Stasiland_ Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall - Anna Funder [107]
When Mielke finally finished there was a banquet: there were grapes, and chicken drumsticks and melon and stone fruits, ‘things that we never had in the GDR and that were truly exquisite, amazing delicacies to us’. But just as they were about to tuck in, Mielke would quickly pick up the microphone to say ‘a few more idiotic words’ and everyone would have to put their drumsticks and bunches of grapes back down on their plates until he was done. He would finish up by saying ‘Guten Appetit’, and the men would start to eat, but moments later he’d grab the microphone again and they would have to put it all down once more. ‘It went on and on,’ Herr Bohnsack says. ‘The whole occasion was insane.’
At Christmas 1989, from his telling of it, events bloomed into full-scale, fast-forward farce. Herr Bohnsack’s entire division was ordered to stay at home so as not to provoke the demonstrators, and to be near the phone. At 3 am they would receive a call ordering them to drive to Normannenstrasse, parking some way away so the demonstrators wouldn’t know the buildings were occupied, and to enter by a rear door. When they reached their offices, all the lights would be out. They were ordered to don camouflage combat gear—‘like the foreign legion in the jungle’—and then to kit themselves out with cooking equipment and cutlery, a spade, a protective suit in the event of chemical warfare, a blanket, toothpaste and brush, and ammunition. They were each issued with a pistol and a machine gun. The whole operation was timed.
‘What would you do then?’ I ask.
‘We’d lie down on our desks and sleep. The generals upstairs on the ninth floor were simulating a war situation. One would come down and wake us up with a message—say, an American sub has been sighted off Turkey. Or, the American B52s are on stand-by. Then at 5 am we’d get worse news—maybe that a Russian sub had been taken off Norway. They were pretending World War III had broken out.’
‘What could you do?’
‘Nothing: we slept some more.’
At 7 am they would get an order to go into the field. ‘We’d play war for a day, stand around, and shoot the cardboard figures that popped up out of the grass. Everyone was there—highly intelligent specialists who could speak Arabic and goodness knows what—and we were all reduced to playing soldiers.’ By the end of 1989 they were doing this every single week. ‘And we knew the GDR was lost,’ he says, ‘so it was a circus.’
Herr Bohnsack’s greatest fear was that he and the others would be ordered to shoot the demonstrators outside their building. During the exercises they were told that the enemy had infiltrated the country and was inciting the East Germans against them. At the end Mielke was more direct. He told them that they—he meant the people—were the enemy. He said, ‘It’s them or us.’
‘For me,’ Bohnsack says, ‘that was the most terrifying thing. That instead of shooting cardboard figures we’d have to shoot our own people. And we knew, just like under Hitler, that if we refused we’d be taken off and shot ourselves.’
There was another fear too. Mielke had also told his men, ‘If we lose, they’ll string us all up.’ The atmosphere was hysterical. Herr Bohnsack had been Markus Wolf’s contact man between the Stasi and the secret services in Hungary, Moscow, Prague and Warsaw. ‘Our man in Budapest had told me that in the drama of ’56 his people were hanged in the trees outside their offices. He said to me, “If someone points you out, five minutes later you’ll be swinging.”’
Herr Bohnsack runs his hand over his head again. ‘Thank God it didn’t come to that,’ he says. He explains that by the time the demonstrators really got going in Berlin—and it was later