Stasiland

by Anna Funder

  Our last stop is at the Oberbaum Bridge. Berlin is a wasteland here, where the tram lines between east and west have only recently been knitted back together. The longest strip of remaining Wall is along this river-bank—more because it was forgotten than deliberately preserved. At the end of it are what look like, at first glance, a small array of circus tents. As we approach I see they are a couple of souvenir stalls, with flags flying atop and signs in English saying ‘Souvenirs for You’ and ‘I Stamp Your Passport’. For one mark you can have your passport stamped with a GDR entry visa, as if you had stepped into this tent and miraculously been admitted to that place in the past. Elderly American tourists are climbing out of a bus. They seem to match—in pressed pale clothes and overly clean running shoes. ‘Betty,’ one woman asks another in a broad southern accent, ‘is that the same jacket you were wearing that day at Auschwitz?’

  Herr Koch bounces into the main stall. ‘Gerd!’ he cries.

  ‘Hagen, my friend!’ The stallkeeper jumps up and runs from behind his wares to greet him. Herr Koch introduces me. Gerd is a suntanned man of sixty wearing a blue shirt unbuttoned to the navel and a smile with the wattage of a vaudevillian. Herr Koch later told me he had been a theatre actor in the east.

  Gerd’s stall is a reliquary of his country’s memorabilia. He has Russian and GDR soldiers’ caps; Russian medals issued as reward for service in the Berlin invasion of 1945 (‘genuine, genuine,’ he says winningly); old enamel signs that read, ‘You are leaving the American Sector’ in English, Russian, French and German and ‘Beware—Mines! Closed Area: Danger to Life!’ He has matchbox-sized Trabant cars, teddy bears, bottle openers, car stickers and coffee mugs; and on one side of the stall in tiny pigeonholes he has lots and lots of pieces of Wall.

  ‘You must take this as a gift from me,’ he says, and he presses a piece of the Wall into my palm. It is in a small plastic bag, complete with a ‘Certificate of Authenticity’. It looks like a forensic sample. The two of them are staring at me, grinning and excited. I fear at any moment they will break into song.

  ‘How do you know this is genuine?’ I ask.

  ‘Oh, it’s genuine,’ Gerd says, twinkling like a daytime television host.

  There have probably been enough ‘genuine’ fragments of the Wall sold to build it twice over. Herr Koch leans in, as always, interested in the documents. ‘Look,’ he says, ‘there’s a certificate to prove it.’

  I thank them both and walk up to the new tramstop at Warschauer Strasse. When I look back, I see Herr Koch has corralled the tourists, and is giving them his side of history.

  27

  Puzzlers

  I catch the train to Nuremberg. When I arrive, I drink an espresso standing up at a bar in the station. A beautiful young woman wearing a fast-food wimple is serving behind the counter. The man next to me orders a Riesenbockwurst. The barmaid reaches first for potato salad and a bun, and then the boiled sausage. ‘Mustard or ketchup?’ She holds the paper plate high for an answer, reaching with her free hand above the bar to where the bottles would normally be, upturned for nips. Instead, there hangs a giant yellow rubber udder. The barmaid does a neat squeeze-and-twist action on one of the teats, milking it for mustard.

  Booking my ticket, I thought of Uwe and Scheller and our puzzle women conversation so long ago. I called Uwe at the television station to catch up, and to tell him I’ve come full circle. A former colleague answered the phone. He said Uwe took a promotion to be roving correspondent in the United States, and that he and Frederica and little Lucas were now happily ensconced in Washington. I asked him to pass on my best.

  The Stasi File Authority office where the puzzle women are housed is in Zirndorf, a village outside Nuremberg. The office is in the same walled compound where asylum seekers are being kept. Two Ethiopians, or perhaps Eritreans, men with sad biblical faces and aimless arms, walk about the outdoor area.

  The director, Herr Raillard, meets me at the entrance and we go upstairs to his office. It is a plain administrative building that smells of floor wax and wet cardboard. Herr Raillard is a compact man with straight white hair to his shoulders and small glasses. He is an archivist.

