Stasiland_ Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall - Anna Funder [46]
‘What do you mean, “political exam”? You wanted to do language training!’ The light tube on the ceiling is still spluttering and hissing and I am bilious and annoyed. In this light, Julia’s face is marble and her lips blue-rimmed.
‘Well, we were asked about our political knowledge. It was intended that we’d work at the highest levels of government, even internationally. So I think that’s quite OK.’ Of course it is. It’s standard practice in the west too, I am just oversensitised.
I get up and find some tea-light candles in the cupboard so I can kill the fluorescent. I put the candles, thimbles of light around the kitchen—on the sink, on the table, and on the windowsill behind Julia.
‘I don’t know with any certainty that it was organised by them that I fail,’ Julia says. ‘There were an awful lot of applicants, and I have to admit that I did pretty crap in that exam.’ She says she didn’t know things, ‘things that were not just faux pas, but really serious mistakes.’ She starts to laugh again.
She couldn’t name, for instance, the political parties in the GDR. There were political parties other than the ruling Socialist Unity Party but they were parties in name only and the names were remarkably similar to those of the political parties that existed for real in West Germany: the Christian Democrats, the Liberals and so on. Julia says, ‘I was terrified of getting them wrong. If I put a name that was actually a western party, I might well have failed.’ She gives the loose table lino a flick. Julia was being asked to repeat her knowledge of socialist catechism, her belief in things that were hard to remember, because they were not real.
After the results were announced a former student of Dieter’s took him aside. The man’s wife and father-in-law were on the university board of examiners. ‘Between you and me,’ he said to Dieter, ‘there’s no point Julia trying again next year. I would strongly suggest to you she do something else. Get a job.’
‘Maybe,’ Julia says, ‘like the headmaster, he was trying to do me a favour. Save me the trouble of reapplying.’ She has started to look away from me, focusing her attention towards the dark corner of the room. ‘But the strange thing was,’ she says slowly, ‘that afterwards I simply couldn’t get a job. Any kind of job at all…’ She fiddles with the scarf wrung around her neck. ‘That was when it got hard for me.’
Julia thought she might work as a receptionist in a large hotel. That way, she could practise her languages. She applied to Berlin, to Leipzig, to Dresden. She was a top student who spoke English, Russian, French and a smattering of Hungarian. She always got an interview. She would present in her neat clothes, and accept the compliments of management. The hoteliers were invariably excited and impressed. They would send her away for a routine medical, shake her hand warmly, and say they looked forward to seeing her soon.
Sometimes a letter would come in the mail a week later: ‘We regret to inform you that the position has been filled. Thank you for your interest…’ Other times she would call up herself to be told that she had just missed out. Sometimes she didn’t hear at all. In the end, she stopped ringing to be told the same, uncomfortable excuses. She tried to find a position as a waitress, also without success. Julia assumes now that every hotel and every restaurant was required to check the names of all new employees with the Stasi.
Her options were running out. She decided to enrol in a night course for a certificate as a Stadtbilderklärerin (‘a Town Plan Explainer’).
‘A what?’ I have never heard this word. Julia says that it means a ‘tour group leader’, but that in the GDR the word ‘leader’ (Führer) was forbidden after Hitler, der Führer. Because ‘führen’ also means ‘to drive’, this meant there were no traindrivers (a Lokkapitän or ‘Locomotive Captain’ instead) and no drivers’ licences