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Mrs May’s Chapter Running Sheet for StasilandBerlin, Winter 1996Opens with ‘I’. Funder immediately places herself in the unpleasant Alexanderplatz station, a claustrophobic, dirty environment. It’s repressive and she needs to get to the surface quickly. ‘…designed to make people feel small. It works.’ (2) Emphasis on smells. Antiseptic of toilets. First person met is the lady who works in toilet. Describes attitude of lady as ‘Berliner Schnauze’ – ‘It’s attitude: it’s in your face.’ (2) First reference to the Wall. ‘…it was one of the longest structures ever built to keep people separate from one another.’ Toilet lady would like to see the Great Wall of China in answer to Funder’s question about travelling. ‘In Northern Germany I inhabit the grey end of the spectrum: grey buildings, grey earth, grey birds, grey trees.’ Shift to personal. Pub session previous night with Klaus and his friends. Hangover elicits Funder’s past memories. Snippets waiting to reconnect. Recalls learning German in Australia. She liked the ‘sticklebrick nature of it, building long supple words by putting short ones together.’ Likes ‘order’, ‘directness’. (4). Comes to live in West Berlin in 1980s and wonders what went on behind the wall. Assesses her feelings for the former GDR – ‘It is a country which no longer exists, but here I am on a train hurtling through it – it’s tumbledown houses and bewildered people.’ Romance of the dream, horror of what they did in its name. Funder first visits Leipzig 1994, 5 years after Wall fell in November 1989 when it still felt like ‘a secret walled-in garden’, a place lost in time’. (5) Die Wende – The Turning Point – Leipzig the start and heart of it. Funder returning in present of 1996. Leipzig a city of shortcuts, crooked, passages, underground bars, unmarked lanes. She heads to the Stasi museum, formerly the Stasi offices to see vast apparatus of Ministry for State Security. Stasi – internal army used by government to keep control. Job to know by whatever means possible. Overt and covert. Obsessed with detail. Reporting on everyone. Irony that they failed to predict end of Communism – and the country. Files of 40 years would be 180km long. Funder observes desks left as they were day Wall fell. ‘frighteningly neat’. Shredding machines broken in desperate bid to rid of damning files. ‘Damp and bureaucratic’. December 4 1989. Photographs showing shock of demonstrators as they took over the building. ‘Large and small mysteries were accounted for when the files were opened. Not least, perhaps, the tics of the ordinary man in the street.’ (7) Funder prints the Signals For Observation document.Describes it as ‘street ballet of the deaf and dumb…a choreography for very nasty scouts.’ (7) an example of how Funder places herself in text…her imagination as well as what she actually observes. Subtle use of irony. Detail of wigs, moustaches, built in microphones in handbags, bugs, mail. Build up of sense of intrusion on daily lives.(8) The smell sample jars. Meeting with Frau Hollitzer who runs Stasi Museum. Surreptitious collection of samples. ‘The containers looked like jam bottling jars…’ Jars disappeared in 1989 but turned up June 1990 – had been used by Leipzig police. 9. Frau Hollitzer tells Funder about Miriam whose husband died in nearby cell. Rumour that funeral orchestrated to conceal reality of his death. Funder’s imaginings set in. ‘I thought I would like to speak with Miriam, before my imaginings set like false memories.’ Funder returns to Australia, now back in Berlin as can’t get Miriam’s story out of her mind. Works part-time in TV and ‘looking for some of the stories from this land gone wrong.’ Opening chapter sets the scene – the greyness, oppressiveness and repressiveness of the East. Introduction to Funder herself and her motives. Indicative of her writing style with emphasis on senses and detail. Ends with intrigue at Miriam’s story that will be become a focus of the text. MiriamFunder works answering queries stemming from television broadcasts. Viewer Post. Irony of letter from Birmingham, Alabama. No mention of those liberated from Bergen Belsen, just of ‘ordinary German people’ who had nothing but ‘when we came they shared it with us like family…’ Subtext of Funder wondering why they didn’t share with Jewish. (11) ‘Sometimes, I wonder what it would be like to be German.’Her boss is Alexander Scheller. Funder calls meeting. Uwe Schmidt the adjutant with little to do, always distracted by women. Funder raises question of the puzzle women in response to TV item. (12) Puzzle women recreate files shredded by Stasi. Letter has asked for item on what life actually like now for East Germans. Wants Eastern rather than Western point of view. Funder suggests stories about people who stood up to the regime or resistance to the dictatorship.(13) Scheller describes Communism as ‘an experiment and it failed.’ Calls East Germans a ‘bunch of downtrodden whingers, with a couple of mild-mannered civil rights activists among them…They just had the rotten luck to end up behind the Iron Curtain.’ Uwe tries to explain Scheller’s reaction. People find the whole Stasi thing ‘embarrassing’. Funder replies to letter saying that the station is unable to investigate ‘more personal, “point-of-view” stories.’ Man angrily writes back. … ‘history made of personal stories’. (14) compares to German reluctance to discuss Nazi regime for many years after. ‘Why are some things easier to remember the more time has passed since they occurred?’ Back to present as train arrives in Leipzig. Reader’s first meeting with Miriam Weber. Holds rose. ‘I know she has not told her story to a stranger before.’ Detail of building work in city, Mercedes symbol. Miriam’s apartment top floor with view over Leipzig. ‘From here you could see anyone coming.’ (15) juxtaposition between Miriam’s tiny, slight body and big voice. ‘…it fills the room, and it wraps us up.’Miriam becomes ‘ officially, an Enemy of the State at sixteen. At six-teen’. Pride in becoming such a fiend and disbelief ‘that country created enemies of its own children. ‘You know, at sixteen you have this sort of itch.’ 1968, old University Church demolished without consultation. Provided focus of malaise Leipzigers caught from Czech cousins (Prague Spring, Russian troops soon to roll). Questions about way parents had implemented Communist ideals. Police arrested protesters in Leipzig. Miriam and friend, Ursula decide to make their own justice. ‘We weren’t seriously against the state – we hadn’t given it that much thought. We just thought it wasn’t fair to rough people up and bring in horses and so on.’ Use child’s stamp set. Printers, typewriters, photocopiers strictly controlled by regime. (16) They make leaflets – ‘Consultation, not water cannons’ and ‘People of the People’s Republic speak up!’. Posted around town. Put leaflets in letterboxes of two boys they knew. One parent rings police. ‘It seems so harmless’ says Funder.(17) ‘At that time it was not harmless. It was the crime of sedition.’Shift to informative mode. Government control of press outlets, books and other media. Censorship. But couldn’t control television signal from West. Stasi question school. Miriam and Ursula agree to admit nothing. Search of Miriam’s house reveals some of little stamp letters in carpet. Solitary confinement for a month – no visitors or reading. ‘But eventually…they break you. Just like fiction.’ Tell each girl the other has admitted. Let out to await trial. New Year’s Eve, 1968, Miriam decides to go over the Wall.Bornholmer BridgeMiriam trains to Berlin. Buys map. Can’t see way over wall. (20) Happens to notice Bornholmer Bridge where wire wall close to railway line with garden plots in front. (21) Funder and Miriam share a laugh comparing Miriam’s antics to those of Peter Rabbit in Mr McGregor’s garden. (22) “I still have the scars on my hands from climbing the barbed wire, but you can’t see them so well now.” Encounter with the dog. Wonders why it doesn’t attack her.(23) Can now see the West, the cars, signs. ‘I did not see the wire.’ Miriam marks and remarks X on the spot where trip wire was. Stasi take her to Berlin Stasi HQ. “You piece of shit” says guard. Only then notices blood from her efforts to climb barbed wire. ‘She came so close’. The NYE fireworks continued in West Berlin. (24) Sent back to Leipzig and told her parents wanted nothing to do with her. Held in 2 X 3 metre cell. ‘But that is when the whole miserable story really took off.’ Funder comments, ‘…The Stasi let her have it.’ Sleep deprivation torture. 10 nights between 10pm and 4am. 25. Funder talks about facts of sleep deprivation. Stasi don’t believe she could get so far across border without help. Want name of underground escape organisation. How did she get past the dogs very important to them. ‘They just could not fathom how I got past that dog…Poor dog.’ Two Interrogators – older one varies from friendly to threatening. 26. What does the human spirit do after ten days without sleep & added isolation. ‘A: It dreams up a solution.’ After eleven days Miriam ‘gave them what they wanted.’ Gives them a name. Sleeps for a fortnight. Give her a book a week. 27. Miriam cooks them up a story. ‘It was utterly absurd. But they were so wild about getting an escape organisation that they swallowed it.’ 28. four men she meets in café supposedly show her map. Funder doesn’t find story as ridiculous as Miriam does. Miriam explains stranger wouldn’t ask another stranger if they lived near the border or if you were thinking of escaping. Relationships are based on mistrust in GDR. Risk of denouncement. 29. Miriam proud of ‘chrome dome with the remarkably small feet’ story. Two weeks later Fleischer returns to say story was made up. Says he will take story out of her file (later realises he was protecting himself. Torture such as sleep deprivation not official policy. Miriam could have revealed lack of sleep in court) Given 18 months in women’s prison, Hoheneck. ‘They were all crazy and they were locking her up.’ Charlie31. ‘When I got out of prison, I was basically no longer human.’ Guards torture her in cold bath. ‘Miriam is upset. Her voice is stretched and I can’t look at her. Perhaps they beat something out of her she didn’t get back.’ 32. Criminal prisoners allowed to abuse political prisoners. Barter system. Funder thinks of old Australian TV show, Prisoners. Never called by name, only number. Day starts at 4.30am. She works in sweatshop making sheets. Prisoners counted all day. ‘Prison left me with some strange little tics.’ Takes doors off where she lives. Likes open plan and stairs. First mention of Charlie, her husband. Incident where Miriam flees as she thinks he’ll strike her when he takes guitar off. Funder feels tired and wishes someone could have protected Miriam in prison33. Miriam released 1970 aged 17 ?. Sister takes her to a lake where she meets Charlie Weber. He pursues her through her sister as finds her ‘so odd’. Miriam says Charlie ‘the one who brought me round again.’ Shows Funder a photo. She has cut herself out of the wedding photo. ‘I want to ask but I sit tight’ says Funder.34. Miriam and Charlie live together. He a sport teacher. Stasi start pursuing him when he and friend swim near Swedish boat on Baltic Sea. Brought in on suspicion of wanting to leave the country. Doesn’t want to teach for state anymore. Leaves to write. Underground satirical magazine. Has small book published in West Germany. Miriam and Charlie subjected to house searches. Elderly neighbour stores important documents for them. 35. Young stasi man finds Animal Farm on shelves, a banned book. Cover of pigs & red flag. Thinks it safe to Miriam’s amusement. Miriam not allowed to study. Impossible to get job because of Stasi. Sells photographs to make money. She and Charlie avoided submitting themselves ‘to the sorts of structures and authority that we couldn’t trust here. We managed.’1979 her sister and husband try to escape in car boot. Stasi followed Charlie. He placed on probation, the others jailed. GDR lock up any potential protesters for WG Chancellor Schmidt’s visit. He cancels due to GDR concerns. Charlie under formal suspicion of ‘Attempting to Flee the Republic’.36. He and Miriam put in formal applications. Applicants put under extreme scrutiny. Irony that application legal but could be seen as statement that you didn’t like GDR. 26 August 1980 Charlie Weber arrested, held in remand cell. Visit scheduled for Tuesday 14 October after no call, no visits allowed. Monday authorisation for visit withdrawn. Wednesday 15 October Miriam told he is dead in matter of fact style by policeman. Funder tells how lip service paid to institutional democracy. But the Party and its instrument, Stasi, run everything. Even judges. Funder saw thesis title: ‘On the Probably Causes of the Psychological Pathological Pathology of the Desire to Commit Border Infractions.’ District Attorney Trost tells Miriam that Charlie hanged himself. Says he was called to cell immediately. Trost can’t answer question of how Charlie managed hanging. Later in day, says elastic from his trousers. Miriam keeps returning. Deputy says C used underwear. Then a bedsheet. 38. ‘The least you people could do is get your story straight.’ Threat to have her arrested. Not allowed in morgue to see Charlie’s body. Funder informs that GDR ‘sold’ people to the West. Miriam sees Herr X, Charlie’s lawyer. Tells her ‘insane’ to ask what happened to Charlie. 39. ‘Here, across the desk, was the face of the system itself: a mockery of a lawyer, making a mockery of her.’Tuesday 21 October 1980 Stasi tell Miriam corpse released from forensics for funeral. Miriam finds funeral already organised without her knowledge. Told needs cremation rather than burial. No coffins left. Miriam says she’ll bring one. 40. Man finds ‘one last coffin’ but body can’t be viewed. Takes flowers to cemetery to be told won’t be a laying out. Miriam threatens a ruckus if it isn’t done. Coffin placed behind thick glass, purple neon light. Miriam sees head injuries, no strangulation mark. 41. Miriam suspects body swapped over then. Thinks more Stasi at funeral than mourners. Van with antennae, telephoto lens, walkie-talkies. Every person photographed. ‘…the cemetery people started piling on the earth and it was too quick. It was just too quick.’ Miriam gives Funder part of Charlie’s Stasi file. All plans set out for funeral. Head of cemetery guaranteed Stasi complete freedom of movement for Weber funeral. 42. Report says ‘On 30 October we buried a coffin.’ Miriam points out they were discussing cremation after this. ‘Either there is no-one inside that thing, or there is someone else in it.’ Miriam applies to rebury Charlie in West Germany. Called in to Stasi every month. 1985: ‘You probably want to have the contents examined, do you?’ Miriam comments on their preoccupation with the coffin, taking it as admission of guilt. She stops obeying summonses to go to offices. She knows they had the power. 43. ‘It was silly. I stopped thinking I’d ever get out. They were playing with me like a mouse.’ May 1989, Stasi demand her to report with identity papers. After 11 years, she is to leave GDR on train that night. Illegal citizen if she is still there after midnight. 44. ‘Essentially, the deportation came eleven years too late,’…’and six months too early.’ Funder shifts into reflective mode. ‘For Miriam, the past stopped when Charlie died.’ ‘She is brave and strong and broken all at once. As she speaks it is as if her existence is no longer real to her in itself, more like a living epitaph to a life that was.’ Miriam is hoping that puzzle women in Nuremberg will find out something about Charlie in ‘all those pieces of files.’ She wants his body exhumed. Can’t believe he would suicide. 45. She has been trying to get criminal investigation into Charlie’s death, but twice authorities have tried to suspend it. Miriam been to Dresden twice to ‘bang on their desks’. Lack of action. ‘You know, they just want to stop thinking about the past. They want to pretend it all didn’t happen.’ Funder asks Miriam if she ever runs into old Stasi men on street. No, but she tried to find people involved in Charlie’s death. 46. After revolution in 1989, tried to find Herr Mohre at cemetery but he’d vanished. Found Major Maler and met him in café. Denies knowing name of Weber. Says just came because thought Miriam was going to tell him something. ‘It is amazing…what a revolution can do to people’s memories.’ ‘She is a maiden safe in her tower.’ Miriam takes great pleasure that Stasi ceased to exist, offices now a museum. ‘You lot are gone.’The Linoleum Palace47. ‘Miriam’s story has winded me.’ Funder exhausted and back in Berlin that night. Description of building. 48. Finds someone in her flat. Julia, her landlord. Taking bookshelves away. Funder been there 6 months. 49. Sees linoleum exposed in the morning. Funder notices how much is broken in apartment. Julia has left Funder coal for heater. 5 types of linoleum in apartment. Compares lack of beauty or joy there to East Germany itself. 51. Palast der Republik locked up due to asbestos. Former parliament of GDR. Hitler’s bunker nearby. What to do with it? 52. ‘To remember or forget – which is healthier?’Street names being changed in ‘massive act of ideological redecoration’. Buildings in tatters. Trams one of first Western things to come after fall of Wall. 53. Funder sees a homeless man. ‘a Winter King’. Baker has expanded now freed of constraints. Can sell luxury baked goods like donuts and cheesecake.Funder reflects on her meeting with Miriam and Stasi men. Places advertisement in Potsdam paper seeking former Stasi officers and unofficial collaborators for interview. ‘I am curious about what it must have ben like to be on the inside of the Firm, and then to have that world and your place in it disappear.’ Stasi HQ54. Calls start early next morning to Funder’s home. First wants money. Says he has learned from Kapitalismus. Was an ‘inofizielle Mitarbeiter’ who reported on family and friends, not uniformed Stasi. Says no to him.55. Arranges number of meetings in various locales. Feels stifled at home. Heads to national Stasi Headquarters. Was home to Erich Mielke, the Minister for State Security. November 7 1990 opened as museum. People now go there to read their ‘unauthorised biographies.’ Funder wonders what they are finding on themselves – why couldn’t get into uni, find a job, forbidden Solzhenitsyn book? Can find out names of actual Stasi officers and informers. Funder reflects on Mielke. Stasi 50% bigger than GDR army.57. GDR known as ‘the most perfected surveillance state of all time.’ 17,000,000 population97,000 Stasi employees173,000 informers. So 1 for ever 63 people. Plus part-time informers. Description of Mielke from photos. ‘He has the face and the lisp of a pugilist.’ Most feared man in GDR. ‘…Execute! And, when necessary, without a court judgment.’ 58. Background to Mielke. Born 1907, son of Berlin cartwright. Joined Communist youth at 14, party at 18. August 8, 1931, he and another shot police chief. Fled to Moscow. Trained with Stalin’s secret police. Decorated by Stalin.After war returned to Soviet section, safe from prosecution. 1957 becomes Minister for State Security. 1971 helped with coup bringing Honecker to power. Well rewarded. ‘From that time on the two Erich’s ran the country.’ Mielke invisible, Honecker’s portrait everywhere. 59. Honecker also youth Communist. Spent time in Moscow. Arrested and escaped from Gestapo.Stasi brief to be ‘shield and sword’ of Communist Party. ‘Protect the Party from the people.’ SED regime (Socialist Unity Party of Germany) wouldn’t survive without it. 60. Tour groups in museum. Demonstrators got inside 15 January 1990. Berliners called it ‘House of One Thousand Eyes’. Many hoped the old men in power would die off. Mielke and Honecker grew up fighting Nazism, then the West. More enthusiastic than other Eastern Bloc countries. 61. Mikhail Gorbachev 1985 (perestroika and glasnost) . June 1988 declared freedom of choice for governments within Eastern Bloc. No Soviet backup for GDR any more. Not culture of opposition in East Germany – better standard of living? Thoroughness of Stasi? Willingness of Germans to subject selves to authority? Funder says because they could ‘dump’ people in West Germany. By 1989 more dissidents & courage to take to streets. GDR elderly men ‘ossified’. Not interested in reform. 1988 still banning Soviet films and magazines.Miriam’s summary expulsion one of last purges in May 1989. 62. plans in 1980s to incarcerate 85,939 East Germans. Meticulous list. Written instructions for packing list on arrest of each prisoner. ‘They would be locked up indefinitely and for no reason at all, but they would have clean shoes, teeth and underwear.’ mid- 1989 more demonstrations. Restrictions, shortages, falsification of election results. August 1989, Hungary cuts hole in border with Austria creating first hole in Eastern Bloc. East Germans flee there. People on trains ripped up identity documents. October 1989, Leipzig at flashpoint. ‘The people went on to the streets.’October 7, GDR celebrates 40 years in Berlin. Gorbachev next to Honecker. His advice for reform ignored. October 8, Mielke activates plan for Day X.64. October 9th, 70,000 protest in dark with candles outside Stasi HQ. Leipzig known as ‘city of heroes’. 65. 17th October, Honecker ousted. November 8th corruption proceedings against him. November 9, travel restrictions relaxed. 10,000 flocked to Bornholmer Bridge. Guards no longer in control. ‘…it was all over, and people from east and west were climbing, crying, and dancing on the Wall.’ The Smell of Old MenNormanstrasse HQ, panic. Destruction of files a priority – westerners, those concerning deaths. Shredders collapsed. Irony of some being bought from West Berlin. Files then torn by hand, put in bags – ones puzzle women piecing together. 13th November, Mielke aged 81, addresses parliament live. 68. ‘Perhaps there is something healing about ridicule. It is a relief, anyway, from terror and anger.’ December 3rd, Mielke and some others expelled from Party. January 1990, Berliners built symbolic wall of rocks around the building. Wanted burning of files to stop. No violence. Eventually Stasi opened doors to demonstrators. 69. Denunciations against Mielke. Indicted on high treason, corruption. Held on remand in various prisons. Trial began 1992 but only 1931 Bulowplatz murder charges lasted. 6 yrs prison. Released August 1995 on health grounds. Still living in Berlin at time Funder writing. Honecker extradited from Moscow to Berlin. Trial suspended due to liver cancer. Died May 1994 in Chile. 70. Most of informers voted in favour of measures to destroy regime that employed them. Much debate about what to do with Stasi files. Finally some destroyed, some locked away and some opened. Stasi had infiltrated in other countries plus West Germany. August 1990 law granting right for people to see own files. But West German government wanted them locked away. GDR people aghast. Thought could be used against them. Protests. October 3 1990 day of German reunification. Newly formed Stasi File Authority. Only Eastern Bloc country to open its files. Funder talks to museum guide. Says she wants to speak with people confronted by regime. Guide gives her phone number of Frau Paul. Display of Stasi objects. Hidden cameras and microphones. 