Stasiland (35 page)
In the next room the pieces are even smaller. ‘It’s painstaking work,’ Herr Raillard says, ‘the most pieces in one page so far has been ninety-eight.’ This person has nearly completed a sheaf of pages that rest in an open manila folder. The pages are all there, piled on top of each other except for a piece or pieces missing in the middle, making a neat hole. ‘It takes brute strength to tear that many pages at once.’ Herr Raillard shakes his head. ‘That Stasi man would have hardly been able to move his fingers the next day.’
On the way to meet the workers, I ask Herr Raillard about security. He tells me that everyone who works here, including the cleaning staff, is checked to make sure they have not had any involvement with the Stasi in the past, even though they are all westerners. He says his workers are told not to speak about the content of the files they piece together. Sometimes this needs to be stressed. ‘If they find, say, a file on an important West German politician, then I’ll go in and have a word and remind them not to mention it at all,’ he says. I ask about electronic surveillance of the rooms, because I imagine there are people out there who would pay a high price to stop some of this information coming to light. ‘No, no,’ Herr Raillard says, ‘sometimes they sit two to a room. But that’s more to alleviate boredom than anything else. And I make sure I put the alarm on when I leave of an evening.’ This is not what I expected. It is friendly and small and low-key. It is something between a hobby farm for jigsaw enthusiasts and a sheltered workshop for obsessives.
Herr Raillard introduces me and leaves. There are three women and two men sitting at a table with fruit juice, biscuits and a thermos of coffee on it. They have left room for me at the head of the table. The two women on my right are both plump, made-up and middle-aged. On my left there’s a young woman with freckles and shoulder-length dark hair, next to her a small brown-haired man with glasses, and at the end a large gentle-looking fellow with fair hair and eyes as blue as marbles. I ask them how they go about their work each day.
The furthest middle-aged woman says, ‘It’s really just like a puzzle at home. You start with the corners, and fill in the rest from the shape of the edges. We get clues too from the sort of paper it is, the typeface or handwriting and so on.’
‘Do you do puzzles at home?’ I ask her.
‘Yes!’ she says, ‘I must be crazy.’ They all laugh.
The woman next to her started here only two months ago. She has painted nails and a gap between her two front teeth. ‘They opened a sack to show me and I saw the really tiny pieces inside and I thought, Oh my God, I can’t do that.’ The sacks are over a metre tall and paunchy as a person. ‘But every sack is different,’ she says, ‘and I have to say there are things that are interesting.’
The dark man appears to be the most senior person here. He has deep-set eyes and a calm voice. The others listen closely when he speaks. He says, ‘Sometimes the satisfaction is in knowing that when people find out what happened to them it might give them some peace of mind—why they lost their place at the university, or what happened to the uncle who disappeared or whatever. It gives those affected an insight into their own lives.’
The others pour coffee and pass long-life milk down the table. I imagine getting more news about myself from a file. You would come to think of your past as a landscape you travelled through without noticing the signs.
‘I think at the end the Stasi had so much information,’ the fair man says, ‘that they thought everyone was an enemy, because everyone was under observation. I don’t think they knew who was for them, or against, or whether everyone was just shutting up.’ He is shy and looks at his hands, closed around his coffee mug, when he speaks. ‘When I find a file where they’ve been watching a family in their living room for twenty years I ask myself: what sort of people are they who want all this knowledge for themselves?’
‘Are you moved by what you find sometimes?’ I ask.
The young woman answers, ‘When I find love letters I think, good grief, they really opened everything—and how many hands did these pass through? How many times were they copied? I’d hate for that to have happened to me. I don’t feel too good about seeing them myself when I piece them together.’
The dark man says he is most shocked by how the Stasi used people’s own distress against them. ‘When they were in prison, for instance, offering to let them out on condition that they spy for the Stasi.’ I think of Koch’s father having to change political parties or be exiled to a Russian camp, or Frau Paul, who could have been bait in a trap to catch a westerner, and even of Julia, imprisoned in her country and offered freedom within it only if she would inform on the people in her life. I think of the generational cycles of tragedy the Germans have been inflicting on themselves.
