Stasiland (34 page)
‘This was the death strip’—Herr Koch holds his arms out—‘but before that the cemetery extended to the street. When they built the Wall they had to dig up the bodies and take away the gravestones.’ He raises his eyebrows, ‘The guards used to get a bit spooked by that.’ Apparently, the border guards working on the death strip preferred no evidence of death in it.
Herr Koch is pleased to be with someone who shares his interest in the Wall. He is also, perhaps, even more obsessed with it than I remember. He seems to have lost the awareness that his is a particular interest. 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. Herr Koch starts to take photographs. I look up at the angel’s long face and I think of Miriam and Julia; lives shaped, too, by the Wall. Will they let it go? Or, will it let them go?
Our next stop is the Schiffahrtskanal. Herr Koch is excited, speaking fast. We park outside a new housing development. The apartments are fresh and brightly coloured. They are arranged around a courtyard in the usual Berlin style but, in a startling departure from tradition, there’s an original, two-storey East German guard tower in the middle of the yard. Herr Koch gestures towards it. ‘This,’ he says, proudly, ‘is my tower.’ For a moment he’s so pleased he’s speechless.
I gaze at the thing. It is, unmistakably, an old guard tower from the death strip. It has square cement walls and windows up high to see in all directions. On the top there’s a fenced area the guards could shoot from. It is hardly a thing of joy, but Herr Koch’s face is shiny with delight.
‘Your tower?’
‘My tower.’
He explains that at the end of 1989 in his capacity as a cultural officer with the Stasi, he took it upon himself to be responsible for ‘
Denkmalschutz
’ or the preservation of historical monuments. He found a lot of little white-and-blue ‘national heritage’ enamel plaques, and in the chaos of those last days he went around screwing them into things precious to him like the Wall, the boom gates at Checkpoint Charlie and guard towers. Most of them were pulled down despite his efforts.
This tower here, he says, gave him a lot of trouble, particularly when the developers came in to build the apartments. ‘So what did I do?’
I look back at him. I cannot imagine.
‘I found a homeless man, and installed him in it! And I gave him money and a job—to renovate the tower! They couldn’t pull it down because it was inhabited!’
I see that over the door someone has hand-painted an address: Kieler Strasse 2. We enter and, sure enough, a modern white-tiled bathroom is being installed downstairs. ‘Unfortunately,’ Herr Koch says, ‘my tenant died.’ We climb a ladder to the top, where the guards worked. The tower is crumbling and smells of wet concrete, but I enjoy the thought that the previous tenant, an old eastern streetperson, would have lapped up the view from here, where before the guards had watched over him.
Herr Koch says, ‘But I think it is saved now. They had to build the apartments around it. The tenants didn’t like it at first, but I’ve been talking to them, and as time goes on they appreciate its historical significance more and more.’ He takes a dustpan and brush, and sweeps up proprietorially before we leave.
We drive into town, past the Bundestag, the Reichstag and Potsdamer Platz. At a set of lights I see a bollard with a poster of Renft promoting their current tour of the old East Germany. I enjoy the thought of Klaus strutting his stuff, blossomed once more into his rock star being. We stop in an ordinary street.
‘See?’ Herr Koch says, opening up his arms. I look around. There’s nothing to see.
‘You can’t see! You can’t see where the Wall went at all!’ He’s right, there’s no sign of it left, no bits of concrete, no wasteland.
‘Look down here though.’ He points to the ground. A narrow strip of granite is inlaid in the pavement, slightly darker grey than the footpath itself. ‘That’s all there is!’ he cries. ‘It used to be a red line, but even that was thought too obvious, so they came up with this instead. And what’s more, in the places where it does say, “Berliner Mauer 1961–1989” it’s written to be read from the western side. For us easterners it’s upside down!’
As we get back in the car he says, ‘I am the only person who is keeping alive the sense of the Wall from the eastern side. If there is one thing my life has taught me, it is that one must not see things just from one side! People don’t like me for it, but it must be done!’ Herr Koch is a lone crusader against forgetting.
We drive along Zimmerstrasse away from the centre to Bethaniendamm. It is a scrawny part of town. There are more new brightly painted apartments on one side, and grey cement buildings on the other. In between there’s what looks at first like an empty lot, fenced in with wire mesh and boards and sticks. Behind the fence someone has planted potatoes and eggplants in neat rows, and tomatoes on stakes. But I’m still not sure what we’re looking at. ‘These,’ Herr Koch says, ‘are the Turkish onions.’
