Stasiland_ Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall - Anna Funder [115]
Inside the museum there are displays and touch-screen presentations showing how the Wall was built, recordings of Kennedy’s ‘Ick bin ein Berliner’ speech, and dramatisations of various escape attempts. ‘Yes, yes, yes,’ a man with his back to me is saying to another man behind the counter, ‘I’ll take them from here and bring them back here. I think it’ll take about two hours. That’s what I’m going to check now.’
‘Right then,’ the other man says, then he looks over at me. He is wearing fancy eyeglasses that appear to be held together by a row of miniature, multicoloured clothes pegs. ‘Can I help you?’
The man standing at the counter turns around to have a look at me. ‘Frau Funder!’ he cries. It is Hagen Koch. ‘Well, well, well! How are you? Yes! You might like to come with me!’ He speaks in exclamation marks. It is as if I have hardly been away. For him the past is the Wall, and I am part of the present, whether three years ago or now. His hair has turned white, but his eyes are the same bright and smiley brown.
‘Herr Koch, I’m well, thank you. Come where?’
‘I’m taking a busload of tourists tomorrow along the route where the Wall was, because you can hardly tell any more. I’m off now to check how long it will take.’
‘I’d love to come.’
We are to drive along the municipal boundary where the Wall was built: in a ring around the old city centre in the east, and past the western suburbs of Wedding, Moabit and Tiergarten. Then, he says, we will drive where the Wall went right through the centre of town, down Niederkirchnerstrasse through to the Spree River, and along its bank to the Oberbaum Bridge.
We climb into his small red car and he drives fast and sure. He is happy to have an audience to rehearse his ‘tour of the forgotten city’ routine. The first stop is just down the street, a stretch of grass maybe a hundred metres wide. Straggly weeds grow to knee-height, sway like sentient things in the warm air. There’s a cemetery behind here. A large stone angel on a pedestal is turned this way, her head bent low in prayer. We walk out to the middle. The sky seems wide in this place.
‘This was the death strip’—Herr Koch holds his arms out—‘but before that the cemetery extended to the street. When they built the Wall they had to dig up the bodies and take away the gravestones.’ He raises his eyebrows, ‘The guards used to get a bit spooked by that.’ Apparently, the border guards working on the death strip preferred no evidence of death in it.
Herr Koch is pleased to be with someone who shares his interest in the Wall. He is also, perhaps, even more obsessed with it than I remember. He seems to have lost the awareness that his is a particular interest. He is, once more, a true believer: the Wall is the thing that defined him, and he will not let it go. I think for a moment of Frau Paul, who will also not let it go. Herr Koch starts to take photographs. I look up at the angel’s long face and I think of Miriam and Julia; lives shaped, too, by the Wall. Will they let it go? Or, will it let them go?
Our next stop is the Schiffahrtskanal. Herr Koch is excited, speaking fast. We park outside a new housing development. The apartments are fresh and brightly coloured. They are arranged around a courtyard in the usual Berlin style but, in a startling departure from tradition, there’s an original, two-storey East German guard tower in the middle of the yard. Herr Koch gestures towards it. ‘This,’ he says, proudly, ‘is my tower.’ For a moment he’s so pleased he’s speechless.
I gaze at the thing. It is, unmistakably, an old guard tower from the death strip. It has square cement walls and windows up high to see in all directions. On the top there’s a fenced area the guards could shoot from. It is hardly a thing of joy, but Herr Koch’s face is shiny with delight.
‘Your tower?’
‘My tower.’
He explains that at the end of 1989 in his capacity as a cultural officer with the Stasi, he took it upon himself to be responsible for ‘Denkmalschutz’ or the preservation