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By Root 415 0

trunk of our books and Charlie’s manuscripts at her place, because they’d never suspect her. We made some mistakes though. I remember one time they were here, young blokes going through all our drawers, everything on the desks, the record collection. One of them was up a ladder searching the bookshelves when he found Orwell’s Animal Farm, which, of course, was blacklisted. We held our breath as he pulled it off the shelf. I remember the cover clearly: it was the pigs, holding a red flag aloft. We watched as this young man looked at it, the pigs and the flag. Then he put it back. Afterwards we laughed! We could only think that he saw the pigs—that was bad—but that they were holding a red flag, and they seemed to be on a collective farm—he must have thought that meant it was all right!

‘I was prohibited from studying. And I couldn’t get any kind of job at all,’ Miriam says. ‘Everything I applied for, the Stasi made sure I was turned down. Employers had to check my personal file and the instruction was always “not her”. I used to take a lot of photographs. Eventually, all I could do was to send them to magazines with friends’ names on them, and my friends would pass on the money they got for my work.’ She ruffles her hair. ‘In a way though, how we lived was quite good—we didn’t have to submit ourselves to the sorts of structures and authority that we couldn’t trust here. We managed.’

In 1979 Miriam’s sister and her husband tried to escape to West Germany concealed in the boot of a car. Charlie drove them to meet the courier who was to smuggle them over the border. The Stasi followed every move; the couple received prison terms, and Charlie was placed on a type of probation.

In September 1980 the West German chancellor Helmut Schmidt was scheduled to visit the GDR. At that time the Solidarity movement in Poland was a source of tension for Eastern Bloc governments, because it was a focus of hope for many under their rule. Then Schmidt’s visit was cancelled because of East German government concern that it would lead to demonstrations for democracy in front of the western television cameras.

Nevertheless, the East German authorities had prepared for the visit. They had rounded up and locked away anyone who might protest, or might in some way embarrass the government.

By this time Charlie stood under formal suspicion of the crime of ‘Attempting to Flee the Republic’. He and Miriam had put in applications to leave the GDR. Such applications were sometimes granted because the GDR, unlike any other eastern European country, could rid itself of malcontents by ditching them into West Germany, where they were automatically granted citizenship. The Stasi put all applicants under extreme scrutiny. People who applied to leave were, unsurprisingly, suspected of wanting to leave which was, other than by this long-winded and arbitrary process, a crime. An ‘application to leave’ was legal, but the authorities might, if the fancy took them, choose to see it as a statement of why you didn’t like the GDR. In that case it became a Hetzschrift (a smear) or a Schmäschrift (a libel) and therefore a criminal offence. On 26 August 1980 Charlie Weber was arrested and held in a remand cell.

At first Miriam’s only contact with him was by letter. She was permitted no visits, and he could not call. Eventually, a half-hour visit was scheduled for Tuesday 14 October. The day before, Miriam’s most recent letter to Charlie came back to her, marked in handwriting: ‘Postal Permission Terminated.’ With it there was a Stasi card in the letterbox: ‘Visit Authorisation for 14.10.1980 Withdrawn.’

On Wednesday 15 October, an ordinary policeman in his green uniform knocked on their apartment door. ‘Is this the house of Herr Weber?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you are Frau Weber?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, you need to report to the district attorney’s office and collect your husband’s things, because he is dead.’

He was gone before Miriam could find any words.

The German Democratic Republic paid lip service to the institutions of democracy. There were district attorneys, whose job it