A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [206]
A Canadian journalist interested in Jews in the former East wanted to speak with her, and he brought along an interpreter from the German government press office. Irene explained that there was no need for the interpreter since she was completely fluent in English. But the interpreter sat in on the interview and wrote careful notes in a little book. Suddenly Irene turned to him and in a loud, good-natured voice said, “I know what you're doing. I used to do the same thing for the Stasi!”
Stasi scandals ruined many of the most productive people from the East, including not only political leaders but important writers and scientists. Most of these people were not agents but simply people who wanted to do things and had been compromised by a conversation—or a series of conversations. Where was the line to be drawn in a society where, as Martin Mandl in Brno said, you had to make decisions every day about what degree of collaboration was acceptable? When Polish General Jaruzelski offered to release Adam Michnik from prison if he would be willing to accept exile and forgo a trial, Michnik angrily responded, “To believe that I could accept such a proposal is to imagine that everyone is a police collaborator.” That was exactly what the system wanted to imagine.
After unification the West Germans, who had never purged the Nazis from their ranks, who had lived for forty-five years with Nazis in government, Nazi judges, teachers, and policemen, now wanted to disenfranchise, fire, and disgrace all half-million East Germans on file at the Stasi, if they could find them. Not all of them made it as easy as Irene.
Moritz Mebel, after years as an outsider because of his Soviet Army record, managed to become head of the urology department at the Charite Hospital. He built a reputation for the department, starting its kidney transplant program, and always felt that the West Germans showed great interest in his work. But once Germany was unified, the same West German professionals suddenly looked down at the work at Charite, somehow implying it was second rate. “I think that all things that were good in the GDR must be put down,” he said. In 1988 he had retired from both the hospital and the university. Under the GDR he got a pension of 5,600 marks monthly, but once the GDR was dissolved, his pension, like many of those that had been paid by the GDR, was reduced by the German government to 2,010 marks.
“When the Wall came down,” said his wife Sonja, the microbiologist, “it was already clear that the GDR was over.”
“But that it would come in the way it came, that we would be a colony,” said Moritz, pointing toward Sonja. “She saw it better than I did. I thought they were more intelligent than that, the Western politicians.” The Mebels’ daughter, Anna, lost her job as a paralegal working for a city service. Most of the East German civil service was fired. But Anna's husband knew how to adapt to the new Germany. In 1990, when he lost his job as a lawyer in the Ministry of Trade, he started retraining as a tax lawyer.
THE FIRST THING Mia Lehmann did to prepare for unification was to reinforce the thin wooden door that had served her Prenz-lauer Berg apartment since 1946, with new thick steel plating. She thought the steel very ugly and covered it with her grandchildren's drawings, but you could not live in this West German society without a strong door. She was not the only one who thought that. At the time of unification East Berlin experienced a run on locks.
In the last years of the GDR, Mia Lehmann had seen dissident meetings in her neighborhood broken up by the police. “I found it horrible. They had a different meeting, and they were persecuted just for that.”
But asked if she was surprised, she laughed, “No. It has