Stasiland_ Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall - Anna Funder [114]
‘We are terrible.’ He has hardly looked at me. He couldn’t know I’m not German. ‘They are terrible. The Germans are terrible.’
He moves off, tapping his way along the buildings.
Which Germans did he mean? Some, or all? For this East German man, long used to thinking the bad Germans were on the other side of the Wall, maybe now it’s hard to tell. Are they really so bad? Or are they worse than he thought? And were his people, now broke or drunk, shamed or fled or imprisoned or dead, any good at all?
A friend of mine who works at the File Authority calls me up.
‘We had an interesting request here for a personal file yesterday,’ he says. ‘I thought I’d let you know.’
‘Who was it?’
‘Mr Mielke.’ My friend chuckles. We both know without saying: Mielke must think the apparatus he created was so thorough, with an administrative impetus all of its own, that somewhere, someone was keeping tabs on him.
A few days later I call Frau Paul. We chat for a while. She is active in an organisation for those persecuted by the regime—taking tours of Hohenschönhausen prison (‘we’re thinking of putting a coffee shop in there,’ she tells me), and campaigning for compensation for victims. Then she says, ‘There’s something else.’
‘Yes?’
‘I was followed home the other evening, from a public meeting on compensation.’
‘What?’
‘It’s true. A car followed me to the underground at walking pace. I was with friends and I didn’t think much about it. But when I got out of the train at Elsterwerdaer Platz I was alone and it was there waiting for me. Then it followed the bus. When I got off the bus it turned its lights off, and drove behind me right to my door.’
‘That’s horrible.’
‘Yes,’ she says, ‘there are a lot of people who don’t want us to raise our voices, to fight for what we deserve.’
‘Do you have any idea who it was?’
‘No. But it was almost certainly an ex-Stasi man.’ She is frightened, but she is steely. ‘It was a Volvo,’ she says. ‘I’m looking for a Volvo driver.’
Mielke died this week. He was ninety-two. The headlines read, ‘Most hated man now dead.’ I think of the other ‘most hated man’ and give him a call. His wife answers the phone and passes me to her husband. Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler tells me he’s not well, and that things are getting worse. By ‘things’, he means the world around him. ‘People are still spreading lies about my dear friend Erich Mielke and he’s under the ground! On Monday the urn was interred and on Tuesday it was desecrated! Right under the noses of the police guarding it! Do you understand? My friend’s ashes were scattered and his grave plot was de-se-cra-ted!’ His voice is exactly the same: hoarse, old and angry. ‘That is capitalism, naked and brutal! An absolute Unkultur.’
The desecration of Mielke’s grave is unlikely to have been the work of westerners, and it is only a product of capitalism in that capitalism does not protect, or not adequately to his mind, the former leadership of the former GDR from what their people thought of them. I hear fear though in his voice, the flipside of fury. Fear perhaps that his end, soon to come, will also be a desecrated grave. Then I remember his conviction to the cause. I think he may not be so much afraid of death itself but that it will eliminate, finally, his powers of rebuttal.
Today I walk from my place up Brunnenstrasse, past Frau Paul’s tunnel to Bernauer Strasse where the Wall was. There is a new museum here. Its greatest exhibit is opposite: a full-size reconstructed section of the Wall, complete with freshly built and neatly raked death strip, for tourists. Right alongside it in Bernauer Strasse there are still some pieces of the real Wall, covered, as they always were on the western side, with bright graffiti. These remnants are behind bushes though, scrappy and crumbling. In some places the steel reinforcements in the concrete are bare as bones.
The new Wall, however, is pristine. It is utterly without grafitti. I can understand why the original has all but disappeared, and why, as Frau Paul and Torsten said, people wanted it to.