Stasiland (3 page)
We drive through Leipzig. The city has been transformed into a building site, a work in progress with some new goal. Cranes are picking over holes open as wounds. People ignore them, weaving head-down along footpaths and alleyways. On one of the concrete towers a large Mercedes emblem rotates, waltzing to the new tune here.
Miriam’s apartment is in the roof of her building. There are five flights of stairs, broad sweeping stairs with a graceful dark balustrade. I try not to puff too loudly. I try not to think about my damaged head. I try to remember when elevators were invented. When we reach it, the apartment is one big light space under the eaves, full of plants and lamps, with views over all of Leipzig. From here you could see anyone coming.
We sit in large cane chairs. Miriam, when I look at her straight, is a woman in her mid-forties with a cute short haircut, the bits on the crown sticking out like a cartoon boy, and small round glasses. She wears a long black sweater and pants, and curls her legs under her. She has a surprisingly big nicotine-stained voice. She is so slight that the voice comes from nowhere and everywhere at once: it is not immediately evident that it is hers; it fills the room, and it wraps us up.
‘I became, officially, an Enemy of the State at sixteen. At six-
teen
.’ Miriam looks at me through her glasses, and her eyes are wide and blue. In her voice is a combination of pride in how she became such a fiend, and disbelief that this country created enemies of its own children. ‘You know, at sixteen you have this sort of itch.’
In 1968 the old University Church in Leipzig was demolished suddenly, without any public consultation. Two hundred and fifty kilometres away the Prague Spring was in full swing, and the Russians had not yet brought the tanks into the streets to crush the demonstrators for democracy. The demolition of the church in Leipzig provided a focus for the expression of a widespread malaise the Leipzigers had caught from their Czech cousins. Twenty-three years after the end of World War II, the next generation was asking questions about the way their parents had implemented Communist ideals.
The Leipzig demonstrations were interpreted by the East German regime as a sign of the times, a cinder likely to ignite. The police doused people with fire hoses and made many arrests. Miriam and her friend Ursula thought this was not right. ‘At sixteen you have an idea of justice, and we just thought it was wrong. 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.’
The two of them decided to do something about it. At a stationer’s they bought a child’s stamp set with ink, small rubber letters and a rail to put them in.
‘You could buy that sort of thing?’ I ask. I know that roneo printers, typewriters and later photocopiers were strictly (if not particularly effectively) controlled by licence in the GDR.
‘Not after what we did,’ she smiles. ‘The Stasi had them taken off the shelves.’
Miriam and Ursula made leaflets (‘Consultation, not water cannon!’ and ‘People of the People’s Republic speak up!’) They stuck them up around town one night. The girls wore gloves so as not to leave fingerprints. ‘We had read as many novels as the next person,’ she says, laughing. Miriam had the posters tucked in her jacket; Ursula had a tub of paste and a brush hidden in a milk crate. They were clever—they slapped the leaflets up in telephone booths over the instructions and at tramstops over the timetables. ‘We wanted to make sure people read them.’ They made a circle around the town, and then they went straight through it.
The girls passed the Communist Party Regional Headquarters. Things were going well. ‘We just looked at each other and we couldn’t resist.’ They marched in and told the guard on duty they were there to see Herr Schmidt, on the off-chance that someone by that name was in the building. They didn’t stop to think what they would have done had a Herr Schmidt come out.
The guard made a call. He put the phone down. ‘Uh no, Comrade Schmidt’s not here at the moment.’ The girls said they would come back the next day.
‘On the way out there were these beautiful smooth columns…’
Miriam is convinced, however, that had they left it at that they would have gotten away with it, but on the home stretch they went one step too far. Passing a building where some of their classmates lived, they put leaflets in the letterboxes of two boys they knew. The next day, one of the parents rang the police.
‘Why would you call the police about some junk mail?’ I ask.
‘Because they were silly, or maybe they were in the Party, who knows?’
‘It seems so harmless,’ I say.
Miriam comes back quiet but strong. ‘At that time it was not harmless. It was the crime of sedition.’
