A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [92]
ALL OF THESE TENSIONS were hardening the regime, instilling the “us or them” brand of official paranoia, making the state increasingly insistent on conformism and increasingly distrustful of rebellious individualists. Georges Alexan's teenage daughter Irene was not fitting in.
Her father had remarried, to an outsider in their circle of outsiders. She was a German, not Jewish, not from abroad. Irene, resenting her, had divided the world into her father's world, which she loved—Jewish and American—and her stepmother's world, which she hated—gentile and German. She continued to insist that she was Jewish, and her father continued to be ambiguous. The day before Christmas, he would hand Irene some money and tell her to buy a tree. She would run out to the street, buy one, and bring it back. But neither of them knew what to do with the tree. Her father went back to reading, back to his customary posture, bent over a book with his hat on.
Irene's rebellion grew. She dropped out of school and later took a lover, ironically a non-Jewish lover, and became pregnant at 18. Her father didn't want them to marry, because they seemed an obvious mismatch. A classic parental mistake, his opposition fueled their determination.
She had a job in the East German news agency, where her skill in English was valued, though she mostly distributed English-language copy to the right desks. As she went through the office reading copy, she made comments with that New York brand of irreverence that had become her style. These were not times for irreverent pregnant teenagers in the GDR. She was informed that she was a “bourgeois leftist revisionist” and that she needed to be reeducated. This was to be accomplished by sending her to work in a factory assembly line.
Factory work? She had never done anything like that. She had grown up among the privileged Communist elite. She didn't even know people who worked in factories. Wandering East Berlin, 18 and pregnant, she contemplated the fact that for the first time in her life she was not going to be in a privileged position. She was not going to be in the vanguard, not a Soviet freedom fighter—she was going to be a faceless German in a factory.
And then someone came to her and said he was from the government and that he understood she was scheduled to go to a factory because she was a bourgeois leftist revisionist. She said that was true, but she didn't want to go, that she was a good Communist and she didn't know what had happened. The man's face glowed with a hospitable smile. “If that is true, if you are right, if you are a correct person, then maybe we could work together.” He explained that he would appreciate having conversations with her, not very often, just from time to time. Maybe once or twice a year. She could just talk about what she thought was going on, her views on people and events in the office, and these would be secret conversations that no one else in the office would know about.
Now she would not have to go to a factory. She would do undercover work! She liked that idea. It seemed like the guerrilla fighter of her childhood fantasies exposing the Nazis.
That summer of 1961, Irene gave birth to a boy, Stefan. Alone, she took her new baby home to her small apartment on a quiet war-scarred street of Mitte. Her street was quieter than usual that night, and she was feeling very alone with her baby, whom she was not exactly sure how to care for. Soldiers had erected a makeshift gate at the entrance to her block, and she had to prove that she lived there before she could pass through. To Irene, that meant