Stasiland_ Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall - Anna Funder [45]
She puts the pen down and smiles. She has found something lighter to tell. ‘The school was strict,’ she says. ‘There were things about it that were seriously traumatic, such as what we used to call “TV-torture”.’
By the 1980s most people in East Germany watched western television, especially the news bulletins. No-one watched the GDR news, despite the fact that it screened daily on both state-run television stations, in a long and a short version. Julia smiles. ‘At that school every night without fail we were sat down and made to watch “Aktuelle Kamera” in the long version. It was hell.’
The news program was so long because each time Erich Honecker was mentioned, he was announced with every single one of his titular functions. Julia sits up straight with her hands on the table and puts on a media voice. In the flickering light and with her fly-away hair she is a newsreader from outer space, coming through static: ‘Comrade Erich Honecker, Secretary-General of the Socialist Unity Party of the German Democratic Republic, First Secretary of the Central Committee, Chairman of the State Council and of the National Defence Council, leader of the Fighting Groups bladibla—’
We laugh and she pushes back onto two legs of the chair. She is a relaxed and confident mimic. ‘And then the actual news item that came after all that would be null!’ She straightens up again. ‘—today visited the steelworks such and such and spoke with the workers about the 1984 Plan targets which they have over-over-over-achieved by so and so per cent’ or, ‘today opened the umpteenth apartment built in the new district of Marzahn’ or, ‘congratulated the collective farm of Hicksville this morning for their extraordinary harvest results, an increase of so-and-so-many-fold on previous years.’
We are laughing and laughing under the strobing light. ‘And the thing about it was,’ she slaps the table with her fine white hand, ‘it never told us anything that happened in the world!’ She shakes her head at the wordiness of no-news.
Worse though than the no-news, was the anti-news. The students also had to watch ‘Der Schwarze Kanal’ (The Black Channel), with Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler. I have heard about this man, the human antidote to the pernicious influence of western television. ‘At home,’ Julia says, ‘everyone called him “Karl-Eduard von Schni—” because that was how long it took before one of us could jump up and change the channel.’
Von Schnitzler’s job was to show extracts from western television broadcast into the GDR—anything from news items to game shows to ‘Dallas’—and rip it to shreds. ‘That man radiated so much nastiness he simply wasn’t credible. You’d come away feeling sullied, as if you’d spent half an hour atrociously badmouthing someone.’ Julia crosses her arms. ‘I mean you might have your doubts about the west—I sure did—but we also felt that our own country was feeding us lies and that our futures depended on seeming to agree with it all.’
One day in 1984 the headmaster made an appointment to see Julia’s parents at home.
‘We should have guessed something at that point. That was unheard of.’ The three of them sat for two hours with coffee and cake, quite formal. He had come to convince Irene and Dieter to influence Julia to break it off with the Italian boyfriend. People assumed, if they didn’t know Julia, that he was her ticket out. The state was using every avenue it could to stop that from happening.
Julia’s mother told the headmaster, ‘Look, the girl is seventeen, she’s just about an adult, and if she’s decided that this is the man for her life, so be it.’ But Irene also said, ‘To tell the truth, we’re not all that happy about it either. He’s a lot older than she is, and we don’t want our daughter to leave. But we will not stand in her way.’
The headmaster didn’t get very far. ‘He left dissatisfied,’ Julia says. ‘He was actually a nice man. It could be that he had been warned about the consequences for me, and was trying his best to help.’
In 1985 Julia matriculated with straight As. She went to Leipzig to sit