Bicycle Diaries

by David Byrne

  I passed through and worked in West Berlin fairly often in the ’80s, when the Wall was still up. West Berlin then was an artificially pumped-up, arty capitalist showcase, the better to show those commies on the other side of the fence what high life and culture they were missing. East Berlin was full of incredible historical buildings and shabby apartments, and there were no amenities. It really was gray and depressing—at least to a visitor. And it smelled—many houses and businesses were heated by coal fires, a smell I recognized, and loved, from visiting my grandma in Glasgow as a child. Even the sky seemed grayer to Western visitors then.

  I suspect that many of the folks who lived in the East felt otherwise and may have viewed the half of the city on the Western side as a decadent cesspool of junkies and hookers (which it partly was) while they alone were maintaining the traditionally high German intellectual, cultural, and moral values and standards. Someone, they might have reasoned, had to preserve civilization while the Yankees turned West Berlin into a soldier’s playground and a haven for crazy artists, playwrights, drug addicts, and musicians of questionable talent.

  In West Berlin at that time the young Germans who didn’t mind living inside a walled island were compensated—they could escape compulsory military service, rents were relatively cheap, and parking laws were almost nonexistent. (Cars would park on the sidewalks, at any angle, and never get towed.) Kreuz berg, the Lower East Side of West Berlin, was one of the most decadent low-life places I’ve ever seen. Lots of black leather, heroin, and late-night punk clubs—a sort of government-sponsored bohemian world just out of reach, but significantly visible to the Easties just over the Wall. The rest of luxurious Western decadence—the plentiful food, crazy fashions, and expensive cars—the Easties could see on bootleg films and TV, and they could probably smell wafting across no-man’s-land the curry wursts and kebabs that fueled the nightlife just across the Wall.

  After the Wall came down all that changed. There was no further need to artificially entice people to live in an isolated island city anymore. Now the decadence here is of another sort, and it has migrated to various neighborhoods in the center of the former East. Friedrichstrasse and the surrounding boulevards are filled with luxury-goods boutiques, designer labels, and swanky hotels. There was a brief time right after the Wall came down when the historic buildings of Mitte were selling for peanuts, and many of them quickly became squats and cheap housing for artists, but that was a relatively short-lived period. Now there are a few coffee shops and some graffiti remaining as reminders of those post-Wall days, but the fancy-goods stores and developers are moving in fast and the rents are going up. More mentally disrupting, for me at least, is that the entire center of town has moved. When the Wall was up, what we in the West considered the center of West Berlin was somewhere around the tower of the bombed Kaiser Wilhelm Gedächtniskirche, and Kurfürstendamm and Kantstrasse radiated outward, but now the center has shifted back to more or less where it was before, pre-cold war—to Friedrichstrasse, Alexanderplatz, and Potsdamer Platz. It’s as if my memory were playing tricks on me.

  Big old Karl-Marx-Allee has yet to catch the wave of gentrification, though the apartment buildings have been cleaned up and I hear the former apartments of party members and Stasi higher-ups are lovely. So, this route is a fitting prelude to the Stasi Museum visit.

  Stasiland, the book by Anna Funder, an Australian journalist stationed in the former East Germany, investigates personal stories involving that notorious state security agency. Funder’s perceptions are wonderful. She spots the bizarre and oppressive not only in the detaining and spying on citizens and the unexplained deaths, but also in things like a weird sexless popular dance (the Lipsi) that the government attempted to insert into popular culture as a kind of immunization against Elvis’s rock-and-roll gyrations.

  The Stasi kept massive “files” of all types: Some consisted of jars of smells of suspected subversives—jars that were filled with scraps of clothing, or preferably underwear, secretly procured from some poor soul suspected of a lack of patriotism. In some cases if actual clothing belonging to the suspect could not be found then an agent would surreptitiously wipe where that suspect had been seated and then quickly preserve the rag, labeling it by name of suspect and how long he or she had been seated on said chair. These rags were filed away just in case that person should disappear, and then at some future date a dog could sniff the rag and presumably discover the culprit’s hiding place.

  It goes on. . . . In the book there’s a beautiful Kafkaesque scene where a woman, denied employment for suspect activities, is called in for questioning:“Why don’t you have a job?”

  “You tell me.”

  “You’re a smart woman, surely you can find employment.”

  “No, I am unemployed.”

  “That can’t be, there is no unemployment in the People’s Republic.”

  We like to think such stories are typical of middle European paranoia and behavior under repressive Socialist regimes. But imagine someone being questioned by Homeland Security saying, “But I was tortured, the information was obtained under duress.”

  “The United States does not torture people, so that can’t be true.”