He takes me around the fenced area, a small triangle of land. There is an elaborate three-storey shack at one end made of pieces of fibroboard, crates and a ladder, with a grapevine climbing over it. Outside it there’s an old couch and chairs, and at the other end of the plot a child’s wooden swing hangs from a tree, painted red and yellow.
Herr Koch says that this land was, strictly speaking, in the eastern zone, but that it was too hard to build a bend in the Wall to include it, so the Wall went straight along the nearest street, leaving this island of land out in the west. No-one in West Berlin knew what to do with it; it could not be resumed for any purpose without antagonising the eastern regime. It was, literally, no-man’s land. Eventually, a Turkish family simply fenced it off and planted vegetables. When the Wall came down, no-one seemed to have a claim, so they are gardening here still. I gaze through the fence. There’s an apricot tree, and a large oak at the end. I imagine great family working bees; grandma on the couch, the kids on the swing and the smell of coffee from the summer palace at the end.
‘But you know what happened,’ Koch says. I turn back to him. ‘The family eventually fought—it was two brothers, I think. They fought so badly that in the end all they could do was to put a fence down the middle of the garden and split it into two separate zones!’ His face is alive with the irony of it. ‘Come here, look.’ We walk to the middle where a two-metre-high cyclone fence runs right through the little field, separating the part with the hut from the part with the swing, and no way of going between.
Our last stop is at the Oberbaum Bridge. Berlin is a wasteland here, where the tram lines between east and west have only recently been knitted back together. The longest strip of remaining Wall is along this river-bank—more because it was forgotten than deliberately preserved. At the end of it are what look like, at first glance, a small array of circus tents. As we approach I see they are a couple of souvenir stalls, with flags flying atop and signs in English saying ‘Souvenirs for You’ and ‘I Stamp Your Passport’. For one mark you can have your passport stamped with a GDR entry visa, as if you had stepped into this tent and miraculously been admitted to that place in the past. Elderly American tourists are climbing out of a bus. They seem to match—in pressed pale clothes and overly clean running shoes. ‘Betty,’ one woman asks another in a broad southern accent, ‘is that the same jacket you were wearing that day at Auschwitz?’
Herr Koch bounces into the main stall. ‘Gerd!’ he cries.
‘Hagen, my friend!’ The stallkeeper jumps up and runs from behind his wares to greet him. Herr Koch introduces me. Gerd is a suntanned man of sixty wearing a blue shirt unbuttoned to the navel and a smile with the wattage of a vaudevillian. Herr Koch later told me he had been a theatre actor in the east.
Gerd’s stall is a reliquary of his country’s memorabilia. He has Russian and GDR soldiers’ caps; Russian medals issued as reward for service in the Berlin invasion of 1945 (‘genuine, genuine,’ he says winningly); old enamel signs that read, ‘You are leaving the American Sector’ in English, Russian, French and German and ‘Beware—Mines! Closed Area: Danger to Life!’ He has matchbox-sized Trabant cars, teddy bears, bottle openers, car stickers and coffee mugs; and on one side of the stall in tiny pigeonholes he has lots and lots of pieces of Wall.
‘You must take this as a gift from me,’ he says, and he presses a piece of the Wall into my palm. It is in a small plastic bag, complete with a ‘Certificate of Authenticity’. It looks like a forensic sample. The two of them are staring at me, grinning and excited. I fear at any moment they will break into song.
‘How do you know this is genuine?’ I ask.
‘Oh, it’s genuine,’ Gerd says, twinkling like a daytime television host.
There have probably been enough ‘genuine’ fragments of the Wall sold to build it twice over. Herr Koch leans in, as always, interested in the documents. ‘Look,’ he says, ‘there’s a certificate to prove it.’
I thank them both and walk up to the new tramstop at Warschauer Strasse. When I look back, I see Herr Koch has corralled the tourists, and is giving them his side of history.