72. Funder looks at ‘revolutionary kitsch’. Sees 1985 plans of Stasi/army invasion of West Berlin. Mielke’s office has portrait of Lenin. Views video of demonstrators storming building 15 January 1990. ‘Their faces wore instead a quiet mixture of disgust and sadness.’ Quick transition from feared offices of secret service to museum. Video makes reference to Stasi using crematorium at Southern Cemetery where Charlie supposedly buried. 74. Psychologist who says informers had ‘an impulse to make sure your neighbour was doing the right thing.’ ‘It comes down to something in the German mentality…a certain drive for order and thoroughness and stuff like that.’ Cleaner comments still not real unity in Germany.Funder says, ‘All I understand is that it only took forty years to create two very different kinds of Germans, and that it will be a while before those differences are gone.’ Cleaner describes smell of building when it first opened. ‘It was the smell…of old men.’Telephone Calls76. Miriam phones. Funder senses that she is not wanting to meet again. ‘If I were Miriam and had told the most painful and formative parts of my life to someone, I’m not sure I’d want to see that person again either.’ 77. Poor quality TV reception. 3 channels. Program called ‘Peep’. 78. TV interviewer asks Yasmina the stripper if she stripped for Politburo. Changes channel to camera views of East German countryside. 79. Phone call at 2.30am. Klaus. Wants Funder to go for drink, hear ‘his song’. 80. Klaus the ‘Mik Jegger’ of Eastern Bloc. Klaus Renft Combo. Morning phone call. Man wants to meet. Thinks an Australian writing in English might be objective.81. He will have rolled up magazine. Gives her orders. Herr Winz. ‘…incredulous that this man wants to play spy games seven years after the fall of the Wall.’He wants to go to a ‘neutral’ place. Hotel Merkur.82. He wants to see Funder’s identity card. Speechless that Australians don’t have ID cards. Still have to prove identity so often in East Germany that Funder carries passport on her ‘like a fugitive.’ Sees she was in GDR in 1987. 83. Jewish party host in 1987 turned out to be an informer. Herr Hinz won’t show his ID. Brings out copy of ‘The Communist Manifesto’. Worked 1961-90 at ministry in Potsdam in counter-espionage. Has thesis on infiltration by NATO secret services. 84. Herr Hinz a member of the Insiderkomitee. Changed name to “Society for the Protection of Civil Rights and the Dignity of Man.’ Made of ex-Stasi men. Suspected they harass those who they fear may uncover them. ‘wannabe victims of democracy and the rule of law.’ Hinz says they try to present objective view of history. ‘To combine the lies and misrepresentation in the western media.’85. ‘I am here to tell you about the excellent work – the masterful work – of the Stasi in counter espionage. That is where I spent my life.’Won’t talk about himself. Keeps returning to the beauty of socialist theory. Funder asks how Herr Hinz is treated today as former Stasi man. ‘The foes has made a propaganda war against us, a slander and smear campaign.’ 86. Says people miss GDR. Much safer. Could leave door open. ‘You didn’t need to, I think, they could see inside anyway.’ Thinks Funder. He is waiting for second coming of socialism. Inscribes Communist Manifesto for Funder. 87. Herr Hinz thinks ‘This system is on its last legs! Its days are numbered! Capitalism will not last!’Leaves Miriam a message on her phone. ‘On some level, at least, I am aware that I am following a person who has been hounded enough.’ ‘Does telling your story mean you are free of it? Or that you go, fettered, into your future.’ Julia Has No StoryObserves people around station and in park. Homeless, punks, drunks.89. Julia in Funder’s apartment again. Came to water plants. Has box of old love letters. Blushes. Offers coffee to Julia. 90. ‘She is a hermit crab, all soft-fleshed with friends but ready to whisk back into its shell at the slightest sign of contact.’ Says there were no drunks before Wall came down. No homeless. Funder tells us that East Germans drank twice as much as West Germans. Housing shortages. Tells Funder she doesn’t look German. 92. Julia had Italian boyfriend. Funder surprised as East Germans didn’t travel abroad. Julia recalls black Lada car crawly slowly in front of their house. 93. ‘That car,’ she says deliberately, ‘was there for me.’ Gradually reveals clues. Car there because of Italian boyfriend. ‘Things can end so badly.’ Ended it with boyfriend on Hungary holiday. Cryptic clues. ‘At least I thought it was the police.’ Funder realises ‘long story’ is code for ‘no story’. Funder tells Julia about meeting Miriam and the Stasi men. Julia: ‘I don’t have any story of the Stasi, or anything like that’. She goes to leave. Funder reflects on the freedom of her youth. 94. ‘Please stay.’ Coffee and Funder makes a meal. Both born 1966. Julia 23 when Wall fell. She is studying obscure Eastern Bloc languages at university. Funder curious about her inability to go forward. 95. Julia Behrend. Parents both teachers. Family ambivalent about politics. ‘We were an ordinary family. None of us had ever had a run-in with the state.’ But they knew what could be said in and out of home. Mother a practical woman who said children could be anything they wanted to be. Father sensitive. Wanted to better what he saw as flawed system although fairer than capitalism. He joined Free German Youth and later the Party as teachers encouraged to. ‘For his pains, his country made him a pariah and his life a misery.’ 96. Dieter Behrend spoke up at meetings. ‘He would come home hollow.’ Didn’t like acknowledging fiction as fact. ‘They sheltered their secret inner lives in an attempt to keep something of themselves from the authorities.’ Dieter suffered depression after retirement in 1989. ‘Living for so long in a relation of unspoken hostility but outward compliance to the state had broken him.’ Julia and family trod line ‘between seeing things for what they were in the GDR, and ignoring those realities in order to stay sane.’Julia fascinated by languages. Wanted to be translator and interpreter. 97. ‘I thought by facilitating, even in this small way, communication among peoples I could make a contribution.’ Julia writes letters in Russian, French, English and sends to outside world. Funder sees Julia as only part-attached to the world. Didn’t want to leave. Believed in GDR. Wanted to explain to others ‘that Communism was not such a bad system.’ Shocked at drugs, homelessness and prostitution in west. ‘I mean how is it people think they can just buy a person?’ Funder believes she is nostalgic rather than bitter about regime. Julia wants to keep talking. ‘…something her mind keeps returning to which she veers away from telling.’ The Italian BoyfriendAt 16 Julia worked at Leipzig Fair – an international trade fair. Meets the Italian boyfriend. He is 30 working for computer firm. 99. Visits her twice a year. Meet for annual holidays in Hungary. Phoned once a week. Write frequently. ‘He became her most intimate penpal.’ Together about 2 ? years. Surveillance intense when he visited. Overt. Always stopped. Boyfriend terrified. ‘I lived with sort of scrutiny as a fact.’ Expects scrutiny of a western foreigner. No phone at home so rings from grandmother’s house. Calls booked through authorities. “Night all.” To those listening in. ‘I meant it as a joke.’ 100. Julia says needed to accept to stay sane. ‘I mean you’d go mad,’ she says, ‘if you thought about it all the time.’Academically clever but authorities sent her to distant boarding school. Thinks authorities may have deliberately isolated her. Tapping pen on the table. School made students watch East German news each night. “Aktuelle Kamera”. Honecker always given every titular when he was referred to. 101. News always about government projects and targets. No western news. Also had to watch the ‘anti-news’. ‘The Black Channel’ – ‘Der Schwarze Kanal’ with Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler, the ‘human antidote to the pernicious influence of western television.’ His job to rip western TV to shreds. 1984, the headmaster makes appointment to see Julia’s parents at home. 102. Had come to get parents to influence Julia to break off with Italian boyfriend. Parents not happy about relationship but won’t stop her. 1985 Julia matriculates with straight As. Sits entrance exam for Leipzig university translating and interpreting course. Failed the political exam part. 103. Thinks fail could have been rigged but she didn’t know names of political parties in GDR. A family friend with inside knowledge suggests she’ll never get in. advises her to get a job. But Julia unable to get a job of any kind. ‘That was when it got hard for me.’ Always got interviews, did well but then rejection. 104. She assumes she was always double checked with Stasi. Enrols in night course as Town Plan Explainer (tour group leader). Experience at Employment Office. Told she isn’t unemployed but ‘seeking work’. Woman loudly says, ‘There is no unemployment in the German Democratic Republic.’ 105. ‘By no fault of her own, Julia Behrend had fallen into the gap between the GDR’s fiction and its reality. She no long conformed to the fiction. Loyal and talented as she was, she was now being edged out of the reality.’ Julia from then on ‘I sort of withdrew from things.’ Thinks she was depressed. Studies Spanish. Goes to local nightclub. Sister Katrin notices a white car outside for 3 days in a row. She knows it’s there for her. ‘She knew, too, that getting on with her life would mean leaving it behind.’. Meets him for holiday in Hungary. Her luggage totally searched. Boyfriend ‘so controlling, so jealous.’ Tells him it’s over. ‘Now Julia had withdrawn from him, withdrawn into her home, and withdrawn from hope. This was more than internal emigration. It was exile.’ Major N.106. Card comes in letterbox to renew ID. ‘There are some things –‘ she stops. ‘I don’t think I’ll be able to remember this. I haven’t remember this.’ 107. At police station, sent directly to Room 118. In the room is Major N. Minister of State Security. 108. ‘She felt fear, she says, ‘like a worm in my belly’. Asks her to explain why she isn’t working. Fears she may be sent to West. He again says no unemployment in GDR. Has copies of her letter to Italian boyfriend. Had received torn letters but ‘had never thought about it for long.’ 109. He reads out a letter. Julia and boyfriend wrote to each other in English. Asks her what they meant. Funder feels humbled. ‘I am outraged for her, and vaguely guilty about my relative luck in life.’ Asked Julia meanings of lots of words. 110. Major N works through all letters thoroughly. He tells her things about the boyfriend that Julia didn’t know. The make of his car.111. He knows every detail about Julia’s life. School subjects. Parents. Sister’s desire to study piano at conservatory.’ Said her father was ‘problematic’ but mother much more loyal to state. Tells Julia she takes after her mother. Ironic that they didn’t seem to know she’d broken up with boyfriend. Major N tells her they are ‘interested in your friend.’ ‘We would propose…if you would assist us, that we meet every now and again. For a chat.’112. Tells him she can’t as they split. ‘He wanted to own me. I knew if I stayed with him I would not be able to determine my own life.’ Major N tells her not to discuss visit with anyone. Gives card with his phone number. ‘He had shown her that with one phone call to him she could be in, or she could be out. She could be with them, or she could be gone.’ Julia ‘felt sundered, suddenly and irrevocably, from life. ‘It was as though all at once I was on the other side…separate from everybody.’ 