  These days many people know of the Stasi from the recent movie The Lives of Others. The combination of psychological and Orwellian horror is hellish and weirdly seductive. The agency was known for turning citizens against their neighbors by subtle pressure, implied threats, or economic incentives. It seems it’s something that many national security agencies do from time to time. (“If you see something, say something.”) Turning the citizenry into rats makes the entire populace scared and docile, and after a while no one knows who’s informing on whom. Anyone could be an informer or an agent. The world becomes a Philip K. Dick novel—although in his version everyone would also be informing on themselves.

  The Stasi Museum is a massive compound that encloses a whole city block. I ride my bike into the inner courtyard and lock it up. Since both the parking and the main entrances to the various buildings are located inside the compound, when it was functioning no one outside could see who was coming or going—exits and entrances from the building all took place within the large interior courtyard. I am told that the whole complex is now for sale! For one euro! Well, there are conditions. The city is actually trying to sell it to Germany, on the condition that they will turn it into a proper museum.

  As it now exists, the museum is rudimentary. One floor of former offices displays clunky spy devices: cameras in logs, behind large coat buttons, and in fake rocks. Here’s one in a birdhouse—a little obvious, I think:

  Maybe the intent was actually not to hide this surveillance gear too well. Maybe it was deemed more important to make people aware that they were being looked at and listened to rather than having the public just suspect that the spying was going on. A camera this blatant would confirm the rumors. If you’re not aware you’re being observed, if there isn’t occasional proof, then you won’t live in fear, so then what’s the point? The best surveillance is when everyone suspects that they’re being watched all the time. The government then doesn’t even have to watch the cameras—they need only let people believe someone might be watching. Sometimes buildings here in the United States put up fake surveillance cameras in the hopes of discouraging perps. Of course, it wasn’t all just charmingly nutty surveillance stuff here at Stasi headquarters—not everything is clunky tech that we now find oddly amusing. People’s lives were ruined, devastated, destroyed; their careers came to a dead end at the least suspicion. There were prison terms and torture without stated reason (where have I heard that one before?), and information and culture was heavily censored. And the food in the East wasn’t that great, either.

  On a higher floor were the preserved offices of the head of Stasi, Erich Mielke. His offices weren’t very grand by Western standards, but he did have a little apartment attached, which was pretty cute. One can now look at this style of furnishing as an example of
a very peculiar design aesthetic. I’m sure for some the mere sight of these curtains and old phones would make them shudder, but for many now they embody a kind of totalitarian kitsch.

  The style is hardly luxurious—but then maybe these higher-ups saw themselves as modest functionaries who were just doing the noble work of the state, of the masses, rather than surrounding themselves with luxury as would quasi-oligarchs or entitled royalty. I remember visiting Pravda headquarters in Moscow in the ’90s, and the decorator must have been the same guy. In that room there were also no decadent touches—which in a power nexus like that was a little surprising. There is almost an absence of power symbols—no marble staircases, giant chandeliers, or even soft leather chairs. Maybe this austerity was meant to be representative of the higher calling being represented, but in this context that pretension coupled with absolute power became all the more chilling. There was one odd decorative item in the Pravda director’s office—a very long bookshelf that held only the collected works of Lenin. (When did Lenin have time to write all those volumes?)

  As the Berlin Wall was coming down the shredding machines in this place went into overdrive. Imagine what an instantaneous change of worldview that must have been—one minute you’re the proud controller of destinies and the next you’re a disgusting worm intent on erasing your own life’s work. I guess the folks who erased the CIA torture tapes and Nixon’s eighteen minutes must have felt the same way. Maybe they all didn’t exactly feel guilty, but they at least knew they and their bosses would be up shit creek if they were caught. Most of the Stasi shredding machines were overwhelmed and got clogged and they had to call for reinforcements. A huge number of documents were destroyed, but there were far too many to shred in just a few days, so there are organizations now that will allow you to locate your file, if it is readable. There is also a group that is attempting to reconstitute documents from the shredded strips of paper—very labor intensive. Here, from our side of the pond, in New York City, is a page from John Lennon’s FBI file. On this particular page none of it is “uncensored”—it appears sort of like a piece of conceptual art.

  What Is the Time Limit on Justice?

  Should the people whose lives were ruined by the Stasi, or by any similar governmental agency anywhere, be due financial reparations? Should their real estate be returned to them or to their heirs? Should there at least have been a truth and reconciliation committee here, as there was in South Africa, to clear the air and allow the country and individuals to move on? (In their version, there are no punishments or reparations, but only if indeed the entire truth is aired.)

