Stasiland_ Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall - Anna Funder [121]
We have reached the door. He says, ‘There is something I need to give you.’ Without a word he passes me a photocopied sheet of paper with some writing on it. It is a copy of a memo he wrote:
Stasi File Authority—Project Group Reconstruction
Time required for the Reconstruction:
1 worker reconstructs on average 10 pages per day
40 workers reconstruct on average 400 pages per day
40 workers reconstruct on average in a year of 250 working days 100,000 pages
There are, on average 2,500 pages in one sack
100,000 pages amounts to 40 sacks per year
In all, at the Stasi File Authority there are 15,000 sacks
This means that to reconstruct everything it would take 40 workers 375 years.
I am speechless. I can only understand this as a small paper protest. Herr Raillard points at the page. ‘These are the figures for forty workers,’ he says. ‘As you see, we only have thirty-one.’ He is telling me, in his quiet way, that the resources united Germany is throwing at this part of reconstructing the lives of its former East German citizens are pitiful, some kind of Sisyphean joke. What he is running here is an almost totally symbolic act.
Herr Raillard has organised a driver to take me from Zirndorf back to Nuremberg. The day is a clear sunny blue. Away from the asylum seekers and scraps of paper, everything is bright and cheerful.
I look out the window, thinking about Miriam and her hopes that the torn-apart pieces of her life will be put back together in those airy rooms, some time in the next 375 years.
28
Miriam and Charlie
The train back to Berlin passes through Leipzig, and I get off.
It’s morning, the air is still with a silken warmth that will work itself into something real by midday. Last time the station was being renovated; it is now part of a three-storey shopping mall in a vast atrium. Escalators move people up and down between levels. Near the exit there’s a display of photographs of the demonstrations ten years ago. The sign over them reads: ‘Leipzig. City of Heroes.’ I’m not sure what I’m doing here.
I wander through town. Most of the cranes are gone. New facades of buildings in sun-yellow and dusky pink, some even gilded, have been revealed from behind scaffolding. I walk past the town hall, and past Auerbach’s Cellar. Next door a new museum has been inserted into the old streetscape: the Contemporary History Forum Leipzig. The inside is all terrazzo flooring and expensive fittings. This, it turns out, is the federally funded effort to put the history of the separation of Germany behind glass.
There are the famous pictures of the Wall being built: an eastern soldier deciding to make a run for it to the west, parting the barbed wire with his hands; and Peter Fechter, the eighteen-year-old shot trying to escape in 1962 and left to die on the death strip, because each side thought the other would retaliate if they went to help him. Someone has thrown him a roll of bandages, but he lies immobile and bleeding. There are pictures of people coming out of a tunnel in West Berlin—the successful group before Frau Paul tried, and there’s a grey paddy wagon parked inside here, exactly the same as the one in which she was transported to her trial. A TV monitor shows Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler in his acidic prime. I come to the seventies, and find a glass case with a display of Renft memorabilia: records, Klaus’s old guitar and pictures of the band, its hairy bellbottomed members looking both innocent and louche.
I am the only visitor. The attendants are eager to make eye-contact and chat, bored as bats. Perhaps because of all the money poured into this, the things behind the spanking displays look old and crummy, like articles from a time that has been left behind. I slap down the stairs in my sandals.