or the god in the machine.’ Mielke made a speech. ‘For four hours he spoke, on and on. Every now and then he gave a rallying cry. “And just remember Comrades this one thing: the most important thing you have is power! Hang on to power at all costs! Without it, you are nothing!” He didn’t mention the democracy demonstrations and the fact that the Soviets were backing away from us,’ Herr Bohnsack says, ‘but it was clear he must, at some level, have felt the end coming.’
When Mielke finally finished there was a banquet: there were grapes, and chicken drumsticks and melon and stone fruits, ‘things that we never had in the GDR and that were truly exquisite, amazing delicacies to us’. But just as they were about to tuck in, Mielke would quickly pick up the microphone to say ‘a few more idiotic words’ and everyone would have to put their drumsticks and bunches of grapes back down on their plates until he was done. He would finish up by saying ‘Guten Appetit’, and the men would start to eat, but moments later he’d grab the microphone again and they would have to put it all down once more. ‘It went on and on,’ Herr Bohnsack says. ‘The whole occasion was insane.’
At Christmas 1989, from his telling of it, events bloomed into full-scale, fast-forward farce. Herr Bohnsack’s entire division was ordered to stay at home so as not to provoke the demonstrators, and to be near the phone. At 3 am they would receive a call ordering them to drive to Normannenstrasse, parking some way away so the demonstrators wouldn’t know the buildings were occupied, and to enter by a rear door. When they reached their offices, all the lights would be out. They were ordered to don camouflage combat gear—‘like the foreign legion in the jungle’—and then to kit themselves out with cooking equipment and cutlery, a spade, a protective suit in the event of chemical warfare, a blanket, toothpaste and brush, and ammunition. They were each issued with a pistol and a machine gun. The whole operation was timed.
‘What would you do then?’ I ask.
‘We’d lie down on our desks and sleep. The generals upstairs on the ninth floor were simulating a war situation. One would come down and wake us up with a message—say, an American sub has been sighted off Turkey. Or, the American B52s are on stand-by. Then at 5 am we’d get worse news—maybe that a Russian sub had been taken off Norway. They were pretending World War III had broken out.’
‘What could you do?’
‘Nothing: we slept some more.’
At 7 am they would get an order to go into the field. ‘We’d play war for a day, stand around, and shoot the cardboard figures that popped up out of the grass. Everyone was there—highly intelligent specialists who could speak Arabic and goodness knows what—and we were all reduced to playing soldiers.’ By the end of 1989 they were doing this every single week. ‘And we knew the GDR was lost,’ he says, ‘so it was a circus.’
Herr Bohnsack’s greatest fear was that he and the others would be ordered to shoot the demonstrators outside their building. During the exercises they were told that the enemy had infiltrated the country and was inciting the East Germans against them. At the end Mielke was more direct. He told them that they—he meant the people—were the enemy. He said, ‘It’s them or us.’
‘For me,’ Bohnsack says, ‘that was the most terrifying thing. That instead of shooting cardboard figures we’d have to shoot our own people. And we knew, just like under Hitler, that if we refused we’d be taken off and shot ourselves.’
There was another fear too. Mielke had also told his men, ‘If we lose, they’ll string us all up.’ The atmosphere was hysterical. Herr Bohnsack had been Markus Wolf’s
contact man between the Stasi and the secret services in Hungary, Moscow, Prague and Warsaw. ‘Our man in Budapest had told me that in the drama of ’56 his people were hanged in the trees outside their offices. He said to me, “If someone points you out, five minutes later you’ll be swinging.”’
Herr Bohnsack runs his hand over his head again. ‘Thank God it didn’t come to that,’ he says. He explains that by the time the demonstrators really got going in Berlin—and it was later there than in Leipzig and elsewhere—Mielke had already stood down. And he had been there so long the generals simply did not know how to give any orders on their own. They could not seize control. ‘And this is what saved us,’ Bohnsack says, shaking his large head, ‘us and the people.’
Somehow, back in September, it became clear to Herr Bohnsack that the files would have to be destroyed. He told his boss he was going to start shredding. ‘It is not allowed!’ the boss said, ‘There is no order to do so!’ ‘But,’ Herr Bohnsack says, ‘I just drove my car into the yard and got the files out of the filing cabinets. There were metres and metres of them—agents’ key files, films, reports—and I drove to our garden one hundred kilometres away from Berlin.’ The family had an old baker’s oven on its holiday plot. And then, ‘totally privately and personally, without any permission and without any command,’ he says, ‘I destroyed everything, all day long.’ There was so much paper to burn the oven nearly collapsed. A cloud of black smoke hung over him in the sky. Herr Bohnsack stood there for three days, feeding the files into the fire.