I catch the train to Nuremberg. When I arrive, I drink an espresso standing up at a bar in the station. A beautiful young woman wearing a fast-food wimple is serving behind the counter. The man next to me orders a
Riesenbockwurst
. The barmaid reaches first for potato salad and a bun, and then the boiled sausage. ‘Mustard or ketchup?’ She holds the paper plate high for an answer, reaching with her free hand above the bar to where the bottles would normally be, upturned for nips. Instead, there hangs a giant yellow rubber udder. The barmaid does a neat squeeze-and-twist action on one of the teats, milking it for mustard.
Booking my ticket, I thought of Uwe and Scheller and our puzzle women conversation so long ago. I called Uwe at the television station to catch up, and to tell him I’ve come full circle. A former colleague answered the phone. He said Uwe took a promotion to be roving correspondent in the United States, and that he and Frederica and little Lucas were now happily ensconced in Washington. I asked him to pass on my best.
The Stasi File Authority office where the puzzle women are housed is in Zirndorf, a village outside Nuremberg. The office is in the same walled compound where asylum seekers are being kept. Two Ethiopians, or perhaps Eritreans, men with sad biblical faces and aimless arms, walk about the outdoor area.
The director, Herr Raillard, meets me at the entrance and we go upstairs to his office. It is a plain administrative building that smells of floor wax and wet cardboard. Herr Raillard is a compact man with straight white hair to his shoulders and small glasses. He is an archivist.
I am nervous as a cat. I am in an unaccountable hurry. I have been thinking about this place for so long as the focus of Miriam’s hopes; I want there to be stainless steel benches and people wearing hair nets and white cloth gloves. I want security guards on the entrances and cameras in the workrooms. I want the completed puzzle pages to be scanned into computers, correlated to the files they belong to and for the people they affect to be called up by sensitive, trained personnel and informed about the new links in their lives.
I want them to find out what happened to Charlie Weber.
I am sure Herr Raillard has things to do but his desk is uncluttered and he gives me the impression of having cleared the agenda for our meeting today. He is a quiet and unassuming man, who made his career in the West German archives at Koblenz, and he is now looking forward to retirement. ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘I’ll be sixty-three shortly,’ as if to say, ‘and I’m out of here.’
He tells me that this work started in 1995, after the sacks of material had sat around in Berlin for five years. Fifteen thousand sacks were found at Normannenstrasse in January 1990. They contained shredded and hand-ripped files, index cards, photos and unwound tapes and film.
Herr Raillard has arranged for me to take coffee with some of the workers. I am keen to meet the puzzle people. I ask him how many there are, and whether they are all women, as I have heard. ‘Oh no,’ he says, ‘but there are probably more women than men.’ He is cautious and exact, and asks his secretary to check the numbers. She comes back with a note: eighteen women and thirteen men.
First, we go down the hall to see the workrooms. On the way, he tells me there has been some controversy because the victims want the work here to go more quickly. A computer program exists that could make this happen; it puts a lot of the pieces together very fast, based on a scan of the exact shape of the ripped edge. But, Herr Raillard says, for the purposes of evidence the documents reconstituted by computer do not count as originals. This doesn’t make much sense to me, because generally people don’t bring cases, they just want to know what happened in their lives. ‘And it would be very expensive,’ he adds. That is more likely why it’s not in use.
The door opens onto an ordinary office; my eyes take in potted plants and old paint on the walls and a poster of glassy-eyed kittens tangled in wool. There is a large desk with an empty chair behind it. ‘Must be on a break,’ Herr Raillard says, gesturing towards the chair. But I am only half listening. The window is wide open, a white curtain moves in the breeze and I am panicked, my heart climbing steps up my chest, because on the desk there are masses and masses of tiny pieces of paper—some in small stacks but others spread out all over. There are so many tatters of paper that the desk is not big enough, and the worker has started to lay them out on top of the filing cabinet as well. The pieces are different sizes, from a fifth of an A4 page to only a couple of centimetres square—and there is nothing to stop them flying around the room and out of the window.
Herr Raillard misreads my face. ‘Yes, it’s a lot of work, as you can see,’ he says.
The next room is similar. This person, also on a break, seems to be sorting the material from the sacks first into cut-off cardboard boxes and then all over the desk. A woman’s eye from a torn photograph looks out at me from one of the boxes; on the table I glimpse the name of the writer Lutz Rathenow on a shred of paper. There’s a roll of double-sided sticky tape near the chair and a partially completed page in front of it: a corner, and the left-hand edge.