In East Germany, information ran in a closed circuit between the government and its press outlets. As the government controlled the newspapers, magazines and television, training as a journalist was effectively training as a government spokesperson. Access to books was restricted. Censorship was a constant pressure on writers, and a given for readers, who learnt to read between the lines. The only mass medium the government couldn’t control was the signal from western television stations, but it tried: until the early 1970s the Stasi used to monitor the angle of people’s antennae hanging out of their apartments, punishing them if they were turned to the west. Later, they gave up: the benefits of soporific commercial programming apparently outweighed the dangers of news bulletins from the free world.
Sedition was handled by the secret police, not the ordinary
Volkspolizei
. The Stasi were methodical. They questioned all the classmates of the boys who had received the pamphlets. They talked to the principal, teachers, parents. Several days went by. Miriam and Ursula agreed on an arrest and incarceration plan: neither would admit anything. The Stasi arrived at a shortlist of suspects. Men with gloves and dogs combed Miriam’s house.
‘And we thought we had been so careful, thrown everything out and destroyed all the evidence.’
The Stasi found some of the little rubber letters in the carpet. Miriam’s parents told the officers they did not know how such a thing could have happened in their house.
Both girls were placed in solitary confinement for a month. They had no visits from their parents or from lawyers, no books, no newspapers, not a phone call.
In the beginning they stuck to their plan. ‘No sir, I don’t know either how the leaflets got there, no, it couldn’t possibly have been her.’ ‘But eventually,’ Miriam says, ‘they break you. Just like fiction. They used the old trick and told each of us that the other had admitted, so we might as well too. After no visits, no books, nothing, you think: well, she probably did say it.’
The girls were let out to await their trials. When she got home Miriam thought, there’s no way they’re going to put me back in that place. The next morning she got on a train for Berlin. It was New Year’s Eve 1968, and Miriam Weber was going over the Wall.
It takes less than two hours to get from Leipzig to Berlin but Miriam had never been there in her life. Alone in the big city, she bought herself a map at the station. ‘I wanted to have a look at the border in a few places. I thought: this cannot be for real, somewhere or other you just must be able to get over that thing.’
At the Brandenburg Gate she was amazed that she could walk right up to the Wall. She couldn’t believe the guards let her get that close. But it was too flat and too high to climb. Later she found out that the whole border paraphernalia only started behind the Wall at that spot. ‘Even if I had been able to get up there, I could only have put my head over and waved “Hello” to the eastern guards.’ She waves with both hands, and shrugs her shoulders.
By nightfall the chances were looking slim. ‘I hadn’t found any holes in it,’ Miriam says. She was cold and unhappy. She sat in the suburban train on her way to Alexanderplatz station to catch the regional line home. It was dark and she was going back to prison. The train sluiced between buildings, high up on its stilts. Buildings on both sides, flat concrete render facades with rectangular windows, five storeys high. Some lit, some dark, some with plants, some without. Then the vista changed. It took Miriam a moment to notice it in the dark, but suddenly she was going past high wire-mesh fencing.
‘I thought: if I am travelling along here, and there’s this big wire fence right next to me, then West Berlin would have to be just over there on the other side.’ She got off the train, crossed the platform and caught another train back. It was as she had thought: a tall wire fence. She got off again and went back, this time getting out at Bornholmer Bridge station.
Later, I looked up the Bornholmer Bridge on a street map. I had heard of it, and thought it might have been one of the places East and West Germany used to exchange each other’s spies. Now, I see nothing but this bridge each time I open a street map. It is like once you notice someone has a cast in his eye, that’s all you can see in his face.
A western train line and an eastern train line met rarely in divided Germany. At Bornholmer Bridge the western train line still swoops down from the northwest to the southwest, and the eastern one up from the southeast to the northeast. The shapes they make on the map are like figures in profile doing a Maori nose-kiss.
