Stasiland_ Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall - Anna Funder [56]
It sure would. This place seems to have been designed on the same one-size-fits-all architectural principle as everything else: the Runden Ecke in Leipzig and Stasi HQ at Normannenstrasse; the same as prisons and hospitals and schools and administrative buildings all over this country, and probably the same as inside the brown Palast der Republik only it’s behind bars and I can’t get in. From here to Vladivostok this was Communism’s gift to the built environment—linoleum and grey cement, asbestos and prefabricated concrete and, always, long long corridors with all-purpose rooms. Behind these doors anything could be happening: interrogations, imprisonment, examinations, education, administration, hiding out from nuclear catastrophe or, in this case, propaganda.
Inside, the room has the proportions of a prison cell, but is decorated like a trailer-home from the 1960s. There are brown curtains for the small high-up window, and brown wallpaper on the walls in a flower pattern. There’s an ancient reel-to-reel film-cutting machine, an office chair, and a tourist poster for the Gobi Desert with text in Russian and German. In the corner there’s a television set and a video player.
Frau Anderson leaves me with some tapes they found. I put one in the machine and turn the lights out. It’s von Schnitzler’s first program from March 1960. The titles come on: a mean-looking cartoon eagle, the West German emblem, wearing the red-white-and-black of fascism alights onto a television antenna. Then the words come up: THE BLACK CHANNEL. Suddenly, a man in a suit with boxy black glasses fills the screen. He addresses me directly, as if he were sitting here in the room:
The Black Channel, my dear ladies and gentlemen, carries filth and sewage. But instead of carrying it to a sewage farm as it ought, it pours, day after day, into hundreds of thousands of West German and West Berlin homes. This channel is the channel broadcasting West German television programs: The Black Channel. And every Monday at this time, we are going to devote ourselves to, as you might say, a hygiene operation.
The next tape was from 1965 after two people had been shot trying to flee over the Wall.
Dear viewers
You all know why I’m here today, returned from my holiday especially to appear before you tonight. Our border guards have, in accordance with their duty, had to shoot at two men. They were breaking the law and seeking to breach our national border. They stopped neither when called, nor when warning shots were fired. One of them was fatally wounded...
People should listen to us when we say, again and again: we determine the order at our border! And we ensure that it is maintained, for good reasons. Whosoever wants to traverse the GDR border needs permission. Otherwise: stay away from our border! He who puts himself in danger will die. I know, ladies and gentlemen, it sounds hard. And will perhaps even be interpreted by some of you as ‘inhumane’… But what is ‘humane’ and what is ‘inhumane’?
Humane it is, to make peace for all men on earth. That is not done by prayer! It is done by fighting. And if, as history teaches us, wars are made by man and not God, then peace too, is a work of man. And for the first time on German soil, here in the German Democratic Republic, peace has been elevated to a governing principle of the state. Whoever seeks to weaken or damage the GDR, whether consciously or unconsciously, weakens or damages the prospects of peace in Germany. It is humane to have created and built this state! It is humane to strengthen and protect it! It is humane to guard the German Democratic Republic against these people who would most like to eat it for breakfast…
He goes on and on, but I wind the tape back and take notes. I want to be able to see exactly how this man turned inhumanity into humanity, these deaths into symbols of salvation. I want more urgently to meet him, and see what he thinks now that the bulwark is down and his world is gone.
It’s nearly 4 pm, and I’m doing well for time. I’m not going to be