Stasiland_ Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall - Anna Funder [116]
This tower here, he says, gave him a lot of trouble, particularly when the developers came in to build the apartments. ‘So what did I do?’
I look back at him. I cannot imagine.
‘I found a homeless man, and installed him in it! And I gave him money and a job—to renovate the tower! They couldn’t pull it down because it was inhabited!’
I see that over the door someone has hand-painted an address: Kieler Strasse 2. We enter and, sure enough, a modern white-tiled bathroom is being installed downstairs. ‘Unfortunately,’ Herr Koch says, ‘my tenant died.’ We climb a ladder to the top, where the guards worked. The tower is crumbling and smells of wet concrete, but I enjoy the thought that the previous tenant, an old eastern streetperson, would have lapped up the view from here, where before the guards had watched over him.
Herr Koch says, ‘But I think it is saved now. They had to build the apartments around it. The tenants didn’t like it at first, but I’ve been talking to them, and as time goes on they appreciate its historical significance more and more.’ He takes a dustpan and brush, and sweeps up proprietorially before we leave.
We drive into town, past the Bundestag, the Reichstag and Potsdamer Platz. At a set of lights I see a bollard with a poster of Renft promoting their current tour of the old East Germany. I enjoy the thought of Klaus strutting his stuff, blossomed once more into his rock star being. We stop in an ordinary street.
‘See?’ Herr Koch says, opening up his arms. I look around. There’s nothing to see.
‘You can’t see! You can’t see where the Wall went at all!’ He’s right, there’s no sign of it left, no bits of concrete, no wasteland.
‘Look down here though.’ He points to the ground. A narrow strip of granite is inlaid in the pavement, slightly darker grey than the footpath itself. ‘That’s all there is!’ he cries. ‘It used to be a red line, but even that was thought too obvious, so they came up with this instead. And what’s more, in the places where it does say, “Berliner Mauer 1961–1989” it’s written to be read from the western side. For us easterners it’s upside down!’
As we get back in the car he says, ‘I am the only person who is keeping alive the sense of the Wall from the eastern side. If there is one thing my life has taught me, it is that one must not see things just from one side! People don’t like me for it, but it must be done!’ Herr Koch is a lone crusader against forgetting.
We drive along Zimmerstrasse away from the centre to Bethaniendamm. It is a scrawny part of town. There are more new brightly painted apartments on one side, and grey cement buildings on the other. In between there’s what looks at first like an empty lot, fenced in with wire mesh and boards and sticks. Behind the fence someone has planted potatoes and eggplants in neat rows, and tomatoes on stakes. But I’m still not sure what we’re looking at. ‘These,’ Herr Koch says, ‘are the Turkish onions.’
He takes me around the fenced area, a small triangle of land. There is an elaborate three-storey shack at one end made of pieces of fibroboard, crates and a ladder, with a grapevine climbing over it. Outside it there’s an old couch and chairs, and at the other end of the plot a child’s wooden swing hangs from a tree, painted red and yellow.
Herr Koch says that this land was, strictly speaking, in the eastern zone, but that it was too hard to build a bend in the Wall to include it, so the Wall went straight along the nearest street, leaving this island of land out in the west. No-one in West Berlin knew what to do with it; it could not be resumed for any purpose without antagonising the eastern regime. It was, literally, no-man’s land. Eventually, a Turkish family simply fenced it off and planted vegetables. When the Wall