Stasiland_ Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall - Anna Funder [4]
Later, Frau Hollitzer told me about Miriam, a young woman whose husband had died in a Stasi remand cell nearby. It was rumoured the Stasi orchestrated the funeral, to the point of substituting an empty coffin for a full one, and cremating the body to destroy any evidence of the cause of death. I imagined paid-off pallbearers pretending to struggle under the weight of an empty coffin, or perhaps genuinely struggling beneath a coffin filled with eighty kilos of old newspapers and stones. I imagined not knowing whether your husband hanged himself, or whether someone you now pass in the street killed him. I thought I would like to speak with Miriam, before my imaginings set like false memories.
I went home to Australia, but now I am back in Berlin. I could not get Miriam’s story, the strange second-hand tale of a woman I had never met, out of my mind. I found a part-time job in television, and set about looking for some of the stories from this land gone wrong.
2
Miriam
I work at the overseas television service in what was West Berlin. The service was set up by the government after the war to beam benign Germanness around the globe. My job is to answer letters from viewers who’ve been beamed at and have some queries.
At Viewer Post I am a cross between an agony aunt, a free research assistant and a receptacle for messages in bottles. ‘Dear Viewer Post, I am looking for the address of the clinic of Dr Manfred von Ardenne to try his new ultra-high temperature cancer treatment for advanced stages as featured in your program…’; ‘Dear Viewer Post, Many thanks for your interesting program on asylum seekers in your country. I am sixteen years old and living in Akra. Could you please send me informations on asylum…’ The occasional neo-Nazi from Missouri or Liverpool writes wanting information on ‘mother groups’ in East Germany. A man from Birmingham, Alabama sent me a photograph of himself in uniform at the liberation of Bergen Belsen concentration camp in 1945 standing behind corpses. He wrote, ‘Thank you for your program on the fiftieth anniversary of the peace. I would like you to know that I recall with great fondness the welcome we Americans received from the ordinary German people. In the villages they had nothing, but when we came they shared it with us like family…’ I write contained and appropriate responses. Sometimes, I wonder what it would be like to be German.
Alexander Scheller is my boss. He’s a tall man just on forty who has a picture of a tight-faced blonde wife, a glass ashtray and a permanent cup of coffee on his vast and otherwise empty desk. He taps incessantly, fidgety with caffeine and nicotine. To his credit, he does me the honour of behaving as if my work answering viewer correspondence is as important as that of the journalists and professional people here. A month ago I sat on the other side of that desk because he had made time for a meeting I called myself.
Scheller’s off-sider Uwe Schmidt was there too. Uwe’s main job as adjutant is to make Scheller seem important enough to have an adjutant. The other part of his job is to appear busy and time-short, which is more difficult because he has hardly anything to do. Scheller and Uwe are both westerners.
Uwe has a similar amount of TV-journo energy to Scheller, only Uwe’s is sexual not chemical. Uwe’s girlfriends are always leaving him and he is, therefore, at most times of day and in almost any company, deeply distracted by desire.
I like Uwe and feel sorry for him because I know that in looking for the reason why his girlfriends leave him he