113. ‘I think I’d totally repressed that entire episode.’ Alludes to ‘the whole 1989 story’. Funder comments that what happened to her was extreme. Julia thinks ‘it’s the total surveillance that damaged me the worst. I know how far people will transgress over your boundaries – until you have no private sphere left at all. And I think that is a terrible knowledge to have.’ ‘At this distance I understand for the first time how bad it was what he did in that room.’ ‘I think I am definitely psychologically damaged!’ ‘I think it’s worse if you repress it.’ Funder thinks, ‘To dig it up, or to leave it lie in the ground?’ 114. Julia reacts badly at home after room 118 episode. Told her parents and sister everything. Discussion about how she might live rest of her life. Only 20 years old. Realises she has to leave family and go to West. Has realised how dangerous ‘the good father state’ really is. Won’t become an informer. 115. Thinks of writing to Honecker. They believed Stasi and State were separate. Mother says to ring Major N and tell him Julia and parents writing to Honecker to make complaint. Has bad nightmares. Dreams of being pursued. Goes to grandmother’s house to make the call. 116. He demands to meet her at covert apartment in town. Tells her serious repercussions for family. Sister won’t get into conservatory. Going to tell his superiors. A week later visited at home. Major N and his boss. Tell them no need to over react and write to Honecker, no need to involve Berlin. Men ask for more time and leave. 117. ‘But when they left we knew we’d won. We had never really known where the battle was…but we knew we’d won.’Rare occasion when the bluff called and the Firm beaten. Next week, Julia is offered a job in hotel. Says she picked up box of letters to read as she is seeing psychotherapist. ‘I look at the box in her arms and know that you cannot destroy your past, nor what it does to you. It’s not ever, really, over. Funder senses that she doesn’t know all of Julia’s story. ‘No-one can tote up life’s events and calculate the damages; a table of maims for the soul.’ The Lipsi116. Hate mail received at radio station. Hate at the whole nation. Uwe tells Funder they usually respond ‘to those in a moderate tone.’117. Funder feels people might well have voted Hitler in again after the war. ‘Everyone, always, is claiming innocence here.’Get’s lift in Uwe’s VW Golf. Funder rarely in car, always uses underground trains. Speeds to sounds of Elton John. Asks if she followed up any of Ossi stories. 120. ‘Yes, I did. I’ve been having Adventures in Stasiland.’ Uwe tells her about Hagen Koch and Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler, the chief propagandist. 121. Phone number wrong for Von Schnitzler. Asks Herr Winz to help find him. Funder watches some of V-S programs on ‘The Black Channel’. It broadcast from East from 1960. Countermeasure to ‘The Red View’ from west. Power workers notices how everyone turned off sets when ‘The Black Channel’ came on. He became ‘most hated face of the regime.’ ‘Say sorry, Schnitzler’. ‘Schnitzler to the Muppet Show’. 122. ‘a grumpy old puppet throwing scorn on proceedings from on high’. Funder goes to TV archive building of shows broadcast in GDR. Uwe helps get her in. The two men at desk ignore her. 123. Funder feels she’s caught in absurdist comedy as men talk about her but not to her. Meets Frau Anderson. Says at least von Schnitzler not a ‘turncoat’ like others. He has ‘stuck with what he said back then.’ Funder picks up on her bitterness and nostalgia. Ostalgie – nostalgia for the East (ost) a new word. Frau Anderson still loyal to the state. 124. notes greyness, inhospitableness of building again. Talks about Communism’s gift to the built environment – ‘linoleum and grey concrete, asbestos and prefabricated concrete and, always, long long corridors with all-purpose rooms.’ ‘Behind these door anything could be happening: interrogations, imprisonment, examinations, education, administration, hiding out from nuclear catastrophe or, in this case, propaganda.’ Funder left with tapes to view. Watch first episode of ‘The Black Channel’. A ‘hygiene operation’ to cleanse out West German television. Next tape 2 people shot trying to escape over the Wall‘But what is ‘humane’ and what is ‘inhumane’? Says peace elevated by GDR to a governing principle of state. Funder rewatches, makes notes. Wants to see how this man ‘turned inhumanity into humanity, these deaths into symbols of salvation. 126. Next tape ‘In the Mood’. ‘Lipsi’ music. Funder fascinated by the Lipsi dance. 127. ‘And here it was: a dance invented by a committee, a bizarre hipless camel of a thing.’ Running late. Feels trapped in building. 128. Frau Anderson lets her out but Funder felt panicked by thinking she was locked in. A week later, Herr Winz gives her von Schnitzler’s phone number. She gets address. Von Schni-129. He is 79 years old. ‘..unmistakeably …’Filthy Ed’. 130. tells Funder 95% of what she reads about him will be false. She has said she is writing a biography of him. Tells him she has read books he wrote himself. ‘He looks challengingly in my direction.’Born 1918. Wealthy Berlin family. Emperor granted father privilege of adding ‘von’. Close to Nazi regime. V S reacted to wealth of Nazism and fascinated by Communism. Served in Hitler’s army in WWII. POW camp in England. Made broadcasts for BBC – ‘German Prisoners of War speak to the Homeland.’ Back to Germany 1945.131. Broadcast from British Occupied Zone in Cologne. Sacked by British admin for Communist views. 1947 left to Soviet zone. Told not to drop ‘von’ from his name. ‘Everyone should know that all sorts of people are coming over to us.’ Black Channel aired until October 1989.Tells Funder his whole life story. Won’t let her excerpt his life. 132. Becomes angry when Funder wants to talk about ‘The Black Channel’. Says it was part of Cold War. She needs to know about history. Says she is most interested in GDR. Recognises him as a bully. Patterns of shouting followed by bouts of calm reason. Says show was his idea. Insisted on one a week. ‘Today I could make one every…single…day!’ ‘That’s how disgusting this, this shitbox television is!’133. Hates ‘Big Brozer’ (Big Brother). Can sense Funder’s ironic tone. People locked up under surveillance in show where name taken from Orwell’s 1984 novel. Orwell banned in GDR. V S says ‘big television tyrant of yours’ involved. Rupert Murdoch. V S calls Murdoch ‘a global imperialist’. Funder asks about the two people shot going over Wall. He says people always went over near Christmas. 134. Funder questions him on whether he still thinks Wall was ‘humane’. ‘My question is whether today you are of the same view about the Wall as something humane, and the killings at the border an act of peace.’ V S screams more than ever. ‘It was absolutely necessary! It was an historical necessity. It was the most useful construction in all of Germany’s history!’ It prevented imperialism. Says people of GDR now ‘walled in’. They could go to Hungary and Poland, just not NATO countries. 135. Thinks if Wall had been opened a few years earlier, the people would have come back again. ‘He is a true believer and for him my questions only serve to demonstrate a sorry lack of faith.’ Says no point to question about whether things could have been done differently. But Funder wants to why GDR no longer exists. V S says he didn’t agree with ‘ridiculous GDR success propaganda’. GDR suffered economically. He says he is still ‘beloved’ today for his work against imperialism. ‘By whom?’ asks Funder. 136. V S now challenged to turn fact he is hated into fact that he is right. Agrees propaganda did distance people because ‘in such stark contrast to the reality.’ Funder notes how he switches from one view to another with frightening ease. Because he is accustomed to such power?Wonders why he didn’t criticise his own country. Funder says she criticises Australia. Doesn’t know if Mielke had a file on him. Says he isn’t curious, only concerned with imperialism. 137. Angrily rejects her comment about collaborators. Says only 10% of number of Stasi claimed actually worked on GDR population. Goes back to Mielke. ‘The Wall was necessary to defend a threatened nation. And there was Erich Mielke at the top, a living example of the most humane human being.’ Funder surprised to hear this about Mielke. V S says ‘I live…among the enemy.’ (reference to NATO bombing of former Yugoslavia).138. Says conversation now over. She gives him pin of Australia/German flags. Wrong flag for him. Not the flag of the GDR. The Worse You Feel139. Funder asks Julia for lunch. 140. Julia has just started to smoke again. They both ‘know there is more of her story to tell.’ Julia finds it hard to answer question about how she found it when Wall fell. Thinks she experienced it ‘more intensely’ than others because of ‘everything I went through around it..’says her therapist keeps coming back to how she can’t submit herself to authority. Always late. ‘I just can’t have structure imposed on me.’141. Note that Funder makes many references to apartment, windows, darkness, grey, brown in this chapter. ‘It’s hard to live in society if you can’t subordinate yourself to authority,’ Julia says, ‘particularly German society.’ Wall, lack of job opportunities to extend herself. Admits she was raped. ‘I didn’t know then what it cost Julia to tell me what had happened to her, and maybe she didn’t either.’After Wall came down, prisoners amnestied. Julia went back to Thuringen for a wedding. Man jams lift emergency button. 142. She went to police station next day but no sympathy. ‘Rape was taboo in the GDR’. Policeman did physical examination. Offered her no protection. Couldn’t tell anyone at the wedding. ‘There are no tears; it is as if she has no self-pity at all.’ Parents didn’t know how to help her. Man caught quickly. She can’t study. Afraid of slightest things. ‘She felt separated from everybody, again.’ Went to San Francisco for a semester as teaching assistant. 143. Had to face man at trial. Says she would kill man rather than endure trial again. Lived on her own in East Berlin. Wore loose clothes, drank to get courage to go out in morning…’until I was numb enough to be able to get out the door.’ Mother thought she should just get on with things. Julia distressed and suicidal. She wanted to die. ‘I could not see how I could go on and live a life in this world, let alone a normal life.’ Stopped eating. 144. Sister monitored her eating. Has done some study. Odd jobs. Convinced that rapist released in amnesties of 1990 by mistake. ‘The end of the security state meant the end, too, of her personal security.’ So Julia associates end of the Wall with the rape and trial. Julia thinks what Funder doing is important. ‘For anyone to understand a regime like the GDR, the stories of ordinary people must be told. Not just the activists or the famous writers.’ ‘You have to look at how normal people manage with such things in their past.’ Funder says she is ‘losing track of what is normal’. 145. Refers to Julia as ‘Tiresias on a bike.’ She rings Klaus to go out drinking.146. Hangover the next morning. Goes to swimming pool. Struck by blinding question: ‘What am I doing in this chaos anyway? In this chaotic city?’ References to Australian swimming champions and drugged East German swimmers. Pool warden tells Funder off for swimming. Only bathing today. 147. ‘So this is orderly chaos.’ Handicapped in Germany wear three yellow dots. ‘This pool must be the subconscious of the country: the mess that gives rise to all that order.’ ‘And I’m painting a picture of a city on the old fault-line of east and west. This is working against forgetting, and against time.’ She’s asked to leave diving pool. Leaves as too many rules. Herr ChristianStarts by observing beautiful woman with baby on train.149. Meets Herr Christian at Potsdam station. Big, black BMW. Takes Funder on tour to ‘show you some the places we operated.’ Sees the ‘Coding Villa’ where phone transcripts coded from intercepted carphones and police walkie-talkies in the west. 150. Herr Christian has sense of fun about what he did with Stasi. ‘I was never very ideological.’ He was employed at 19 during military service. Wanted to be a boxer with Club Dynamo, sporting club of armed forces and Stasi. Worked for The Firm. ‘I’ve always had am acute sense of duty to obey the law…and I thought it was the right thing to do.’Go to see the bunker for leading Stasi in case of nuclear catastrophe.151. Bunker contained everything to save themselves and repopulate ‘if they remembered to take any women with them.’ Guard tells them to leave. Drive past places where Wall used to be. Herr Christian now works as private detective. Doesn’t do marriage work. 152. He was locked up for three days for having affair. Dobbed in by friend. Demoted. Supervisor tells him, ‘Anyone can have an affair, but everything must be reported. Sent to work on building site for a year. Becomes covert security officer on Stasi buildings. 153. Shows Funder where did main work. Building at last stop on road before cars from west entered West Berlin. Job to hunt out cars that might have stowaway East Germans. Eavesdropping equipment could catch conversations in cars. Fuel attendants were informers. Camera in bowser. Talks about people smuggling as a business. Describes joy on faces of woman and child when they thought he one of smugglers in civilian clothes. Felt sorrow but says still a stickler for the law. 154. Penalty 1-2 years in jail. Liked wearing disguises. Liked dressing up as blind man best of all. ‘Yes, being a blind man is the best way to observe people.’ Socialist ManAugust 1961, new Stasi recruit, Hagen Koch, painted line where Wall would go. 21 yo. Honecker’s personal cartographer. ‘Welcome to the Wall Archive.’ 156. He has maps, pennants, other regime memorabilia around apartment. Happy to have Funder record him. Says had to be chosen to join the Stasi. He says she needs to understand his childhood to know why he joined. 157. Funder more interested in how they deal with past now all over. Koch says GDR like a religion he was brought up in. She thinks it a ‘closed system of belief’ that created own punishments. ‘My upbringing was so…so, GDR.’ His father put him on that track. Says for those like his father and propaganda of Cold War, the GDR ‘like a religion.’ Funder thinks disloyalty ‘was calibrated in the minutest of signs: the antenna turned to receive western television, the red flag not hung out on May Day, someone telling an off-colour joke about Honecker just to stay sane.’ 158. Funder recalls her Catholic school days and sister explaining ‘leap of faith’ required ‘before the closed universe of Catholicism would make any sense.’ Thought God could see inside you ‘to reckon whether your faith was enough to save you.’ ‘The Stasi could see inside your life too, only they had a lot more sons on earth to help.’GDR efforts to create ‘Socialist German Man’ and get people to believe in him. History taught as leaps towards Communism. Thinks of Koch, wondering if ‘instead of a diligent and orderly one; whether it would have saved him from carrying his explanatory box through life.’ 159. Details of Herr Koch’s life. Father, Heinz, born 1912. Father learned he was illegitimate. Big sister his mother. Ostracised at school, leaves, joins army in 1929 for 12 year term. Due to expire 1941 but WWII. Not back home until May 1945. Dessau where lived, given to Russians. Given permission to ride a bicycle by Soviet command. Used to pass on news. 160. Funder wonders why Koch telling all this story. A construction or confirmation of father’s innocence during war? Division of Germany after war between Allies and Russians. Berlin divided as well. The Western zone set about catching prominent Nazis. 1948 FDR (West Germany). 161. GDR established as USSR satellite state in 1949. Everything nationalised. One party rule. Russians refused American money. Plundered production. Everyone had to switch allegiance immediately. ‘And almost overnight the Germans in the eastern states were made, or made themselves, innocent of Nazism.’ ‘History so quickly remade…’ ‘This sleight-of-history must rank as one of the most extraordinary innocence manoeuvres of the century.’ ‘…or whether a certain time had been allowed to elapse before things could begin to be rewritten.’ 162. Starting a new country means starting with the children. Old teachers dismissed. New socialist ones created. ‘People’s Teachers’. Heinz Kock retrained as teacher. Elections always huge Communist vote. 163. Evaluation of vote where Heinz Koch wins mayoral vote. Communist candidate calls meeting and has Koch as ‘fascist imperialist army soldier’ for 16 years sentenced to 7 years as POW. 164. Funder shocked. Townspeople’s men in Russian POW, so right Koch should be too. Russian secret police reused some of concentration camps. Enke visits Heinz after month and says he can be released if quits Liberal Democrats and joins Socialist Unity Party. Herr Koch asks Funder what she would choose. She says ‘wife and life’. This is what Heinz does. 165. Lindau Communist Party have him where they can keep an eye on him. Hagen starts school that year. Father has to teach the doctrine of Communism. Villagers don’t want their children in Pioniere. (Free German Youth) as too soon after Hitler Youth. Heinz arrested. His own son has to join before he is released. So 13 December 1946 Herr Koch, first child to wear the kerchief. ‘This is how Hagen Koch became a Musterknabe, a poster boy for the new regime.’ 166. The American Beetle. Russians cut power and land supply routes to West Berlin for more than a year in 1948/49. American and British plane drop supplies. East Germans told the planes were spraying potato beetles. ‘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.’ 167. Believed as Americans had bombed Dresden and Japan. ‘I am telling you how propaganda works!...That is how I grew up.’ Rationing still. Children collect beetles in return for ration cards. ‘This story – of insects and sweets and the making of an enemy – is the story of the making of a patriot.’Drawing The Line168. April 5 1960, Herr Koch starts with Ministry of State Security.’ Mielke at his maiden speech. Picks Koch out and he is made director of Drafting Office for Cartographics and Topography.169. Falls in love with girl from Berlin. Stasi tell him she is inappropriate, ‘GDR-negative’. Her parents horrified he was ‘one of them’. They eloped July 1961. Funder notices calendar with nude torso. Printed after Wall came down for border troops. Calendar printed for border guards everyone assumed would continue.170. Koch supported Wall in 1961. Said West ‘robbing them blind’. Prices and wages lower in East so people wanted to work in West and earn more. Would then buy cheaply in East and take back to friends in West. ‘Something had to be done to stop people fleeing through this mousehole in the GDR.’ Also thousands leaving for good. By 1961, 3000 a day leaving. Losing skilled workers and professionals. 171. Head of state decided to build an ‘anti-fascist protective measure’. Funder thinks of prophylactic protecting east from western disease of materialism. Night of Sunday 12 August 1961, barbed wire rolled out. Daylight people found themselves cut off from relatives, work, school. Apartments overlooking border had windows bricked up. State of emergency declared when Wall went up. Koch ordered to get new boots. Inspects barbed wire with Honecker. Koch draws white chalk line across street. He, Honecker and others walked 50 km length of city border marking boundary. Saw protesters on western side. 172. Only 21 yo. Remarks on new boots and sore feet. Didn’t cross line when drawing it as was in love. Only married 3 weeks. Went back to wife like his father did. He had become a ‘Socialist Man’. Says he only person alive who can represent Wall from Eastern side. ‘The Wall has been ersed 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.’ 172. Heinz Koch lost his job after his biological father visited from Holland. Hagen hadn’t told Stasi about the visit. 173. Hagen wants to get out. Hands in his letter of resignation after father tells him story. Arrested for ‘Preparation and Reproduction of Pornographic Material.’ Funder surprised. He’d handmade some pamphlets for friend’s wedding. No nudity in pics but any kind of printing banned unless authorised. Koch had used typewriter at his office. Stasi could track individual typewriters. Didn’t tell his wife where he was. Search apartment and find nothing. Ask wife about their sex life. Told her her husband a pornographer. 174. Blackmail wife. Who could look after little boy. Tell her she will be arrested as pornographer. Only solution is to distance herself from husband. They show her application for divorce to sign. Funder; ‘I feel a mild physical shock.’ ‘She signed it out of fear they’d take the child away. Then they came to me in prison with this – this thing.’ ‘At that moment my world broke apart.’ His Party secretary wants to get him out of prison175. says needs to retract resignation and renew pledge to lifelong service. Gives him already filled out documents to sign. Koch believed divorce application by wife. Can be promoted without her. Funder wonders who thought up blackmail schemes in Stasi. Note her tone here. ‘When Koch came out of the lock-up he was deaf to everything but his distress.’ Wanted nothing more to do with wife as she left him in lurch. 176. Son, Frank, lived with her. He wouldn’t listen to wife’s explanation that it all a terrible mistake. But son tells him of overheard conversation. They remarried 18 months later. Disciplined for ‘inconstancy’. His files refer to repeated negative influence of Frau Koch.The PlateHeinz Koch died 1985. Hagen not allowed to attend father’s funeral as his sister, who lived in West, given permission. ‘This was more than he could take.’ Heinz transfers out of Stasi into regular army. Realises he was interchangeable. 178. He would leave no mark. Takes plate pinned on wall. ‘My little private revenge…That plate was all I had the courage for.’3 weeks later, old Stasi section head comes to collect plate. Koch denies taking it. Commandant establishes ‘Working Group on Plate Re-Procurement’. Koch summoned for interview. Hides plate in kitchen. 179. District Attorney visits. After Wall comes down, Koch retrieves plate from behind sink pipe and pins up in study. ‘Now it was a real trophy.’1993 interviewed by TV crew. Ask him why he establishes Wall archive. Cameraman stops filming as plate reflecting in his lens. Koch refuses. Tells them they can move anything else but not that plate. Interviewer puzzled. 180. Tells story of plate to interviewer with camera rolling. Program broadcast. Several days later two men come for plate. Group set up to oversee fire sale on East German state owned enterprises. Tell him plate rightfully property of GDR. ‘We are charged with its collection.’ Tells them to get out. Court order comes in mail. Criminal proceedings issued. 181. Two men return to say allegations of theft withdrawn. Plate worth 16 marks. Offence occurred beyond Statute of Limitations. But new proceedings for perjury. The affidavit Koch swore in 1985. Allegations did some damage. Wife lost her job. Rumours of Koch as thief, liar, perjurer. 182. ‘You know though, it was worth it. All the courage I had is in that plate.’ Anna leaves message on Miriam’s phone that’s she’s been having some odd adventures. Herr Koch gave Funder Stasi diagrams and photos of ‘border installation’ at Bornholmer Strasse. Made copies on his machine. She goes to place where Miriam climbed over. Has sketch she drew. Trying to ‘bring the past into some kind of focus.’ Garden colony still there. 183. Funder retraces Miriam’s steps. ‘I put my fingers through the wire, and hang onto the fence for a while.’KlausFunder goes to visit Klaus. Says she needs to see ‘a survivor’. Drinking.185. Wants to hear his story. ‘This room is Klaus’s life; it’s the inside of his head.’ Klaus ‘bad boy of East German rock’ n’ roll. His band The Klaus Renft Combo most popular in GDR.186. They listened illegally to music from West. Recorded songs to work out the music. Funder amazed authorities let them play Rolling Stones, ‘Satisfaction’. Klaus said none of them knew what it meant. Only one record company. Their lyrics to every song changed before they could be recorded. They took the ‘holy things’ of the GDR, army and Wall, and sang about them because they wanted to ‘scratch the GDR at its marrow.’A famous song – ‘The Chains Are Getting Tighter)187. Not permitted to play in towns, only villages. They lived sex, drugs and rock n roll. ‘I mean we really lived!’ Half painted buildings in towns – supposedly all Honecker could see from his limo. Shops mocked up with goods for his visits. ‘This society, it was built on lies – lie after lie after lie.’ ‘…there were so many lies that singing the truth guaranteed them both hero and criminal status.’ ‘Way too explosive for regime’ by mid-70s. Called in to Ministry of Culture September 1975 to play for licence renewal. Klaus has his Stasi file. Was offered a move to the west to get rid of two band members. 188. ‘I knew then, that was a death sentence for us.’ In file, Mielke asks Stasi in Leipzig why band can’t just be liquidated. Band too famous to handle so directly.File refers to amount of alcohol they drink, belching into microphone, saying ‘shit’189. Authorities tell them their song writing has absolutely ‘nothing to do with our socialist reality…the working class is insulted and the state and defence organisations are defamed’. ‘We are here to inform you today, that you don’t exist any more.’190. Klaus secretly recorded conversation. Passed tape to girlfriend, Angelika. She goes to West Berlin for day on her Greek passport. Puts word out he’d recorded the decree of licensing committee & it was now with radio station in West Berlin. If anything happened to them it would be played immediately. All Renft records disappeared from shops overnight. Everything reprinted leaving them out. Klaus says it was ‘just like in Orwell.’ Stasi put out rumours band has split. 2 members imprisoned until August 1977 when bought by west. Other 2 stayed in east with manager who turned out to be Stasi. Now called ‘Karussell’ and recorded Renft songs ‘note for note’. 191. Funder surprised Klaus not furious. 15 year hiatus for him. ‘He seems incapable of regret, and anger evaporates off him like sweat.’ End of 1975, he has nothing to do. Allowed to West Berlin with girlfriend. Worked as sound man in theatre. Pannach, their writer died of rare cancer. Suspicion that Stasi used radiation to mark people and objects it wanted to track. Other dissidents and writers died of same cancer. On writer’s manuscript irradiated so could be traced to recipients. 192. Reformed Klaus Renft Combo. Last track on their CD is 1975 recording of interchange saying they no longer exist.Says he coped as material things aren’t what mattered to him. ‘I think the Stasi people have been punished enough.’Thinks they might have a conscience. Funder thinks of Herr Winz, Herr Christian and Herr Koch ‘and the different kinds of conscience there are.’193. ‘I’m not that interested….I didn’t let them get to me.’ Funder thinks it ‘his victory’. ‘This is what stops him being bound to the past and carrying it around like a wound.’ Puts on video of band performing a song Pannach wrote shortly before he died. ‘I sing my blues for a manWho could tell youHow red the dreams were in the ruinsWhere the concrete towers are nowAnd do you want to know what’s leftOf that man’s dreams? Then ask the wallsOf Cell 307 in HohenschonhausenI sing the blues in redFor one who can’t hear meAs a child in the darkSings a song to himself…‘You can’t let it eat you up, you know, make you bitter. You’ve got to laugh where you can.’Herr Bock of Golm195. Funder receives another phone call. Says he can tell her everything about Stasi as he was professor at training academy. Taught Spezialdisziplin – science of recruiting informers…art of the handler.’ Tells her to come to his house. 196. Again Funder notes overwhelming brown and beige of his house. Even Herr Bock’s clothes. Says she can’t use his name. Stasi designed to defend government against the people. Irony of ‘Defence’ ministry. 197. Only 17 million people but each Stasi division replicated 15 times through regions. Stasi people put into theological colleges. Bock claims 65% church leaders were informers. Rest under surveillance. Irony that so many informers at demonstrations they made groups appear stronger than they were really. 198. Lectures Funder on four main working methods1. Exposing of moles2. Recruitment of informers3. Operational Control of Persons (Surveillance)4. Security ChecksFunder records Bock’s instructions about recruiting informers. Looked for people’s weak points to use against them as well if they said no to informing. 199. Goes through ‘allowable means and methods’ such as phone tapping, shadow surveillance, installing bugs, post interception. Says smell sampling only for criminals. She asks how he knew people were ‘enemies’. Once investigation, there was suspicion. ‘This was the perfect dictator logic: we investigate you, therefore you are an enemy.’ Bock says definition of enemy became wider as time went on. Law professors promoted according to finding ways laws could be expanded. 200. Bock says ‘too wide’. Then goes on to say ‘Too wide…to be properly carried out. Within available resources I mean.’Goes through qualities needed in an informer. Adaptable, stable character, honest, faithful and trustworthy. Adds that ability to ‘betray’ ‘not a great quality in a human being. But it was vital for our work.’ He claims same in all secret services. Funder thinks not. Informers paid a pittance. 201. ‘So why did they do it?’ Bock says some convinced of cause. Mainly feeling that they were ‘somebody’. ‘They felt they had it over other people.’‘Betrayal clearly has its own reward: the small deep human satisfaction of having one up on someone else.. It is the psychology of the mistress, and this regime used it as fuel.’ Bock is now a ‘business adviser’. Says he works for West German firms coming to buy up East German assets. He mediates. Says Easterners wary of Westerners. 202. Funder says most Stasi men found work after Wall came down. Insurance, real estate, telemarketing. Suits them. ‘We never thought, no-one ever thought, that it would all come to an end,’ says Bock. ‘It would not have occurred to anyone that our country could somehow cease to be. Just like that.’Funder fills ill at ease when she wants to ring for taxi.Frau Paul204. Guide at Stasi HQ adamant Funder speak to Frau Paul. GDR imported North Vietnamese workers and treated them badly. Passes flower seller. Detailed description. Flower stall a front for black market cigarettes.205. Sigrid Paul. Early sixties. Home ‘spick and span’. She’s made notes on her life for Funder. Two pages titled, ‘The Wall Went Straight Through My Heart’. She tells her story well. Gave birth to first child in January 1961. Baby, Torsten, bleeding first few days, wouldn’t feed. 206. Sent home after six days. Eastern hospital couldn’t tell what wrong. Westend Hospital in western sector diagnosed damaged stomach and oesophagus. Life threatening condition so immediate surgery. July 1961 well enough to take home but needed regular formula and medications from hospital. Needed border sector permission even though no Wall then. Applied for permission each time. Frau Paul weeps. Night of 12 – 13 August Berlin Wall rolled out in barbed wire. She and husband awoke to changed world. Refused permission to collect formula/medicine. 207. Official tells her better if son died if as sick as that. Put Torsten on ordinary formula. Bleeding returns. Take him to eastern hospital. Admitted overnight. Not there the next morning. Doctors had him spirited across border to save his life. Try for permission to visit son. A matter for Ministry of the Interior. Shows Funder photo of ‘emergency christening’ in October 1961 when thought baby might die. She was issued day pass to attend but husband not allowed in case they remained in west. 208. Torsten underwent many operations. Artificial oesophagus and diaphragm inserted. Artificially fed. She wanted to see Torsten more. ‘My husband and I decided to attempt illegally to leave the territory of the GDR.’ Says she wasn’t ‘your classic resistance fighter’, not a criminal, not a member of political party. But did listen to western radio, RIAS.Looked for ways to leave. Michael Hinze, a student in West. His parents want to join him. Michael involved in scheme to get people out. He was 23.209. He contacted a human rights group. GDR tried to seal off every route. West Germans could board train in East Berlin. Ticket, passport, visa check on the train. Scheme turned an East German into a West German for the day. Matched in age, height etc. Altered Western passports which were smuggled back to East Germans wanting to leave. 210. Hid passports in air vents of Michael’s VW Beetle. Also brought over western style other bits and pieces. Remove clothing labels that said, ‘People’s Own Manufacture’. Xmas ’61, Michael’s parents safely in West. Winter, 1961, Frau Paul had permission to vist Torsten 4 times. Feb 1962, they plan to get out using transit route from Berlin Ostbahnhof through Denmark to reach West Berlin. 3 eastern students escaping with them, including Werner Coch. 211. Funder speaks to Coch as well who tells her more about the escape route. On the day, signal came that not safe to go. The group before them were arrested and jailed. 212. Stasi used new stamp as part of transit visa. The previous group didn’t have that stamp. Took all the passports home and burned them. She and husband decide not to leave again. Feb 1963, the 3 students stay with them. She trusted students and gave them key to house. Tunnel had been built from West Berlin under Wall to apartment cellar in East Berlin. It flooded so a new escape planned. The Deal213. Students waited at Frau Paul’s house for signal. Then complicated signals for rest of way. 214. Had to go to 45 Brunnenstrasse. Funder goes to see the place as just near her flat. She’s fascinated by shop selling digging equipment. 215. She goes into cellar of the house with a workman and sees where tunnel has been bricked up. When Coch goes to cellar door and says code signal, no answer. 3 Stasi waiting for him. Frau Paul’s husband saw him taken away. She doesn’t tell Funder all of this. ‘Memory, like so much else, is unreliable. Not only for what it hides and what it alters, but also for what it reveals.’ 216. Frau Paul shows Funder the Stasi report on the tunnel. 217. She and her husband followed from then on. 218. Two weeks later, she was asked at bus stop for her ID. Grabbed and shoved into car. Interrogated at Stasi HQ for 22 hours. At first she denied everything but then noticed they already knew a great deal. Wanted information about students who stayed with them. After further interrogations, offered her a deal. 219. Would she like to see her son? Of course she did but suspicious. They wanted her to meet up with Michael Hinze and take him for stroll in Charlottenburg Castle. ‘You can leave the rest to us.’ She recalls Karl Wilhelm Fricke who she heard on western radio tell of his kidnapping and imprisonment. 220. Realises they were going to use her as bait to kidnap Michael. Funder tells that Fricke a broadcaster and journalist. Agitator against GDR. April 1, 1955 drugged by Stasi agents and dragged across border. Sentenced to four years in solitary confinement. Nothing west could do to get him out. Immediately upon release, broadcast story of his abduction. When Funder interviewed him, he called Frau Paul ‘a very brave woman.’ ‘She would be theirs forever: a stool pigeon and a tame little rat.’ She decided she can’t trap Michael. ‘I had to decide against my son, but I couldn’t let myself be used in this way.’ 221. Funder observes ‘There was no right answer here, no good outcome.’ ‘It is so hard to know what kind of mortgage our acts put on our future.’ ‘Once made though, her decision took a whole new courage to live with.’ Funder describes her now as ‘a lonely, teary, guilt-wracked wreck.’ Her husband and the other 3 students also arrested plus others. Hohenschonhausen222. Frau Paul and her husband held at Hohenschonhausen prison for 5 months and then with students transported to Rostock on Baltic Sea for trial. Thinks because Western media knew about Torsten & authorities wanted no publicity. Never saw their charges or judgement. Their lawyer only given charges 5 minutes before the trial. 223. Saw her judgment file for first time in 1992, 29 years later. No mention of Torsten. Said she was a constant listener to ‘NATO smear-radio’. Each given 4 years hard labour. Coch got 1 year 9 months. Being accessory a greater crime than actually trying to flee. 224. Frau Paul takes Funder to Hohenschonhausen prison. She is involved with group trying to preserve it as a museum and has key. Funder emphasises greyness, lack of windows and ventilation. Shows her truck used for transporting prisoners. 225. Locks Funder in to show her how it feels.Prisoners never knew who else was there. All human contact strictly monitored for psychological purposes. Admires Frau Paul’s bravery in being back there. ‘But here she is in the place that broke her, and she is telling me about it.’ 226. Takes Funder to room where she was interrogated. ‘brown’, linoleum’. Small stool she was made to sit on for 22 hours. Funder notices the strange smell. ‘This U-Boat smelt of damp and old urine and vomit and earth: the smell of misery.’68 small compartments where people placed in icy water up to neck. Concrete cells that were completely dark. People kept in them with own excrement. Cell lined entirely with padded black rubber. Water torture cell.227. Funder thinks this contraption ‘Pythonesque’ and ‘too primitive for the mid-twentieth century’. ‘It was in offices that the Stasi truly came into their own: as innovators, story-makers, and Faustian bargain-hunters. That room was where a deal was offered and refused, and a soul buckled out of shape, forever.’‘Not one of the torturers at Hohenschonhausen has been brought to justice.’Frau Paul’s mother allowed to visit 4 times a year. Transported somewhere else for visit so no-one knew where she was being kept. Torsten kept at Westend Hospital. Staff took care of all his needs. Hospital his only home. 228. Letter got through in November 1963 when he was 3. Says he making progress with walking. ‘He has become the darling of the ward.’ He still needs stomach tube and weight too low. Short for age. Sent by one of the doctors.Michael Hinze always lived in West. Never kidnapped by Stasi and didn’t know they were after him. Only learned recently about Frau Paul and connection with his continuing freedom. Had seen himself as small fry. 229. ‘I’m grateful to her. But at the same time I don’t think I need to feel guilty – I don’t feel guilty…’ Tells Funder that Frau Paul and her husband (the Ruhrdanzes) very committed helping people to get out. Frau Paul hasn’t told Funder this. ‘The picture we make of ourselves, with all its congruences and fantastical edges, sustains us.’ She doesn’t see herself as a hero or a dissident. ‘And she is a criminal.’ ‘This seems to me the sorriest thing; that the picture she has of herself is one that the Stasi made for her.’Michael Hinze says he was moved deeply by her story. ‘I told her that her story moved me deeply’. ‘She behaved with such great humanity…But unfortunately,…,at her cost.’ August 1964 Ruhrdanzes bought free for 40,000 western marks. Not released into west but dumped in street in East Berlin with no papers. Frau Paul thinks because they didn’t use state lawyer. Only 9 of 34,000 bought by west, not delivered. News of Torsten 9 April 1965 from Sister Gisela, one of nurses. 230. Easter picture painted by Torsten. Received card from parents. Such a shame they can’t enjoy his progress. ‘It could drive one to despair, this drama between parts of a single city.’ Torsten comes home 8 months later. End of 1965. Nearly 5, ‘small and bent and very polite’. Doesn’t recognise his mother or know what a mother is. Thinks of how frightened he must have been when she hugged him for the first time. 231. ‘They made our boy a stranger to us.’ Frau Paul wonders if she did right thing in refusing to be used as kidnapping bait. Funder cries too. She meets Torsten. His small body, hunched, arms and legs seem crooked. ‘He does not seem surprised to see his mother has been crying.’ Not sure if remembers meeting parents for the first time. Confused between photos and actual memory. Funder asks him if his mother made right decision. Says he never ‘thought they made the wrong decision…or looked at them like the Stasi did, as criminals or anything like that…’ 232. ‘I admire them for what they did.’ He lives on invalid pension supplemented by work in electronic music scene. Allowed, before Wall fell, to travel to West once a fortnight, because of invalid status. Smuggled back spare parts for musicians. Well known to border guards. Searched 90% of time. Caught sometimes but consequences not bad. Stasi still try to persuade Torsten to inform for them. Gathered compromising material on his smuggling. Taken for questioning. His 1985 Stasi file says he is unsuitable as ‘participates in criminal activity.’ ‘I ask Torsten whether he thinks of his life as having been shaped by the Wall.’233. no doubt it has been. Has learned not to play the ‘if only’ game. ‘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.’ Funder asks how he does deal with them. He has no long term aspirations. ‘Whatever it is I want, I want it now, to experience it today.’ Torsten happy that little trace of Wall left. ‘It would remind me that it could come back.’ Thinks it possible could be reversed. He and mother agree they never thought Wall possible but it was. Never thought it would fall. But it did. People talk of Mauer im Kopf or the Wall in the Head.234. Funder realises for some Stasi men, they hope the Wall might come again one day. To victims a terrifying possibility. Torsten drives Funder to station. ‘Then he lets me out with a wave and drives on, crooked and crippled and living for the day.’Herr Bohnsack235. Funder meets her last Stasi man. She goes to pub with Herr Bohnsack. Feeling of invading local pub uninvited. 236. Publican knows Bohnsack. He is 57. A Stasi man who outed himself. Worked in Division X, responsible for ‘disinformation and psychological warfare against the west.’ HVA the overseas espionage service of Stasi. Its director, Markus Wolf, model for le Carre’s spymaster, Karla. Wore suits instead of uniform, highly educated, privileged existence. Could travel, knew languages, cultivated. All scorned Mielke. 237. Bohnsack a journalist by training. 26 years in disinformation. Much work against West Germany. Leaked information, manufactured and spliced recordings of conversations that never took place to damage public personas. Spread rumours. Fed coups about West German politicians with Nazi pasts. 1972, Willy Brandt faced no-confidence motion. Div X bribed votes to keep him in power.Tells Funder Titanic joke. He was told off for telling it at a lunch. ‘…the GDR wants the band that played as it went down.’ 238. Says the worst Mielke jokes weren’t jokes, they were true.’ October 3, 1989, Stasi party to celebrate 40 years of GDR. Height of demonstrations and unrest. Mielke made speech lasting 4 hours. He didn’t mention problems going on. They all ate delicacies not available in east. Kept being interrupted by Mielke as they ate. ‘The whole occasion was insane.’Christmas, 1989 Bohnsack’s whole division ordered to stay home and be near phone. 239. Had to camouflage themselves and go to office at night. Issued pistol, machine gun, protective suit, etc. Simulating a war situation. Playing war games. ‘And we knew the GDR was lost…so it was a circus.’Feared they’d be ordered to shoot demonstrators. Mielke told them the people were the enemy. ‘He said, ‘It’s them or us.’ Knew if they disobeyed orders, they’d be shot themselves just like Hitler. 240. Also fear, that if GDR lost, they’d all be ‘strung up’. But Mielke had already stood down by time demonstrators really got going. Generals didn’t know how to give orders on their own. They could not seize control. Bohnsack had realised in the September that files would have to be destroyed. Boss said he wasn’t allowed to shred as no order to do so. He burned lots in family’s old baker’s oven. Took him 3 days to feed files into the fire. Funder back to reality as publican takes more drink orders. 241. His neighbour suspicious about the smoke. Neighbour sings anthem of citizens’ rights movement over the fence. Knew what Bohnsack doing. Funder describes his face in detail. Says he was always a regular at this pub. Says regulars suspected what he might do for job. Recalls when Wall fell November 9 1989, his first visit to pub. 242. A man screams “Stasi out” at him. Tells publican he can’t take it all back. Took 3 years Finds out that magazine, Die Linke, had disk with names of 20,000 top paid Stasi and about to publish. Decided to ‘out’ himself first. Called Der Spiegel, western newspaper, and arranged to tell them everything. Edition had his photo, everything. Found it very strange. Hardly any of his colleagues talk about what they used to do. ‘omerta’ – code of honour that rules them. Old Stasi men still meet, using an agenda. See the media as their enemy. 243. They see Herr Bohnsack as a traitor because he went to media with his story. Death threats. Used to check his car to see if had been tampered with. Funder asks him if he has friends.‘Well, I have none,’…He looks at me with shiny, anaesthetised eyes. ‘I’ve fallen between two stools, you might say.’ Funder receives phone call from home in Australia at 3 am. Her mother has four secondary cancer tumours. Her language affected. ‘…she a woman of such elegant and slicing language.’ ‘Je suis foutu…’ ( I am fucked). Uwe, Funder’s boss, all kindness and takes her to the airport. 244. Leaves message on Miriam’s phone. Tries again and phone rings out. No more answering machine. Her mother dies nine months later. Funder feels ‘robbed of all the thing you were going to do in the future, but seeing at the same time that they were not important, it was simply the future itself, a bigger number, that was. ‘After she died, grief came down on me like a cage.’ 3 years before she returned to Berlin. Berlin, Spring 2000‘Berlin is green, a perfumed city. Funder hasn’t been there in spring before. Detail of flowers and trees. Lucky her old apartment suddenly available again. Agents tell her it mightn’t be very liveable. 