Stasiland_ Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall - Anna Funder [30]
On 13 November, Mielke, aged eighty-one, became desperate about the waning of his world. He made his first and only address to the parliament. It was broadcast live. ‘Dear Comrades,’ he opened, and the booing began. Cries of ‘We are not your comrades!’ came from the newly independent minor parties. Then, as if he simply could not understand why he might be disliked, Mielke stammered into the microphone. ‘I love,’ he said, ‘—but I love all people. I put myself out for you…’ When they think of Mielke, East Germans like to think of this. Perhaps there is something healing about ridicule. It is a relief, anyway, from terror and anger.
On 3 December, along with Mielke, Krenz was expelled from the Party. Hans Modrow, a politician from Dresden, became leader. Modrow decided to change the name of the ‘Ministry for State Security’ to the ‘Office of National Security’ (Amt für Nationale Sicherheit) a cosmetic reform resulting in the deeply unfortunate acronym, ‘Nasi’. Nobody was fooled.
The group of West Germans touring the building has become tighter. The quiet jokes among the men have stopped, the looks between the wives. The guide asks whether they would like to see upstairs, but they shuffle and shake their heads, and say they probably don’t have time, today.
‘Well then,’ she says, ‘we come now to the end of our story.’ With her bossy manner and her twitching nose, she is not going to let these westerners go until she has told them how the people took this building.
She says that in January 1990 when the Berliners saw the smoke coming out of the chimneys they came here to protest. They brought bricks and rocks and built a symbolic wall around the building, to get the Stasi to stop burning the files. She says it is extraordinary that, with all those stones, not one was thrown and that, conversely, not one shot was fired from this building. ‘There were a lot of Stasi agents mingled in among the demonstrators,’ she sniffs, ‘and maybe that’s why they didn’t fire—fear of hitting a colleague.’ Eventually, after the Stasi had done all they could to remove or destroy the files, they opened the doors to the demonstrators.
The denunciations against Mielke began as soon as he lost power—and how could they not, his people being trained to the highest level in denunciation. The Berlin prosecutor’s office received a note accusing Mielke of using public funds to build his hunting estate. In January 1990 more counts were added to the indictment: suspicion of high treason; collaboration to subvert the constitution in that he, along with Erich Honecker had instituted a ‘nationwide system of post and telecommunications surveillance’; and having ‘contrary to the law’ denied people their freedom by locking them up in ‘protective custody’ on the occasion of the GDR’s fortieth birthday.
Mielke was taken into remand. Through 1990 and 1991 he was in and out of custody in various Berlin prisons including Hohenschönhausen, where he had sent most of his political detainees. Further counts were added, including the charge of murdering the police officers in 1931. Mielke’s trial began in 1992 but by the time it ended the only accusations remaining concerned the Bülowplatz murders. For his part in those, he was sentenced to six years in prison. The guide says to her flock, ‘It was ridiculous to get him for those old murders.’ Many people felt though, at least it was something. He was released on health grounds in August 1995, and lives now not far from this building.
Honecker fared worse. In early 1990 he was arrested on suspicion of corruption and high treason, but released from remand. In November of that year he was accused of responsibility for killings at the Wall but fled to Moscow, from where he told the press he had no regrets, and protested the arrest of former colleagues. In July 1992 he was extradited to Berlin to face trial, which was suspended the following January due to his terminal liver cancer. Honecker and his wife left for Chile, where he