Stasiland_ Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall - Anna Funder [38]
‘We had people everywhere!’ he says. His main interest seems to have been placing young committed East Germans into lives in West Germany, where they would eventually come into the sights of the West German security service and be recruited. ‘We had them very high up! We had Günter Guillaume as Chancellor Brandt’s secretary and Klaus Kuron in West German counter-intelligence and the woman who prepared Chancellor Kohl’s daily intelligence briefings!’ This is true, but it is widely known. I find it hard to believe that Herr Winz was personally involved at a high level. He’s too underconfident and unconvincing with all his spy play-acting to have ever done it for real. I try to imagine what he probably did do, because he won’t tell me. The best I can come up with is that he wrote procedural manuals.
But Herr Winz is warming to his tale. ‘The CIA—now they were bandits! A very nasty crew. Did you know they made twenty attempts on Fidel Castro’s life?’
‘They couldn’t have been very good then,’ I smile. He looks startled. He is not amused.
‘Bandits!’ he shouts, ‘I said they were bandits!’
I cast a look behind him in the direction of the waiter, shuffling busily at his station. If he had any curiosity about this man’s origins, it is now well and truly sated.
‘How are you treated today, as a former Stasi man?’ I ask. I would like to find out why he is disguised as a westerner.
‘The foe has made a propaganda war against us, a slander and smear campaign. And therefore I don’t often reveal myself to people. But in Potsdam people come up and say’—he puts on a small sorry voice—‘“You were right. Capitalism is even worse than you told us it would be. In the GDR you could go out alone at night as a woman! You could leave your apartment door open!”’
You didn’t need to, I think, they could see inside anyway.
‘This capitalism is, above all, exploitation! It is unfair. It’s brutal. The rich get richer and the masses get steadily poorer. And capitalism makes war! German imperialism in particular! Each industrialist is a criminal at war with the other, each business at war with the next!’ He takes a sip of coffee and holds his hand up to stop me asking any more questions.
‘Capitalism plunders the planet too—this hole in the ozone layer, the exploitation of the forests, pollution—we must get rid of this social system! Otherwise the human race will not last the next fifty years!’
There is an art, a deeply political art, of taking circumstances as they arise and attributing them to your side or the opposition, in a constant tallying of reality towards ends of which it is innocent. And it becomes clear as he speaks that socialism, as an article of faith, can continue to exist in minds and hearts regardless of the miseries of history. This man is disguised as a westerner, the better to fit unnoticed into the world he finds himself in, but the more he talks the clearer it becomes that he is undercover, waiting for the Second Coming of socialism.
He pulls himself together and lowers his voice, leaning towards me in a conspiratorial way. His breath is hot and bitter from coffee and small flecks of brownish spittle spray over the cardboard thesis cover. ‘Have this.’ He passes me The Communist Manifesto from the top of his pile. It looks well-loved. ‘You should read it,’ he hisses. ‘Then you will understand a great deal more. There is, even today, no better analysis of capitalism. It’s a present from me.’ He takes out a pen and inscribes it to me ‘as a memento of our Potsdam discussion’.
‘Thank you very much.’
Herr Winz collects his material and stands up to go. Then he puts one set of knuckles down on the table and pushes his face close to mine. ‘You can take it from me,’ he says. ‘I have lived through a revolution already—in 1989—and I know the signs.’ His voice is getting louder. I can see the veins in his forehead.