Stasiland (30 page)

The strangest cell contained a wooden yoke arrangement, something like an apparatus at a county fair. The prisoner would be nearly bent double, head and hands through the slots and the yoke closed over them. In front of his head hung a metal bucket of water like a nosebag. The floor and walls were black, and lined with spiky ridges. Frau Paul explained that the prisoner would be barefoot, yoked into position. The ridges would bite into the soles of his feet. Then water dripped from a pipe hanging through the ceiling, onto his head. Eventually, the prisoner would be in such pain that he would lose consciousness, and his head would slump. It would hit the water in the bucket in front of him, and he would either revive into pain again, or drown.

There was nothing funny about this cell and there was nothing funny about standing in it with Frau Paul, feeling the spiky floor through my boots and touching the coarse yoke and imagining being bent nearly double in the dark, in pain and drifting between consciousness and drowning. But there was something barnyard about it. It seemed too primitive for the mid-twentieth century and too primitive for here. This contraption belonged further east and further back in time, in some Pythonesque sideshow of history.

But there was something even more chilling about the office with the little stool Frau Paul was made to sit on, and the ordinary administrative desk and chair where the interrogator sat over her. 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 Hohenschönhausen has been brought to justice.

Four times a year Frau Paul received permission to have a visitor (mostly her mother) but she’d be transported elsewhere for it so that neither she nor her visitor would know where in the GDR she was being kept. Mail was sent to another Stasi address, and brought to her opened. She had been taken out of time, and out of place.

Torsten remained over the years at the Westend Hospital. The nurses and doctors fed him through tubes and gave him medicine and changed his nappies. They sang him songs, they taught him to speak, and they tried to teach him to walk. The hospital was the only home and its staff the only people Torsten Rührdanz knew. This is one of the letters that got through to his parents. It was written in November 1963 when Torsten was nearly three years old:

Dear Mr and Mrs Rührdanz,

I learnt that you would like to be informed as to Torsten’s health, which I can very well understand. Generally he is cheerful, making progress with his walking, and happy. He has become the darling of the ward. Of course from time to time we still have difficulties to overcome, which means that, unfortunately, discharge from hospital is not possible in the foreseeable future. We cannot manage to feed him without a stomach tube, because as soon as he eats normally he is in pain. His weight is still unsatisfactory, at 7670 g. His height is also significantly less than the norm for his age. His diarrhoea has virtually ceased though. There is nothing left for us but to continue as we have been, and in the hope that his stomach will gradually widen and that the problems at the end of his diaphragm will mend.

You can be assured that everything possible will continue to be done for your child. I will write again before Christmas.

Yours sincerely,

Prof. Dr L.

Michael Hinze has always lived in the west. He was never kidnapped by the Stasi; he didn’t even know that they were after him. And, until recently, he had no idea that Frau Paul was in any way connected with his continuing freedom. ‘I found out about it a couple of years ago, after the Wall fell. For years I’d heard nothing from the Rührdanzes. Then they called me,’ he says. ‘All this story with the blackmailing and the plans to kidnap me—I knew nothing about that at all.’ He is slightly uncomfortable with the whole idea. ‘I mean I always saw myself as small fry. I just put people together, got passports. I knew it was illegal under GDR law, but…’ he trails off. He didn’t really think it through. Even if he had, how could he have imagined that someone else was being asked to pay a price for his liberty? ‘She’s a very courageous woman,’ Hinze continues, ‘I have a great deal of respect for her. I’m also grateful to her. But at the same time I don’t think I need to feel guilty—I don’t feel guilty, I mean, I was just lucky that I didn’t fall into the clutches of the Stasi. That way, or by other means.’ He thinks that if they had really wanted him they could have got him, and this is probably true.

‘She was very active in the whole thing,’ Hinze says admiringly. ‘The Rührdanzes used to marshal the people from Halle or Dresden or wherever who wanted to get out, and help them. They were very committed people.’

