Stasiland_ Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall - Anna Funder [71]
I remember Sister Eugenia at school, with her tight sausage-fingers, explaining the ‘leap of faith’ that was required before the closed universe of Catholicism would make any sense. Her fingers made the leap, pink and unlikely, as we children drew the ‘fruits of the holy spirit’—a banana for redemption, as I recall—and all I could think of was a sausage-person walking off a clifftop, believing all the time the hand of God would scoop him up. The sense of having someone examine your inner worth, the violence of the idea that it can in fact be measured, was the same. God could see inside you to reckon whether your faith was enough to save you. The Stasi could see inside your life too, only they had a lot more sons on earth to help.
The GDR, in its forty years, tried strenuously both to create Socialist German Man and to get the people to believe in him. Socialist German Man was to be different from Nazi German Man, and different from western (Capitalist Imperialist) German Man. History was taught as a series of inevitable evolutionary leaps towards Communism: from a feudal state through capitalism and then—in the greatest leap forward to date—socialism. The Communist nirvana was the world to come. Darwinian diagrams flash into my mind showing man on a scale of increasing uprightness and lack of body hair: from monkey to Neanderthal to Cro-Magnon to Modern. Here now in front of me is Socialist Man, smooth and keen and very, very verbal.
As Koch dips into the carton once more, I wonder whether he ever wished he had been a disruptive and disorderly pupil, instead of a diligent and orderly one; whether it would have saved him from carrying his explanatory box through life.
‘My story comes directly out of my father’s story.’ Hagen Koch passes me the photograph of his father again, and Heinz Koch looks out from early in the century. He had the same brown eyes as his son, but in a narrower, more doubtful face.
Heinz Koch was born in a village in Saxony on 5 August 1912, and was brought up as the son of the village tailor. One day when he was sixteen years old he ran home from school, distraught, with his report card in his hand. In the space for ‘Name’ was written: ‘Koch, Heinz, Grandson of the Master Tailor.’ Koch pulls a yellowing report from the box. ‘This occurred on the twenty-third of the third, 1929,’ he says, shaking the document. ‘On that day my father learnt of his illegitimacy—his big sister was his mother!’ Heinz was stunned by the realisation that everyone had lied to him: You all hid this from me for so long?
‘Who was his real father?’ I ask.
‘I’ll get to that,’ Hagen says.
‘According to the German moral code of that time, illegitimacy was terrible, shameful.’ Heinz was immediately ostracised by his friends and left school. He decided to join the army, hoping that a uniform would hide the stigma of his birth. In September 1929 he signed up for a twelve-year term of duty.
Heinz Koch got more than he bargained for. By the time his term was due to expire in October 1941, he found himself stationed in France as part of the Nazi occupation force and could not be discharged. In May 1945, after Berlin surrendered, Master Sergeant Koch somehow made it back to Dessau, to his wife and two small children. He travelled over a landscape pockmarked with craters, through towns of rubble with pipes and plumbing exposed in the streets. People were crazy with pain and secrets. In the woods and on the roads were refugees, war criminals, rogue bomber groups and Allied forces who had started the Cold War between them before the hot one had ended. In Dresden he thought he smelt rotting flesh. But, one week after the war ended, Heinz Koch was home. At the Potsdam conference, Dessau was given to the Russians. They released him from active duty.
Koch is talking, dipping into his document box, talking. Then he leans forward as if to tell me a weighty piece of information. I smell his aftershave. ‘On 1 September 1945,’ he says,