Stasiland_ Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall - Anna Funder [7]
‘Not after what we did,’ she smiles. ‘The Stasi had them taken off the shelves.’
Miriam and Ursula made leaflets (‘Consultation, not water cannon!’ and ‘People of the People’s Republic speak up!’) They stuck them up around town one night. The girls wore gloves so as not to leave fingerprints. ‘We had read as many novels as the next person,’ she says, laughing. Miriam had the posters tucked in her jacket; Ursula had a tub of paste and a brush hidden in a milk crate. They were clever—they slapped the leaflets up in telephone booths over the instructions and at tramstops over the timetables. ‘We wanted to make sure people read them.’ They made a circle around the town, and then they went straight through it.
The girls passed the Communist Party Regional Headquarters. Things were going well. ‘We just looked at each other and we couldn’t resist.’ They marched in and told the guard on duty they were there to see Herr Schmidt, on the off-chance that someone by that name was in the building. They didn’t stop to think what they would have done had a Herr Schmidt come out.
The guard made a call. He put the phone down. ‘Uh no, Comrade Schmidt’s not here at the moment.’ The girls said they would come back the next day.
‘On the way out there were these beautiful smooth columns…’
Miriam is convinced, however, that had they left it at that they would have gotten away with it, but on the home stretch they went one step too far. Passing a building where some of their classmates lived, they put leaflets in the letterboxes of two boys they knew. The next day, one of the parents rang the police.
‘Why would you call the police about some junk mail?’ I ask.
‘Because they were silly, or maybe they were in the Party, who knows?’
‘It seems so harmless,’ I say.
Miriam comes back quiet but strong. ‘At that time it was not harmless. It was the crime of sedition.’
In East Germany, information ran in a closed circuit between the government and its press outlets. As the government controlled the newspapers, magazines and television, training as a journalist was effectively training as a government spokesperson. Access to books was restricted. Censorship was a constant pressure on writers, and a given for readers, who learnt to read between the lines. The only mass medium the government couldn’t control was the signal from western television stations, but it tried: until the early 1970s the Stasi used to monitor the angle of people’s antennae hanging out of their apartments, punishing them if they were turned to the west. Later, they gave up: the benefits of soporific commercial programming apparently outweighed the dangers of news bulletins from the free world.
Sedition was handled by the secret police, not the ordinary Volkspolizei. The Stasi were methodical. They questioned all the classmates of the boys who had received the pamphlets. They talked to the principal, teachers, parents. Several days went by. Miriam and Ursula agreed on an arrest and incarceration plan: neither would admit anything. The Stasi arrived at a shortlist of suspects. Men with gloves and dogs combed Miriam’s house.
‘And we thought we had been so careful, thrown everything out and destroyed all the evidence.’
The Stasi found some of the little rubber letters in the carpet. Miriam’s parents told the officers they did not know how such a thing could have happened in their house.
Both girls were placed in solitary confinement for a month. They had no visits from their parents or from lawyers, no books, no newspapers, not a phone call.
In the beginning they stuck to their plan. ‘No sir, I don’t know either how the leaflets got there, no, it couldn’t possibly have been her.’ ‘But eventually,’ Miriam says, ‘they break you. Just like fiction. They used the old trick and told each of us that the other had admitted, so we might as well too. After no visits, no books, nothing, you think: well, she probably did say it.’
The girls were let out to await their