Frau Paul has told me none of this, although it might be something another person would be proud of. The picture we make of ourselves, with all its congruences and fantastical edges, sustains us. Frau Paul does not picture herself as a hero, or a dissident. She is a dental technician and a mother with a terrible family history. 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.

‘I told her that her story moved me deeply,’ Hinze says. ‘And that I don’t know many people who would not have betrayed me. I said that there are not many people who have the courage she did. To behave with’—he’s looking for a way to describe it—‘with such great humanity, can I say. She behaved with such great humanity.’ We are both silent for a moment. ‘But unfortunately,’ he says, ‘at her cost.’

In August 1964 the Rührdanzes were bought free for 40,000 western marks. But instead of being released into the west to be with their baby, they were dumped on the street in East Berlin with no papers. Frau Paul puts this down to their refusal of Dr Vogel as lawyer. Of the estimated 34,000 people bought free between 1963 and 1989 there are at this stage only nine documented cases of such cruelty, where the west paid hard currency and the east did not deliver the people whose freedom had been purchased.

Torsten was still living in the Westend Hospital. On 9 April 1965 when he was four years old Frau Paul had news of him from Sister Gisela, one of the nurses.

We all wish you and your husband a very healthy and happy Easter. Torsten has painted you an Easter picture, all by himself—brown Easter bunnies and a nest with colourful eggs. He said, ‘That is for my mummy, she’ll like that!’ Yesterday we received your lovely card, and we thank you on behalf of Torsten. He was so happy, we had to read it out to him straight away. He never lets it out of his little hands, and keeps looking at the Sandman on it…

My dear Mrs Rührdanz, Torsten is really coming along now. It is such a shame that you can’t be here to enjoy his progress. It could drive one to despair, this drama between parts of a single city!! But I don’t want to write about that.

Better some more news of Torsten. He weighs 9450g now and is 84cm tall. He speaks and understands everything like a six year old. He doesn’t miss a trick! He told me I should write you that he’s coming home soon to Kaulsdorf. Torsten can walk 5 m by himself! Apart from that he wheels around all afternoon about the station. Dear Mrs Rührdanz, every best wish from us and one thousand kisses from Torsten—for his Daddy too.

They waited another eight months before Torsten was well enough to be released from the Westend Hospital. When he came home to East Germany he was nearly five, small and bent and very polite.

‘Of course he didn’t recognise me as his mother,’ Frau Paul says. ‘He didn’t know what a mother was. He only knew the sterile atmosphere of the hospital and the staff there, the doctors, the sisters and the other personnel. Even though they all dealt very lovingly with him and they tried’—she’s crying now, hard—‘tried to create for him in whatever ways they could something like a family atmosphere, it just wasn’t his home. He was frightened. And when I…’ She has to stop because she can’t get the words out. ‘And when I took him in my arms for the first time and held him to me he must have thought, “What does this old lady want with me? She says she is my mother, but what is that, a mother?” He addressed us with the formal “
Sie
”. He would say, “Mother, would you kindly be able to make me a sandwich, I’m hungry,” or “Father, would you mind lifting me onto the chair, I can’t manage,” and this, this terrible distance. They made our boy a stranger to us.’ She lowers her voice. ‘And it was then I fought with myself the most: did I decide right in the interrogation when I refused to be used as bait for a kidnapping? Or should I have come to my son?’ She is weeping and weeping.

I’m upset too. It’s the small things that make you cry. The idea of nurses and doctors in West Berlin trying to tell a little boy what a family was, to prepare him for one. The idea that in justifying her decision of more than thirty years ago to me here today, there is no peace for Frau Paul. I am scrabbling for tissues which seem to exist only in various embarrassing degrees of decay in the bottom of my backpack. I don’t even think about Torsten.

The doorbell sounds, and Frau Paul gets up to answer it. She comes back into the room with a man whose age is hard to tell, but I know immediately it’s him. When I stand up to shake hands I tower over him and his hand fits inside mine. His body is small and hunched and his arms and legs seem crooked, spidery. His head seems small too. He has bright deep-set dark eyes and prominent cheekbones. He’s wearing a jacket with a couple of badges on the lapel, casual cool. ‘Pleased to meet you,’ Torsten says genially, and he sinks down lopsided into the couch next to me. He does not seem surprised to see his mother has been crying.