246. Has letter she sent to Miriam from Australia. In it she writes: ‘I was trying, I think to get a perspective on this lost world, and the kinds of courage in it.’ Says she would like to meet Miriam again to find out if puzzle women ever found out anything about Charlie and that she has her facts right. Letter not returned but no reply. Funder emailed Julia. Now in San Francisco. ‘I was just living with too many things from my past that could come find me there.’ Working in feminist bookshop. Feels Americans honour their victims. Went on a ‘Reclaim the Night’ march.247. Julia finds herself more at home in San Francisco than her own countryFunder returns to describing apartment. Not much has changed. Sits in park opposite with coffee. Looks at statue of Heine, a poet, a free-thinker. Spoke of ideas catching hold of people. 248. Watches man feeding birds. 249. Homeless men meeting together. ‘Or perhaps reality has been so strange here that anything else is welcome to take its place.’ Funder talks to one of the men. He thinks Australia is Austria. Reference to ‘impure blood’. 250. Tells her about mushrooming trips. Names all the varieties. Funder names him ‘Professor Mushroom’. 251. Says he was tailor in the GDR. Doesn’t like Kapitalismus. Living costs doubled. Preferred socialism. Funder thinks some of people colouring the past in a ‘cheap and nasty world’. 252. Tells Funder: ‘It’s terrible the morals these days.’ He’s been mugged and robbed. She senses ‘an ache for a lost time when things were more secure.’ Complains West have bought up all their factories, businesses and even the pubs.His view that you didn’t buck the system. ‘I know this argument as well: if you didn’t buck they system, then it wouldn’t harm you. But, from what I have seen, it probably would.’She shakes his hand and leaves to her ‘palace of light and air and lino.’The Wall253. Funder walks everywhere. Descriptions of cherry trees. Meets drunk who says ‘I don’t want to be German any more.’ 254. Says Germans are terrible. Unclear to what he is referring. Friend at File Authority calls her to say they had request for Mielke’s file. He wants to see his own file.Calls Frau Paul. Active in organisation for those persecuted by the regime – prison tours and campaigning for compensation for victims. Says she was followed home by a car.255. Believes it an ex-Stasi man in Volvo. A lot of people who don’t want us to raise out voices, to fight for what they deserve.Mielke died at 92. Headlines – ‘Most hated man now dead.’ She calls Von Schnitzler who isn’t well. Says people spreading lies about his dear friend, Erich Mielke. His urn descrecated. Anger. 256. Funder goes to Bernauer Strasse where the Wall was. New museum with fully reconstructed section of the Wall. Includes ‘Death Strip’. West side original was covered with colourful graffiti. Reconstruction is pristine. ‘But this new one is a sanitised Disney version; it is history, airbrushed for effect.’ Museums shows dramatisations of escape attempts. Funder meets Hagen Koch. Offers to take her on tourist route.257. A trip following route of the Wall. ‘He is, once more, a true believer: the Wall is the thing that defined him, and he will not let it go. I think for a moment of Frau Paul, who will also not let it go.’ Funder wonders if Miriam and Julia will be able to let go of their lives shaped by the Wall. Koch proudly shows off his guard tower in mid of new housing development. ‘This,’ he says, proudly, ‘is my tower.’ After fall of Wall he went around screwing ‘national heritage’ enamel plaques into things precious to him: boom gates at Checkpoint Charlie etc. They go up the guard tower, Koch had tenanted to save it. 258. Funder notices poster of current Renft tour of old East Germany. Koch upset that words to mark where Wall went written to be read from western side. ‘I am the only person who is keeping alive the sense of the Wall from the Eastern side.’ Says people need to see it from both sides. ‘Herr Koch is a lone crusader against forgetting.’ 260. Irony of vegetable garden in ‘no-man’s land’ planted by Turkish family. Brothers fought and fence now splits middle of it. Find tourist stall that stamps passports with GDR entry visa. 261. Koch knows Gerd the stall owner, a reliquary of his country’s memorabilia. Gives Funder a piece of Wall complete with certificate of authenticity. Funder notices Koch giving the American tourists ‘his side of history.’Puzzlers262. Nuremberg. Funder discovered Uwe promoted to roving correspondent in Washington. 263. Stasi File Authority where puzzle women are is in Zirndorf village. Same compound as asylum seekers. Herr Raillard the director. Funder thinks of this place as the focus of Miriam’s hopes. ‘I want them to find out what happened to Charlie Weber.’Work started in 1995 on 15,000 sacks of shredded & hand-ripped files etc. 18 women, 13 men work as ‘puzzlers’. 264. Victims want work to go more quickly. Funder thinks of computer programs helping to put files back together but Herr Railler says ‘for purposes of evidence the documents reconstituted by computer do not count as originals.’ Adds that it very expensive. Funder observes the process by which the puzzlers work. 265. Staff checked to ensure no past involvement with Stasi. All westerners. ‘It is something between a hobby farm for jigsaw enthusiasts and a sheltered workshop for obsessives.’ He leaves Funder with some workers for coffee. Asks about their work. 266. Clues from sort of paper, typeface, handwriting. Man says he likes to know that what they find might give someone peace of mind. Gives those affected an insight into their own lives. ‘You would come to think of your past as landscape you travelled through without noticing the signs.’ Another man questions what sort of people would want to watch a family for twenty years.267. Even love letters opened. Wonder at who saw them, how many times copied. Shock at how Stasi used people’s own distress against them. Man tells Funder it’s not about individuals. ‘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.’ Reminded that some people did refuse to be informers. One woman announced in canteen that she’d been recruited. Deliberately blew her cover so useless to Stasi. 268. Mention of better social conditions in east. For example, childcare and lower rent. Story of couple from east who stayed with woman after Wall came down. Amazed at all the different varieties of ketchup. She says a ‘middle way’ needed. Realised don’t really need all this choice. Discussion about whether big mistake of GDR was forcing people to be ‘either you are for us or an enemy.’ Irony that those who refused to inform at time, files just closed. But people didn’t know that nothing would happen so hardly anyone refused. Herr Raillard gives Funder fact sheet on Project Group Reconstruction. 269. 1 worker reconstructs average 10 pages per day40 workers average 400 pages per day. 100,000 pages a year. Average 2500 pages per sack. To reconstruct everything would take 40 workers 375 years. ‘I am speechless.’ Resources thrown at reconstructing files a joke. It’s a ‘totally symbolic act’. Funder notices colour and brightness away from Zirndorf. Thinks about Miriam and her hopes that pieces of her life will be put back together in next 375 years. Miriam and Charlie268. Funder gets off train at Leipzig. Description of weather, city. Notices new building since her last visit. Modernised. Visits new museum. Is the only visitor.269. Finds TV monitor with von Schnitzler broadcasts. Old Renft memorabilia. Things that Funder has come to learn/see/hear about on previous stay. Funder annoyed that ‘this past can look so tawdry and so safe, as if destined from the outset to end up behind glass…’. Heads to Runden Ecke. 270. Finds citizen’s committee museum still exists. Not compatible with new museum because of funding and automony. Old museum more authentic. Place where files stored, people interrogated. Smell sample jars still there. It’s where Funder’s quest began. 271. Sees young girl and thinks of Miriam. Rings her and she’s home. Miriam comes to collect Funder. She’s moved house since last time. 272. Funder notices perfume of the acacias. Finds Miriam’s new building beautiful. ‘Everything is white and light and comfortable.’ Funder tells Miriam about her travels and discoveries. 275. Miriam says everything takes a very long time in this place when told about visit to puzzle women. The slightness of her build. She works at public radio station. Increase in ‘Ostalgie’ parties. ‘Things like this feed into a crazy nostalgia for the GDR…’ People too young to remember. She works with some former Stasi informers. Funder shocked. Miriam shrugs. ‘The old cadre are back in power.’ She declined to make Ostalgie program. One of ex-stasi colleagues tells her she can’t identify with culture of station. (Funder thinks substitute ‘nation’). Another reference to the ‘creeping nostalgia’. Funder asks her what Charlie like. 276. ‘Things have been put behind glass, but they are not yet over.’ Miriam shows photos. Funder doesn’t recognise the ‘exquisite, extraordinarily beautiful’ Miriam. Photo of when she’d just got out of prison. Looks about 12. 277. Miriam talks of effort to dig out the photos. She has a poem of Charlie’s. Describes Charlie as sensitive, reserved, took things to heart, an only child. Says friends thought marriage a catastrophe but ideal for them. Both independent and it worked well, possibly from her experiences in prison. 278. Funder realises Miriam is really pleased to see her. Continuation of conversation 3 years ago. Didn’t tie herself down by responding to Funder’s letters and calls. M & C applied to leave. Harassed by Stasi. Followed. Charlie imprisoned then cards arrived calling him to room 111 at Dimitroffstrasse, the police building. One time he never returned. Funder asks about her wish to exhume the coffin. DA’s office just want to cover up everything that happened then. Don’t want to pursue Stasi. Funder ponders if because many of colleagues now were Stasi. The judge who signed Charlie’s arrest warrant is still on the bench. 279. One development. Witness heard commotion in Charlie’s cell. Guard called others who came running. DA tell Miriam then another witness ‘credibly assured’ had heard nothing. M has lost faith in investigation. Sent all her files to Minister of Justice but no response. She still hopes for puzzlers. Funder asks her what she thinks happened that day. Thinks they roughed him up and he hit his head against the wall. 280. ‘For now, though, this terrible game of waiting keeps her suspended from her life with Charlie, still in contact. And underneath the need to know is the need for justice.’ Feels the world won’t be right until M gets justice. Funder stays for meal and the night. Mother has become ‘a social climber’, her sister a dentist in same building, father died of cancer in early 70s. Funder spots old puppet. During night she sees Miriam asleep on living room floor ‘in loose white pyjamas with a blindfold across her eyes.’ ‘She’s so slender and crumpled her whole body nearly fits onto it, strings cut, in the spotlight.’ 281. M takes Funder to station where she copies Charlie’s poem. ‘Then Miriam waves and walks away, straightbacked into the sunlight.’ Funder likes trains, their rhythm and freedom of being suspended between two places. Reads Charlie’s poem. Thinks of Charlie Weber, ‘now of this land.’ ‘And I think of Miriam, a maiden blowing smoke in her tower. Sometimes she can hear and smell them, but for now the beasts are all in their cages.’Text ends with focus on colour, brightness, grass, life moving on. Notices playground near her apartment for the first time. ................
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