At Bornholmer Bridge the border ran, in theory, along the space between the tracks. In other places in Berlin the border, and with it the Wall, cut a strange wound through the city. The Wall went through houses, along streets, along waterways, and sliced underground train lines to pieces. Here, instead of cutting the train line, the East Germans built most of the Wall’s fortifications in front of the train line on the eastern side, letting the eastern trains run through to the furthest wall at the end of the death strip.
‘I had a look at the lie of the land and decided: not too bad.’ Miriam could see the border installation, the cacophony of wire and cement, asphalt and sand. In front of where it began was a hectare or so of fenced-in garden plots, each with its own little shed. These handkerchief gardens are a traditional German solution to apartment dwellers’ yearning for a tool shed and a vegetable garden. They make a patchwork of green in odd corners of urban land, along train lines or canals or, as here, in the lee of the Wall.
Miriam climbed through and over the fences separating the gardens, trying to get closer to the Wall. ‘It was dark and I was lucky—later I learned that they usually patrolled the gardens as well.’ She got as far as she could go but not to the Wall, because there was this ‘great fat hedge’ growing in front of it. She rummaged around in someone’s tool shed for a ladder, and found one. She put it against the hedge and climbed up. She took a good long look around.
The whole strip was lit by a row of huge street lamps on poles, their heads bent in submission at exactly the same angle. Overhead, fireworks had started to fizz and pop for the New Year. The Bornholmer Bridge was about a hundred and fifty metres away. Between her and the west there was a wire mesh fence, a patrol strip, a barbed-wire fence, a twenty-metre-wide asphalt street for the personnel carriers and a footpath. Then the eastern sentry huts stretched out about one hundred metres apart, and behind them more barbed wire. Miriam takes a piece of paper and draws me a mess of lines so I can see it too.
‘Beyond all of that, I could see the wall I had seen from inside the train, the wall that runs along the train line. I assumed that there, behind it, was the west, and I was right. I could have been wrong, but I was right.’ If she had any future it was over there, and she needed to get to it.
I sit in the chair exploring the meaning of dumbstruck, rolling the word around in my mind. I laugh with Miriam as she laughs at herself, and at the boldness of being sixteen. At sixteen you are invulnerable. I laugh with her about rummaging around for a ladder in other people’s sheds, and I laugh harder when she finds one. We laugh at the improbability of it, of someone barely more than a child poking about in Beatrix Potter’s garden by the Wall, watching out for Mr McGregor and his blunderbuss, and looking for a step-ladder to scale one of the most fortified borders on earth. We both like the girl she was, and I like the woman she has become.
She says suddenly, ‘I still have the scars on my hands from climbing the barbed wire, but you can’t see them so well now.’ She holds out her hands. The soft parts of her palms are crazed with definite white scars, each about a centimetre long.
The first fence was wire mesh with a roll of barbed wire along the top. ‘The strange thing is, you know how the barbed wire used to be looped in a sort of tube along the top of the fence? My pants were all ripped up and I got caught—stuck on the roll! I just hung there! I cannot believe noone saw me.’ A Pierrot doll hanging on display.
Miriam must have come unstuck, because next she got down on all fours and started her way across the path, across the wide street, and across the next strip. The whole area was lit as bright as day. ‘I just got down on my knees and went for it. But I was careful. I was very slow.’ After the footpath she crossed the wide asphalt road. She could not feel her body, she was invisible. She was nothing but nerve endings and fear.
Why didn’t they come for her? What were they doing?
She reached the end of the asphalt and they still hadn’t come. There was a cable suspended about a metre off the ground. She stopped. ‘I had seen it from my ladder. I thought it might be some sort of alarm or something, so I went down flat on my belly underneath.’ She crawled across the last stretch to a kink in the wall and crouched and looked and did not breathe. ‘I stayed there. I was waiting to see what would happen. I just stared.’ She thought her eyes would come loose from her skull. Where were they?
Something shifted, right near her. It was a dog. The huge german shepherd pointed himself in her direction. That cable was no alarm: it had dogs chained to it. She could not move. The dog did not move. She thought the guards’ eyes would follow the pointing dog to her. She waited for him to bark. If she moved away, along the wall, he would go for her.