‘But this is not about the individuals,’ the dark man continues. ‘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. I’m reluctant to condemn them because the Stasi were also manipulated, they too needed jobs.’ The others are nodding. ‘On the other hand,’ he says, ‘there were lots of people who just said no. Not everyone can be bought.’ He tells of an engineer who refused to inform, ‘And nothing more happened to him. The file was simply closed.’
I am reminded of the story of a factory worker who, after she was approached to inform, announced loudly the next day at the canteen table, ‘Guess what! You wouldn’t credit it, but
they
think me so reliable that I’ve been asked to inform!’ Her cover blown, she was useless and she was left alone.
The young woman says, ‘I think there were advantages over there, that we forget, particularly for mothers and children. I’m a single mum and I know what I’m talking about. I had to work, and it was hard to find a kindergarten place. I have a friend who lived over there and she says she didn’t want for anything…’
‘And rents were lower,’ the gap-toothed woman on my right adds.
‘The kindergartens were there,’ the dark man says, ‘because they wanted to get to the children early to bring them up loyal to the state.’
‘Sure,’ the young mother says. ‘But it all became crudely clear to me just after the Wall came down. I met a couple in the street who’d just come over from the east and had no money and nowhere to go, so I said they could stay with me. They were with me for a weekend and I showed them around. We went to Karstadt department store and looked in the food section. They were beside themselves. “How many kinds of ketchup do you have?” they said as they looked at the shelves. Then I thought to myself, it really is too much—there must be a middle way. Do we really need thirty different kinds of ham and fifteen kinds of ketchup?’
‘The mistake the GDR made was to force people into a position,’ the dark man says, ‘either you are for us or an enemy. And if you then came to think of yourself as an enemy you had to ask yourself: what am I doing here? They wanted to put everything into their narrow schema, but life simply didn’t fit into it.’ He pauses, and the others wait for him to finish. ‘I think we need to remember that they came here for the freedom, not for fifteen kinds of ketchup.’
Herr Raillard sees me out. I check with him what the consequences were when someone who had been approached to inform either told people about it or flatly refused. ‘There really were no consequences,’ he says. ‘That was the thing. The file was just closed, marked “
dekonspiriert
”. But of course,’ he adds, ‘no-one could know at the time that nothing would happen to him. So hardly anyone refused.’
We have reached the door. He says, ‘There is something I need to give you.’ Without a word he passes me a photocopied sheet of paper with some writing on it. It is a copy of a memo he wrote:
Stasi File Authority
—
Project Group Reconstruction
Time required for the Reconstruction:
1 worker reconstructs on average 10 pages per day
40 workers reconstruct on average 400 pages per day
40 workers reconstruct on average in a year of 250 working days 100,000 pages
There are, on average 2,500 pages in one sack
100,000 pages amounts to 40 sacks per year
In all, at the Stasi File Authority there are 15,000 sacks
This means that to reconstruct everything it would take 40 workers 375 years.
I am speechless. I can only understand this as a small paper protest. Herr Raillard points at the page. ‘These are the figures for forty workers,’ he says. ‘As you see, we only have thirty-one.’ He is telling me, in his quiet way, that the resources united Germany is throwing at this part of reconstructing the lives of its former East German citizens are pitiful, some kind of Sisyphean joke. What he is running here is an almost totally symbolic act.
Herr Raillard has organised a driver to take me from Zirndorf back to Nuremberg. The day is a clear sunny blue. Away from the asylum seekers and scraps of paper, everything is bright and cheerful.
I look out the window, thinking about Miriam and her hopes that the torn-apart pieces of her life will be put back together in those airy rooms, some time in the next 375 years.
The train back to Berlin passes through Leipzig, and I get off.
