Stasiland_ Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall - Anna Funder [70]
All along the corridor hang framed colour photocopies of what were once top secret Stasi maps. They show various parts of the Wall in aerial view, with a colour-coded key for the guard towers, mine traps, dogs and trip-wires. Black-yellow-red East German pennants are pinned on the walls and the bodice of a uniform of the leaders’ elite guard, the Felix Dzerzhinski regiment, hangs from hooks, deflated as a scarecrow. More obscure mementos of the regime sit in glass-fronted cupboards. As we walk along the corridor, I think I see a crocheted doily in the national colours.
Koch talks as we walk, and by the time we reach his study he is listing off on his fingers the VIPs who have been to see him and his archive. Behind his desk a large gold plate bearing the East German hammer and compass shines out from just above head height. The room is lined with framed newspaper articles. The pictures show Koch with his visitors. He looks straight into the camera, clean-featured and moon-faced and beaming: Koch with the Queen of Sweden, Koch with an actor from ‘Star Trek’, Koch with Christo the wrap artist.
He is more than comfortable with the tiny microphone on my tape recorder. When I ask if I might clip it to his shirt he takes it from me and wields it like a rock star. His forearms are honey-brown and lightly haired.
I ask him how he had applied to join the Stasi.
‘No, no, no, no. It didn’t work like that. You had to be chosen.’ Apparently this was one of the fundamentals of the system: don’t call us, we’ll call you.
‘Who chose you then?’
‘Just a moment,’ he says. ‘It is hard for you to understand. Without understanding my childhood, you can’t see why anyone would want to join the Stasi.’
This isn’t quite true. I have given a lot of thought to why people would want to join. In a society riven into ‘us’ and ‘them’, an ambitious young person might well want to be one of the group in the know, one of the unmolested. If there was never going to be an end to your country, and you could never leave, why wouldn’t you opt for a peaceful life and a satisfying career? What interests me is the process of dealing with that decision now that it is all over. Can you rework your past, the grit that rubs in you, until it is shiny and smooth as a pearl?
‘My upbringing was so…’ he searches for the words, ‘so… GDR.’ His eyebrows move up and down. ‘Everything that was GDR-positive, that was me.’ Koch turns to a large cardboard box on the floor beside his desk. ‘My father put me on this track.’ He reaches into the box and pulls out a brownish photograph of his father in army uniform, with the expression men in armed services pictures often have, as if they are already elsewhere. Then he goes back to the box and produces a school report. He flashes it at me and I see the old-style gothic handwriting. Koch starts to read: ‘Hagen was a diligent and orderly pupil…’ And then he reads on through the report. We are right back at the beginning of his life. I look at the box, and the box is deep. It seems this afternoon we are going to go through it piece by plastic-wrapped piece.
‘You have to understand,’ he says, ‘in the context of my father, and of the propaganda of the Cold War—the GDR was like a religion. It was something I was brought up to believe in…’
He speaks passionately and loudly, although I am sitting close to him and the room is small. I watch him waving his arms and my microphone. He brings out more photographs and more documents and I hear him say, ‘You can see here after the war we had no mattresses, holes in our socks…’
But I am mulling over the idea of the GDR as an article of faith. Communism, at least of the East German variety, was a closed system of belief. It was a universe in a vacuum, complete with its own self-created hells and heavens, its punishments and redemptions meted out right here on earth. Many of the punishments were simply for lack of belief, or even suspected lack of belief. Disloyalty was calibrated in the minutest of signs: the antenna turned to receive western television,