Stasiland_ Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall - Anna Funder [54]
‘That’s where I’m off to now,’ he yells. ‘My teacher lives in Mitte like you. Speaking of which, did you follow up any of those Ossi stories you were talking about?’ He doesn’t ask this as if I need to redeem myself from my outburst with Scheller. He seems genuinely curious. And he turns the music down.
‘Yes, I did,’ I say. ‘I’ve been having Adventures in Stasiland.’ He laughs, so I go on. ‘I’ve been in a place where what was said was not real, and what was real was not allowed, where people disappeared behind doors and were never heard from again, or were smuggled into other realms.’
‘Really? How did you find these people?’
‘They’re all around us, Uwe. This was the east, after all. And I’ve gone looking. I advertised for Stasi men—’
‘You did what?’ He looks at me and I wish he’d look back at the road.
‘I put an ad in the paper, Uwe, it was no big deal. And other people I’ve just stumbled across. My landlady, for instance,’ I say, and I tell him briefly about Julia’s expulsion from life until the Stasi offered to redeem her if she would inform for them. ‘And this was as late as the 1980s,’ I finish.
‘No shit,’ Uwe says, and I can see that Julia’s story is as strange and awful for him as it is for me. He slows to a stop. We have reached my place, intact. He turns to me. ‘Two things,’ he says, in his serious journalist’s voice. ‘There’s a man around who as a young Stasi officer drew the line along the street where the Wall would be built, and he’s prepared to talk about the whole thing. His name is Hagen Koch—we had him on a program once about Checkpoint Charlie. And what you said about turning one world into another made me think of someone else. There is a fellow called Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler—he was the chief propagandist for the regime. He might be interesting for you too.’
‘Julia mentioned von Schnitzler. He’s still alive then?’
‘Yep. And fierce, from what I hear.’
‘How can I find them?’
‘I’ll see whether we’ve got any contact details at work.’ Uwe leans across me to open my door, which is sort of gentlemanly, but also unnecessary. He takes the opportunity to look up and check out my building.
‘Thanks for the lift,’ I say. ‘And thanks for the tips.’ He smells of smoke and fake pineapple, like a seedy Hawaiian.
‘No problem.’ He’s still leaning across me, so I follow his gaze. In the bare tree outside my living room two white things float in the branches. One is a plastic bag, and the other, as we both stare up at it, reveals itself to be a pair of men’s underpants. I shrug. I can tell Uwe would never live in a place like this. He leans back into his seat. ‘Good luck in Stasiland,’ he says. ‘Take care there.’
A few days later Uwe does find me a number for von Schnitzler, but it’s wrong. ‘Lady,’ the man who answers tells me, ‘people like that don’t want to be found.’ Herr von Schnitzler is unlisted. I decide to call Herr Winz, to see if he can help. Herr Winz is chuffed to think I need him, and says he’ll see what he can do. In the meantime, I decide to watch some of von Schnitzler’s programs, ‘The Black Channel’.
‘The Black Channel’ was broadcast in the east from 1960. It was intended as a countermeasure to the western program ‘Das Rote Optik’ (The Red View), a critique of socialism being broadcast into the east from West Germany. On Monday nights Deutsche Fernsehfunk, then the single East German television station, screened beloved old movies from the heyday of the pre-war studios, and the Party decided that these, as well as the western programs, required commentary. Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler was given the job.
For a long time, workers in the power stations were on alert every Monday night. First, everyone tuned in at once to the movie, so they went into overdrive. Then, when ‘The