Torsten is not sure whether he remembers meeting his parents for the first time. ‘I’ve seen the photos,’ he says, ‘and it’s hard to distinguish what I remember from what I’ve since seen. I know from being told that I addressed them with the formal “Sie” because I didn’t know what a parent was. Sometimes I have an inkling of the meeting, in the dark past like a
fata morgana
, but not consciously so, no.’ His voice is very soft.

I want to know if he thinks his mother made the right decision not to come to him, so I ask him directly. He is relaxed. ‘I have never looked at my parents and thought they made the wrong decision,’ he says, ‘or looked at them like the Stasi did, as criminals or anything like that—quite the opposite: I admire them for what they did.’ He seems to have learned to contain both longing and regret. ‘It doesn’t occur to me,’ he says, ‘to think that perhaps they might have done things differently and things might have worked out differently.’

‘But then again,’ I offer, ‘I suppose one visit wouldn’t have made much difference—’ I wasn’t trying to take any of her heroism away. I was trying to find a way of thinking about her choice that wasn’t such a drastic abandonment of him. But he gently cuts me off and thinks of it from his mother’s point of view. ‘Well yes,’ he says, ‘but if you think someone is dying you probably want to see them just one more time before they do. That would make a difference to you, even if it doesn’t change anything.’

Torsten supplements his invalid pension by working with bands in the electronic music scene. It is something he has done, in one form or another, since before the Wall fell. Back then, because of his invalid status, he was permitted to travel to the west once a fortnight. He would be commissioned by rock musicians in the GDR to smuggle back spare parts for them. Torsten was well known to the border guards, and was searched ‘about 90 per cent of the time’, he says, smiling. ‘I was frequently caught, but luckily the consequences weren’t so bad for me. They did accuse me though, of “dangerous trade with musical instruments and musical electronics,”’ he laughs.

Despite his family history, the Stasi went after Torsten to see if he would inform for them. First, they gathered compromising material on his smuggling. Then they brought him in for questioning. Torsten went mum, so the same material that would have been used to pressure him into informing became instead evidence of his unsuitability for it. A final report of 17 June 1985 is two sentences long. ‘R. is not suited for an unofficial collaboration with the Ministry. (R. participates in criminal activity).’ It was clearly not an option to write, ‘R. refuses, on principle, to collaborate.’

I ask Torsten whether he thinks of his life as having been shaped by the Wall.

‘I find it hard to tell exactly, in what sense my life has been shaped by the Wall—how it might have been different otherwise,’ he says, ‘but that it has been, I have no doubt.’

He has learned not to play the ‘if only’ game: if only there had been no Wall I might not have relapsed; I might have grown up with my parents; they might not have gone to prison; I might have had a healthy body, a job, a partner. He shifts in his seat to look at me straight on. ‘There are no people who are whole,’ he says. ‘Everyone has issues of their own to deal with. Mine might be a little harder, but the main thing is how one deals with them.’

‘And how do you?’ I am facing him, looking at his twisted body, and listening to him breathe through the tubes they placed inside him.

‘Well, it is an issue for me. I think life can end much too quickly, so I have no long-term aspirations. Whatever it is I want, I want it now, to experience it today. I have no patience for saving money, or building up some kind of enterprise. It makes me nervous. Other people say, “You have time, you’re still relatively young.” But I’m always so afraid that things can come to an end at any time.’ He pauses. ‘Or that politically, too, it could all change again, and then I’d have no chance to experience certain things.’

I remark that for something so big, that shaped their lives so brutally, it’s hard now to find a trace of the Wall. I am about to say I think it’s odd to let everyone forget so quickly, when Torsten says, ‘I’m happy that it’s gone, and I’m happy too that there’s so little of it left to see. It would remind me that it could come back. That everything that’s happened might be reversed.’