  I am nervous as a cat. I am in an unaccountable hurry. I have been thinking about this place for so long as the focus of Miriam’s hopes; I want there to be stainless steel benches and people wearing hair nets and white cloth gloves. I want security guards on the entrances and cameras in the workrooms. I want the completed puzzle pages to be scanned into computers, correlated to the files they belong to and for the people they affect to be called up by sensitive, trained personnel and informed about the new links in their lives.

  I want them to find out what happened to Charlie Weber.

  I am sure Herr Raillard has things to do but his desk is uncluttered and he gives me the impression of having cleared the agenda for our meeting today. He is a quiet and unassuming man, who made his career in the West German archives at Koblenz, and he is now looking forward to retirement. ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘I’ll be sixty-three shortly,’ as if to say, ‘and I’m out of here.’

  He tells me that this work started in 1995, after the sacks of material had sat around in Berlin for five years. Fifteen thousand sacks were found at Normannenstrasse in January 1990. They contained shredded and hand-ripped files, index cards, photos and unwound tapes and film.

  Herr Raillard has arranged for me to take coffee with some of the workers. I am keen to meet the puzzle people. I ask him how many there are, and whether they are all women, as I have heard. ‘Oh no,’ he says, ‘but there are probably more women than men.’ He is cautious and exact, and asks his secretary to check the numbers. She comes back with a note: eighteen women and thirteen men.

  First, we go down the hall to see the workrooms. On the way, he tells me there has been some controversy because the victims want the work here to go more quickly. A computer program exists that could make this happen; it puts a lot of the pieces together very fast, based on a scan of the exact shape of the ripped edge. But, Herr Raillard says, for the purposes of evidence the documents reconstituted by computer do not count as originals. This doesn’t make much sense to me, because generally people don’t bring cases, they just want to know what happened in their lives. ‘And it would be very expensive,’ he adds. That is more likely why it’s not in use.

  The door opens onto an ordinary office; my eyes take in potted plants and old paint on the walls and a poster of glassy-eyed kittens tangled in wool. There is a large desk with an empty chair behind it. ‘Must be on a break,’ Herr Raillard says, gesturing towards the chair. But I am only half listening. The window is wide open, a white curtain moves in the breeze and I am panicked, my heart climbing steps up my chest, because on the desk there are masses and masses of tiny pieces of paper—some in small stacks but others spread out all over. There are so many tatters of paper that the desk is not big enough, and the worker has started to lay them out on top of the filing cabinet as well. The pieces are different sizes, from a fifth of an A4 page to only a couple of centimetres square—and there is nothing to stop them flying around the room and out of the window.

  Herr Raillard misreads my face. ‘Yes, it’s a lot of work, as you can see,’ he says.

  The next room is similar. This person, also on a break, seems to be sorting the material from the sacks first into cut-off cardboard boxes and then all over the desk. A woman’s eye from a torn photograph looks out at me from one of the boxes; on the table I glimpse the name of the writer Lutz Rathenow on a shred of paper. There’s a roll of double-sided sticky tape near the chair and a partially completed page in front of it: a corner, and the left-hand edge.

  In the next room the pieces are even smaller. ‘It’s painstaking work,’ Herr Raillard says, ‘the most pieces in one page so far has been ninety-eight.’ This person has nearly completed a sheaf of pages that rest in an open manila folder. The pages are all there, piled on top of each other except for a piece or pieces missing in the middle, making a n
eat hole. ‘It takes brute strength to tear that many pages at once.’ Herr Raillard shakes his head. ‘That Stasi man would have hardly been able to move his fingers the next day.’

  On the way to meet the workers, I ask Herr Raillard about security. He tells me that everyone who works here, including the cleaning staff, is checked to make sure they have not had any involvement with the Stasi in the past, even though they are all westerners. He says his workers are told not to speak about the content of the files they piece together. Sometimes this needs to be stressed. ‘If they find, say, a file on an important West German politician, then I’ll go in and have a word and remind them not to mention it at all,’ he says. I ask about electronic surveillance of the rooms, because I imagine there are people out there who would pay a high price to stop some of this information coming to light. ‘No, no,’ Herr Raillard says, ‘sometimes they sit two to a room. But that’s more to alleviate boredom than anything else. And I make sure I put the alarm on when I leave of an evening.’ This is not what I expected. It is friendly and small and low-key. It is something between a hobby farm for jigsaw enthusiasts and a sheltered workshop for obsessives.

