Stasiland_ Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall - Anna Funder [32]
On the next landing I pass a black bust of Marx on a pedestal, godlike with flowing hair. One of the offices has been converted into a trophy room for Stasi trinkets. There are banners for each regiment, ribbons and medals for service and buttonhole pins as signs of seniority. There are miniature pointy-bearded Lenins in a range of sizes, and a long row of clenched plaster fists sticking up for international socialism. There are trophies and vases and beer mugs with the GDR’s hammer-and-compass insignia on them. A miniature boxed book set contains the life and deeds of Comrade Erich Honecker and there’s a locket-sized portrait of Mielke himself in, of all things, enamel. A carpet hangs on the wall bearing the woolly triumvirate of Marx, Engels and Lenin in profile next to a lurid hand-worked mat with the Stasi insignia in red, yellow and black acrylic. The rugs fascinate me. They demonstrate, I think, the value of labour over everything else here, mostly aesthetics and utility.
A smaller room leads off from this one. At first I think it’s going to be more revolutionary kitsch, but here there are just books and medals under glass. In fact, mostly there seem to be papers. But when I read them, I see why they deserve a room of their own. They are the 1985 plans of the Stasi, together with the army, for the invasion of West Berlin.
The plans are methodical. They include the division of the ‘new territory’ into Stasi branch offices, and figures for exactly how many Stasi men should be assigned to each. And there’s a medal, cast in bronze, silver and gold by order of Honecker, to be awarded, after successful invasion, for ‘Courage in the Face of the Western Enemy’. No-one in the west had imagined the extent of the Stasi’s ambitions.
Mielke’s quarters are on the second storey. There’s no-one around. My shoes make a plasticky noise on the lino, till I reach his office where the floor is parquetry. It’s a spacious room, with the feel of well-kept impoverishment. It is the same sense you might get visiting someone who bought their furniture as a bride in the 1950s but never had the means to update it. In fact, everything seems to be in that particular fifties yellowy-green colour, nuclear mustard.
The main feature of the room is a middling-sized veneer desk. As I approach I pass a portrait of Lenin. His eyes follow me across the room. The only things on the desk are two telephones and a white plaster death mask of Lenin. Life-size, his head seems small compared with all the exaggerated versions of it in wool and paint and marble in the treasure chamber downstairs. It also looks very dead—a memento mori in this belief system, like a crucifix in another. Aside from his presence though, this place could be the mayor’s office in the down-at-heel council chambers of a small but proud rural town whose people recall fondly the days when wool prices were high.
The light is so bad now that outlines are blurring. I walk further, through Mielke’s private quarters (a daybed and chair) and personal bathroom (a plain tiled affair) to a larger anteroom which now has cafeteria tables for tourists. It, too, is empty. There are a couple of old lounge chairs in one corner; a video plays on a television set. I move towards it, a source of light, and sit down to watch.
The film shows amateur footage of demonstrators storming this building on the cold night of 15 January 1990. They walked through the offices, the supermarket, the hairdressers, opening locked rooms and staring at the sacks and sacks of paper. They didn’t seem jubilant; they didn’t even show much bravado. Their faces wore instead a quiet mixture of disgust and sadness. I have heard this particular feeling described as not knowing whether you want to laugh or throw up.
It’s cold in here, and the air tastes recycled. I pull my coat collar up to my ears. I think that there is no parallel in history where, almost overnight, the offices of a secret service have gone from being so feared they are barely mentionable,