Stasiland_ Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall - Anna Funder [113]
I have heard this kind of thing before, though ex-Stasi men, privileged left-wing intellectuals or former Party members complain more about airfares: ‘What good is freedom to travel when I can’t afford to go to New York/Las Palmas/New Zealand for my holiday?’ Once in Leipzig, an old woman in a pub, drinking her daily schnapps at four in the afternoon, said to me, ‘Well, this is better than the Weimar Republic and better than the Nazis but bring back the Communists, is what I say. The pubs were fuller under Honecker. Cheers.’ I don’t doubt this genuine nostalgia, but I think it has coloured a cheap and nasty world golden; a world where there was nothing to buy, nowhere to go and anyone who wanted to do anything with their lives other than serve the Party risked persecution, or worse.
The morning has come alive now, insects dance over the grass and pollen hangs in the light as people walk through the park to Rosenthaler Platz station. Professor Mushroom is on a roll. ‘Back then when you were drunk the police would just take you under the arms and set you down on a bench. Now, we can’t even sleep here any more or we’d get robbed! It’s terrible the morals these days. Do you know you can get mugged for one cigarette! It’s the Russian mafia and the Romanians and the gypsies. If a gypsy woman came and danced on this bench, I tell you your wallet would be gone in a flash!’
This complaint, too, I have heard before in different versions: an ache for a lost time when things were more secure. In a security state, after all, the least the authorities could do when they were incarcerating so many innocents was to clean up the criminals at the same time.
‘Look, 200 metres over there’—Professor Mushroom extends his arm and I see a swathe of grey chest hair between his braces—‘was the Wall. Before we had that, the Wessis flocked over here and bought up all our stuff! We put up the Wall so we could go shopping in our own shops! In the end though, they pulled the Wall down and bought us all up anyway, those Wessis with their western money—all the factories and businesses and even the pubs. And they won’t let us hold our heads high now—oh no!
‘I’ll tell you honestly about the border.’ He pats my knee again. ‘And I am an honest man. We all knew, every GDR citizen knew, that if you went close to it, you’d be shot! That’s all there was to it! So we stayed here! I mean they should have all sat here on their arses—then they wouldn’t have got them shot full of lead!’
I know this argument as well: if you didn’t buck the system, then it wouldn’t harm you.
But, from what I have seen, it probably would.
The professor shakes my hand. ‘You really should come mushrooming with us,’ he says. The chorus rumbles and nods and I thank them and go, up to my palace of light and air and lino.
26
The Wall
In this soft spring I have taken to walking everywhere. It’s about 10 pm, and the sun has only just set. Cherry trees lining the streets scatter pips and juice stains over the pavement like blood. I walk home past the outdoor cafés at Kollwitzplatz where students, largely from the west, sit eating and laughing. I’m not sure how much they know of what has gone on in this place. I’m dreaming at the kerb as a woman in a jester’s cap and short shorts nearly clips my ear as she cycles past.
By the time I turn into my street the sky is black. A man is hunched unsteadily against my building, banging along it like a fly at a window. In the darkness he is more a shape than a person, an outline with a bottle in his hand. He is drunk—very drunk. When I get closer he reaches towards me and speaks, but it’s not clear whether he’s addressing me or the universe.
‘I don’t want to be German any more!’ he sobs. ‘I don’t want to be German any more!’ His face is tracked with silver tears.
‘Why not?’ I hold