  Herr Raillard introduces me and leaves. There are three women and two men sitting at a table with fruit juice, biscuits and a thermos of coffee on it. They have left room for me at the head of the table. The two women on my right are both plump, made-up and middle-aged. On my left there’s a young woman with freckles and shoulder-length dark hair, next to her a small brown-haired man with glasses, and at the end a large gentle-looking fellow with fair hair and eyes as blue as marbles. I ask them how they go about their work each day.

  The furthest middle-aged woman says, ‘It’s really just like a puzzle at home. You start with the corners, and fill in the rest from the shape of the edges. We get clues too from the sort of paper it is, the typeface or handwriting and so on.’

  ‘Do you do puzzles at home?’ I ask her.

  ‘Yes!’ she says, ‘I must be crazy.’ They all laugh.

  The woman next to her started here only two months ago. She has painted nails and a gap between her two front teeth. ‘They opened a sack to show me and I saw the really tiny pieces inside and I thought, Oh my God, I can’t do that.’ The sacks are over a metre tall and paunchy as a person. ‘But every sack is different,’ she says, ‘and I have to say there are things that are interesting.’

  The dark man appears to be the most senior person here. He has deep-set eyes and a calm voice. The others listen closely when he speaks. He says, ‘Sometimes the satisfaction is in knowing that when people find out what happened to them it might give them some peace of mind—why they lost their place at the university, or what happened to the uncle who disappeared or whatever. It gives those affected an insight into their own lives.’

  The others pour coffee and pass long-life milk down the table. I imagine getting more news about myself from a file. You would come to think of your past as a landscape you travelled through without noticing the signs.

  ‘I think at the end the Stasi had so much information,’ the fair man says, ‘that they thought everyone was an enemy, because everyone was under observation. I don’t think they knew who was for them, or against, or whether everyone was just shutting up.’ He is shy and looks at his hands, closed around his coffee mug, when he speaks. ‘When I find a file where they’ve been watching a family in their living room for twenty years I ask myself: what sort of people are they who want all this knowledge for themselves?’

  ‘Are you moved by what you find sometimes?’ I ask.

  The young woman answers, ‘When I find love letters I think, good grief, they really opened everything—and how many hands did these pass through? How many times were they copied? I’d hate for that to have happened to me. I don’t feel too good about seeing them myself when I piece them together.’

  The dark man says he is most shocked by how the Stasi used people’s own distress against them. ‘When they were in prison, for instance, offering to let them out on condition that they spy for the Stasi.’ I think of Koch’s father having to change political parties or be exiled to a Russian camp, or Frau Paul, who could have been bait in a trap to catch a westerner, and even of Julia, imprisoned in her country and offered freedom within it only if she would inform on the people in her life. I think of the generational cycles of tragedy the Germans have been inflicting on themselves.

  ‘But this is not about the individuals,’ the dark man continues. ‘It is about a system that so manipulated people that it drove them to do these things. It shows how people can be used against one another. I’m reluctant to condemn them because the Stasi were also manipulated, they too needed jobs.’ The others are nodding. ‘On the other hand,’ he says, ‘there were lots of people who just said no. Not everyone can be bought.’ He tells of an engineer who refused to inform, ‘And nothing more happened to him. The file was simply closed.’

  I am reminded of the story of a factory worker who, after she was approached to inform, announced loudly the next day at the canteen table, ‘Guess what! You wouldn’t credit it, but they think me so reliable that I’ve been asked to inform!’ Her cover blown, she was useless and she was left alone.

  The young woman says, ‘I think there were advantages over there, that we forget, particularly for mothers and children. I’m a single mum and I know what I’m talking about. I had to work, and it was hard to find a kindergarten place. I have a friend who lived over there and she says she didn’t want for anything…’

  ‘And rents were lower,’ the gap-toothed woman on my right adds.

  ‘The kindergartens were there,’ the dark man says, ‘because they wanted to get to the children early to bring them up loyal to the state.’

