Stasiland_ Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall - Anna Funder [55]
Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler became a one-man institution and the most hated face of the regime. At the end of 1989 when the demonstrators called out, ‘We are the people!’ and ‘Free elections!’ they also shouted, ‘Say Sorry, Schnitzler!’ and ‘Schnitzler to the Muppet Show!’ That was exactly what he was: a grumpy old puppet throwing scorn on proceedings from on high.
The East German television station was at Adlershof, an eastern suburb of Berlin. The complex is now being touted as a hot new multimedia centre but remains a cluster of cold grey buildings set in an expanse of gravel, like an industrial park. One of them houses the archive of programs broadcast in the GDR.
This place isn’t really open to the public, and Uwe has made some calls to get me in. I enter what seems to be a back door and then walk along a grimy glass-sided gangway linking this building to the next. There are no people around. I come to double doors with an old security intercom. I ring in and they open for me. Ahead, there’s a counter. In either direction, right and left, a long linoleum corridor stretches out, strewn with ancient editing equipment and piles of film reels.
Behind the counter I find the first signs of life. Two men in what look like matching brown cardigans are drinking coffee. They take a look at me and turn back immediately to one another.
‘Good morning,’ I say.
‘Have you come for a parcel?’ Cardigan One asks, staring straight at Cardigan Two.
‘No,’ I say. ‘I’ve come to look at some tapes.’
‘We wouldn’t know anything about that,’ Cardigan One says. He still doesn’t look at me. There’s a silence.
‘Is Frau Anderson about?’ I ask.
‘She’d have to see Frau Anderson about that, wouldn’t she?’ One says to his silent companion. Two takes a sip. One reads this as agreement.
‘Yes,’ One repeats, ‘she’d have to see Frau Anderson about that.’
I glance up and down the empty corridor.
‘It’s getting on for time,’ he adds. ‘We leave here at 4.25, you know.’
‘Right,’ I say.
Cardigan Two speaks. ‘We’re on a break,’ he says to One.
‘Right,’ I say again. There’s another silence. What is this, Beckett? I remember what the German absurdist poet Kurt Tucholsky said about his countrymen and counters: they all grovel in front of them, and aspire to sit behind them. I am tossing up whether to grovel like a native or to make a scene, foreign-style, when I am saved by footsteps coming along the corridor: Frau Anderson.
‘There you are then,’ Cardigan One says to Cardigan Two, as if this whole little episode had been a private bet between them, ‘Frau Anderson.’
Frau Anderson is a woman in her mid-fifties. It is hard to tell what she really looks like because she is wearing makeup to disguise. Perhaps she used to be on the stage, or in television. She has shiny skin the consistency of cheesecake and lips painted on in a shape that departs, boldly and theatrically, from nature.
‘Ach, Herr von Schnitzler,’ she says as she leads me down the corridor. ‘He was a one. You’ve got to give it to him: at least he has stuck with what he said back then. Not a damn turncoat like the rest of them these days.’ Her bitterness and nostalgia shock me. It is part of the nostalgia for the east (ost) which has given rise to a new sticklebrick word: Ostalgie. Clearly only those demonstrably loyal to the state worked here, and Frau Anderson is still one of them.
The corridor is fluorescent-lit, without a chink of natural light. The linoleum is beige, and either mottled or marbled. The walls are a peeling bilious yellow. There’s a stale smell. It is like being inside some old beast. We walk the length of the corridor and I count, from habit or obsession or just not wanting to get lost, fifteen steel doors on each side before we get to the last one. Frau Anderson opens it and turns to me. ‘I leave at 4.25,’ she says, ‘do you think you’ll be done by then?’
‘I hope so,’ I say.
‘It would be terrible,’ she jokes,