It’s morning, the air is still with a silken warmth that will work itself into something real by midday. Last time the station was being renovated; it is now part of a three-storey shopping mall in a vast atrium. Escalators move people up and down between levels. Near the exit there’s a display of photographs of the demonstrations ten years ago. The sign over them reads: ‘Leipzig. City of Heroes.’ I’m not sure what I’m doing here.
I wander through town. Most of the cranes are gone. New facades of buildings in sun-yellow and dusky pink, some even gilded, have been revealed from behind scaffolding. I walk past the town hall, and past Auerbach’s Cellar. Next door a new museum has been inserted into the old streetscape: the Contemporary History Forum Leipzig. The inside is all terrazzo flooring and expensive fittings. This, it turns out, is the federally funded effort to put the history of the separation of Germany behind glass.
There are the famous pictures of the Wall being built: an eastern soldier deciding to make a run for it to the west, parting the barbed wire with his hands; and Peter Fechter, the eighteen-year-old shot trying to escape in 1962 and left to die on the death strip, because each side thought the other would retaliate if they went to help him. Someone has thrown him a roll of bandages, but he lies immobile and bleeding. There are pictures of people coming out of a tunnel in West Berlin—the successful group before Frau Paul tried, and there’s a grey paddy wagon parked inside here, exactly the same as the one in which she was transported to her trial. A TV monitor shows Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler in his acidic prime. I come to the seventies, and find a glass case with a display of Renft memorabilia: records, Klaus’s old guitar and pictures of the band, its hairy bellbottomed members looking both innocent and louche.
I am the only visitor. The attendants are eager to make eye-contact and chat, bored as bats. Perhaps because of all the money poured into this, the things behind the spanking displays look old and crummy, like articles from a time that has been left behind. I slap down the stairs in my sandals. I am annoyed that this past can look so tawdry and so safe, as if destined from the outset to end up behind glass, securely roped off and under press-button control. And I am annoyed at myself: what’s the problem? Isn’t a museum the place for things that are over?
It’s a fair walk from here but I think I remember the way, so I set off for the Runden Ecke. I hope it’s still there, that this slick western-funded version is not all that remains of East Germany. I know that on the outskirts of town there are the usual socialist high-rises, but here the streets are cobbled and the buildings are grand. Carved faces stare down from the archways over arcades, and a row of karyatid creatures holds up the old theatre. I pass a music shop (this was the home of Bach), a bistro and a funeral parlour with a surprising range of offerings available, the sign says, ‘day and night’: burial, cremation, burial-at-sea and anonymous burials are listed, as well as ‘transport of coffins’. A dog walks purposefully along the pavement and somewhere, I think, a person is lost. Its high-headed confidence makes me smile. A man in a tobacconist’s window sees me and smiles back.
The building is still there, its vastness covering the block and ending in the round corner where the entry is. When I reach it, I see that the citizens’ committee’s museum still exists, and it’s open. Inside me a small stretched thing dissolves with relief. I go up the stone stairs. The entry to the exhibition is on the left, and to the Leipzig branch of the Stasi File Authority on the right. Nothing much has changed. I walk down the corridor past the workroom with the girly calendar, and the cell with its tiny window and bed, to the museum office. There are signs requesting donations for funds to keep the place running.
Frau Hollitzer’s not here today, but yes, her young colleague tells me, she still works with the
Bürgerkomitee
. I ask him about the new museum in town, and he shrugs and says something about the incompatibility of funding and autonomy. They had tried to negotiate with the federal authorities about having just one museum of divided Germany in Leipzig, and one run by easterners, but it hadn’t worked. This museum has been left a smaller, shabbier outfit than the other, but for all that, it’s more authentic: here, in this building where people were held and interrogated, and where, upstairs, their stolen biographies were filed away. I spend some time in the rooms, seeing the piles of file-pulp in one, the moustaches and wigs and glue in another, and the smell sample jars in a third. For me, this is where it all began. I buy a couple of books from the young man and leave. Outside it is hot; since morning the trees have deepened their green, and are making darker shadows. I have nothing more to do here but wander back to the station.