  ‘Sure,’ the young mother says. ‘But it all became crudely clear to me just after the Wall came down. I met a couple in the street who’d just come over from the east and had no money and nowhere to go, so I said they could stay with me. They were with me for a weekend and I showed them around. We went to Karstadt department store and looked in the food section. They were beside themselves. “How many kinds of ketchup do you have?” they said as they looked at the shelves. Then I thought to myself, it really is too much—there must be a middle way. Do we really need thirty different kinds of ham and fifteen kinds of ketchup?’

  ‘The mistake the GDR made was to force people into a position,’ the dark man says, ‘either you are for us or an enemy. And if you then came to think of yourself as an enemy you had to ask yourself: what am I doing here? They wanted to put everything into their narrow schema, but life simply didn’t fit into it.’ He pauses, and the others wait for him to finish. ‘I think we need to remember that they came here for the freedom, not for fifteen kinds of ketchup.’

  Herr Raillard sees me out. I check with him what the consequences were when someone who had been approached to inform either told people about it or flatly refused. ‘There really were no consequences,’ he says. ‘That was the thing. The file was just closed, marked “dekonspiriert”. But of course,’ he adds, ‘no-one could know at the time that nothing would happen to him. So hardly anyone refused.’

  We have reached the door. He says, ‘There is something I need to give you.’ Without a word he passes me a photocopied sheet of paper with some writing on it. It is a copy of a memo he wrote:

  Stasi File Authority—Project Group Reconstruction

  Time required for the Reconstruction:

  1 worker reconstructs on average 10 pages per day

  40 workers reconstruct on average 400 pages per day

  40 workers reconstruct on average in a year of 250 working days 100,000 pages

  There are, on average 2,500 pages in one sack

  100,000 pages amounts to 40 sacks per year

  In all, at the Stasi File Authority there are 15,000 sacks

  This means that to reconstruct everything it would take 40 workers 375 years.

  I am speechless. I can only understand this as a smal
l paper protest. Herr Raillard points at the page. ‘These are the figures for forty workers,’ he says. ‘As you see, we only have thirty-one.’ He is telling me, in his quiet way, that the resources united Germany is throwing at this part of reconstructing the lives of its former East German citizens are pitiful, some kind of Sisyphean joke. What he is running here is an almost totally symbolic act.

  Herr Raillard has organised a driver to take me from Zirndorf back to Nuremberg. The day is a clear sunny blue. Away from the asylum seekers and scraps of paper, everything is bright and cheerful.

  I look out the window, thinking about Miriam and her hopes that the torn-apart pieces of her life will be put back together in those airy rooms, some time in the next 375 years.

  28

  Miriam and Charlie

  The train back to Berlin passes through Leipzig, and I get off.

  It’s morning, the air is still with a silken warmth that will work itself into something real by midday. Last time the station was being renovated; it is now part of a three-storey shopping mall in a vast atrium. Escalators move people up and down between levels. Near the exit there’s a display of photographs of the demonstrations ten years ago. The sign over them reads: ‘Leipzig. City of Heroes.’ I’m not sure what I’m doing here.

  I wander through town. Most of the cranes are gone. New facades of buildings in sun-yellow and dusky pink, some even gilded, have been revealed from behind scaffolding. I walk past the town hall, and past Auerbach’s Cellar. Next door a new museum has been inserted into the old streetscape: the Contemporary History Forum Leipzig. The inside is all terrazzo flooring and expensive fittings. This, it turns out, is the federally funded effort to put the history of the separation of Germany behind glass.

  There are the famous pictures of the Wall being built: an eastern soldier deciding to make a run for it to the west, parting the barbed wire with his hands; and Peter Fechter, the eighteen-year-old shot trying to escape in 1962 and left to die on the death strip, because each side thought the other would retaliate if they went to help him. Someone has thrown him a roll of bandages, but he lies immobile and bleeding. There are pictures of people coming out of a tunnel in West Berlin—the successful group before Frau Paul tried, and there’s a grey paddy wagon parked inside here, exactly the same as the one in which she was transported to her trial. A TV monitor shows Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler in his acidic prime. I come to the seventies, and find a glass case with a display of Renft memorabilia: records, Klaus’s old guitar and pictures of the band, its hairy bellbottomed members looking both innocent and louche.