Stasiland_ Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall - Anna Funder [2]
My travelling companion takes out a packet of West cigarettes, which seem to be the most popular brand here since the fall of the Wall. She lights up and directs her breath of smoke over my head. When she’s finished she butts out in the flip-top bin, clasps her hands around her middle and falls asleep. Her expression, fixed with pencil, doesn’t change.
I first visited in Leipzig in 1994, nearly five years after the Wall fell in November 1989. East Germany still felt like a secret walled-in garden, a place lost in time. It wouldn’t have surprised me if things had tasted different here—apples like pears, say, or wine like blood. Leipzig was the hub of what everyone now calls die Wende—the Turning Point. The Wende was the peaceful revolution against the Communist dictatorship in East Germany, the only successful revolution in German history. Leipzig was the start and the heart of it. Now, two years later, I’m on my way back.
In 1994 I found a town built by accretion. The streets wound crookedly, there were crumbly passages through buildings that led unexpectedly into the next block, and low arches funnelled people into underground bars. My map bore no resemblance to how life was lived in Leipzig. People in the know could take hidden short cuts through buildings, or walk along unmarked lanes between each block, moving above and below ground. I got thoroughly lost. I was looking for the Stasi museum in the Runden Ecke, or ‘round corner’ building which had formerly been the Stasi offices. I needed to see for myself part of the vast apparatus that had been the East German Ministry for State Security.
The Stasi was the internal army by which the government kept control. Its job was to know everything about everyone, using any means it chose. It knew who your visitors were, it knew whom you telephoned, and it knew if your wife slept around. It was a bureaucracy metastasised through East German society: overt or covert, there was someone reporting to the Stasi on their fellows and friends in every school, every factory, every apartment block, every pub. Obsessed with detail, the Stasi entirely failed to predict the end of Communism, and with it the end of the country. Between 1989 and 1990 it was turned inside out: Stalinist spy unit one day, museum the next. In its forty years, ‘the Firm’ generated the equivalent of all records in German history since the middle ages. Laid out upright and end to end, the files the Stasi kept on their countrymen and women would form a line 180 kilometres long.
Eventually, I found the Runden Ecke, and it was huge. A set of steps led up to vast metal-clad double doors with studs on them. I shrank like Alice. To the right there was a pale rectangle in the cement facade, a bit of the building that hadn’t been tanned by smog. A plaque saying ‘Ministry of State Security—Leipzig Division’ or something like it had hung there. It had been removed in a kind of fearful joy during the revolution and has not been seen since.
I walked around inside. All the desks were just as they were left the night the demonstrators took the building—frighteningly neat. Dial phones sat in breeding pairs. Shredding machines had been thrown out the back after collapsing in the Stasi’s final desperate attempt to destroy the most damning files. Above one desk was a 1989 calendar with a picture of a woman naked from the waist up, but mostly there were just Communist insignia on the walls. The cells were open, set up as if prepared for more prisoners. Despite the best efforts of Miss December, the building felt damp and bureaucratic.
The citizens’ committee administering the museum had mounted displays on cheap particleboard screens. There was a print of the famous photograph from the autumn 1989 demonstrations. It showed a sea of people holding candles, their necks craned up to the building, staring their controllers in the face. They knew it was from here that their lives were observed, manipulated and sometimes ruined. There were copies of the increasingly frantic telexes from the Berlin headquarters