Stasiland_ Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall - Anna Funder [24]
The next day the phone calls start very early in the morning. I hadn’t thought it through—I hadn’t imagined what it would be like to have a series of military types, who had lost their power and lost their country, call you up at home.
I’m asleep. I pick up the phone and say my name.
‘Ja. In response to your notice in the Märkische Allgemeine.’
‘Ja…’ I fumble for my watch. It is 7.35 am.
‘How much are you paying?’
‘Bitte?’
‘You must understand—,’ the voice says. I sit up and pull the covers around me.
‘To whom am I speaking?’
‘That doesn’t matter for the moment.’ The voice is assured. ‘You must understand that it is very hard for some of us now to get jobs in this new Germany. We are discriminated against and ripped off blind from one minute to another, in this—this Kapitalismus. But we learn fast: so I ask you, how much you are prepared to pay for my story?’
‘I don’t know, if I don’t know what sort of story it is.’
‘I was IM,’ he says.
I am tempted. The ‘IMs’ were ‘inofizielle Mitarbeiter’ or unofficial collaborators. I know I probably won’t find many who will speak to me. They are the most hated people in the new Germany because, unlike the uniformed Stasi officers and administrative staff who went off to their bureaucratic jobs each day, these informers reported on family and friends without them knowing. ‘Moment, bitte,’ I say, and I put the phone in my lap. I remember Miriam telling me that informers routinely argue that their information didn’t harm anyone. ‘But how can they know what it was used for?’ she asked. ‘It is as if they have all been issued with the same excuses manual.’
I pick up the receiver and say no. How can I reward informers a second time around? And besides, I don’t have the money.
The phone keeps ringing. I make a series of assignations with Stasi men: in Berlin, in Potsdam, outside a church, in a parking lot, in a pub and at their homes.
My kitchen overlooks the yard. I often see movement behind the windows of the other apartments. Today in one of them a man stands, staring out absent-mindedly. He is naked. I’m on the telephone and I look away, hoping he has not felt observed. When I turn to put the receiver down he’s still there—for a moment I think he may not have seen me. But then I notice he has pulled the curtain across his penis, where he holds it in a gesture of static modesty, a polyester toga.
I need to get out of the house, and away from the phone.
Outside the cold is bitter and soggy. There’s no wind; it is as if we have all been refrigerated. In the stillness people trail comets of breath. I catch the underground to the national Stasi Headquarters at Normannenstrasse in the suburb of Lichtenberg. The brochure I picked up at the Runden Ecke shows a vast acreage of multi-storey buildings covering the space of several city blocks. The picture is taken from the air, and because the buildings fold in at right angles to one another the complex looks like a gigantic computer chip. From here the whole seamless, sorry apparatus was run: Stasi HQ. And, deep inside this citadel was the office of Erich Mielke, the Minister for State Security.
On 7 November 1990, only months after the citizens of Berlin barricaded this complex, Mielke’s rooms, including his private quarters, were opened to the public as a museum. The ‘Federal Commissioner for the Files of the State Security Service of the former GDR’ (the Stasi File Authority) has taken control of the files. People come here to read their unauthorised biographies.
I see through a window into a room where several men and a woman sit each at their own small table. They look at pink and dun-coloured manila folders and take notes. What mysteries are being solved? Why they didn’t get into university, or why they couldn’t find a job, or which friend told Them about the forbidden Solzhenitsyn in their bookcase? The names of third parties mentioned in the files are crossed out with fat black markers so other people’s secrets are not revealed (that Uncle Frank was unfaithful to his wife, that a neighbour was a lush). But you are entitled