  The people of Zimbabwe, formerly Rhodesia, have been attempting in recent years to reclaim the farming lands taken from their ancestors many years ago by the white settlers. The whites have sometimes lived on these appropriated farms for three generations or more, and naturally they now think of them as theirs; they view the land as their homeland now too. The whites accept—so we are told—that the nation should not and cannot be ruled by outsiders anymore, or even by a small white minority, but they see these homes and farms as their own. They have raised children, built infrastructure, and improved the fields. But not just on their own farm. To some extent they have put into place the infrastructure that allowed the whole country to function. But, as the political tide has recently turned and the whites are no longer the political bosses, their right to hold on to 80 percent of the country’s arable land just because their ancestors stole it seems less a viable argument and less likely to continue. Mugabe, who may have come into power showing promise that a self-governed African country rich in resources and with functioning systems might flourish, has sadly devolved into a corrupt and violent despot desperate to hold on to power at any cost. The descendants of the original inhabitants from the precolonial era, along with Mugabe’s greedy and opportunistic self-appointed representatives, have begun to reappropriate the farms by force.

  Is this fair? Not exactly, but neither was the appropriation of the land years ago by the whites. Justice, some might say, was simply delayed. If I can steal from you, and you are powerless to reclaim your property or land, even for generations, does it then at some point legally and morally become mine? At some point does the passage of time itself transfer ownership? What point might that be? Ten years? A hundred? A thousand?

  Most likely any ultimate attempt at justice will be skewed. Maybe absolute justice, like absolute anything, rarely exists except in mathematics. In Zimbabwe whites will be forcibly removed, improved land will sometimes sadly go unused, and some reclaimed land will inevitably be wasted by the new owners, unaccustomed as they might be to managing such a resource. There will most likely be unscrupulous landgrabs and struggles for property among the new owners. But maybe, after some time, if things don’t get completely out of hand, a kind of balance will be achieved. Some will argue that not even a single white person belongs on this land, and they have a point. But with some compassion and forgiveness perhaps a few of the descendants of the thieves might find a place and a home and even some honor and respect. Almost all of us, of every race, have something to be ashamed of in our history. Sometimes it is close by, within memory, a constant reminder. Sometimes it happened generations ago, and we feel no personal sense of guilt or obligation, but then things change and what was forgotten or buried comes back to life.

  I would argue that it is increasingly hard for anyone anywhere to say, “I belong here and you don’t.” Human migrations have never stopped, they’re endless, and mingling is tough, but it can often be fruitful—a source of innovation and creativity.

  Will there be a bloody scramble for those beautiful ’50s modernist homes in the Vedado district of Havana at some point? Israel, Palestine, South Dakota, Tibet—all involve some appropriation of land by one group from another. Does one theft of land or property inevitably prophesize a reciprocal theft? Is delayed justice inevitable? Is it even justice?

  When does the clock for justice and reparation run out, if ever? Can the victims of the Stasi demand some compensation? Can German Jews reclaim their houses in Leipzig and in Berlin (those that are still standing)? Can the descendants of Russians exiled since the revolution return and claim their beautiful homes in St. Petersburg? The Chinese multitudes, tossed out of their family homes during the cultural revolution by Red Guard hoodlums—compounds where they’d lived for generations—can they now return? Can everyone simply make history go backward when it’s their time in power, and does the associated violence constitute justice?

  Is anyone native to anywhere? I think, in most cases, not. And maybe, somehow, that might be where the answer lies.

  Parallels

  Here is a frame from Hitler’s Secretary, a documentary that is pretty much one long contemporary interview with that woman. It is a wonderful example of how we humans can deceive ourselves, delude ourselves, and blinker ourselves.

  Now, of course, she realizes what she had willed herself not to see or admit, just as today many people (fewer now than previously) refuse to admit that what the Bush administration was doing was unethical, unconstitutional, maybe even illegal because their buttons were pushed with words like national security, patriotism, terrorism, democracy, small government, free market . . .

  Our ability to live in denial and hide from the facts in front of our faces is obvious. I can’t possibly believe that people can perpetrate the horrors they do without justifying them to themselves, or better yet denying their existence entirely—or, as Hitler’s secretary does, claiming that some eggs inevitably get broken to make an omelet. I think someone in the Bush administration may have used the same metaphor. It seems to me that this capacity for denial must have evolved out of a survival mechanism—some mental ability that helps one to focus and to exclude unhelpful news and distracting or diverting information when on the hunt or when courting. The skill and complexity of denial behaviors may have become absolutely necessary, at least at the time that they are needed—though sometimes later another point o
f view can be entertained and the truth confronted.

  Far from being a fault, a deficiency, this capacity for denial was, and still is, a much-needed survival mechanism—one that, perversely, makes us human. Do animals practice denial? Would a dog say, “Who, me, shit on the rug, are you kidding?” and, more important, would a dog be able to convince himself that he didn’t shit on the rug? I think animals can indeed be tricky and deceitful, but whether they can deceive themselves . . . well, we’ll probably never know. Maybe it is this mental skill set that allows us to be as single-minded, and therefore as successful, as we often are.