Stasiland_ Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall - Anna Funder [72]
‘Why did people need a permit to ride a bike?’ I ask.
‘Because they could bring messages! Pass on news!’ Koch cries. ‘There was no other transport. People on bikes could evade checkpoints, they could have secret meetings.’ Clearly the atmosphere of paranoid control had set in early under the Russians. All the same, I have started to worry about the level of detail we are sinking into. I steal a look towards his bottomless box, wondering whether we are descending into the morass for the sake of it, or whether there was some point to the bicycle tale. Then, as he turns away from me to put the document back in his box, he says, ‘But beforehand, you realise, they had to vet his record to check that he wasn’t an evil person.’
Was this the point? Was Koch using the available evidence—in this case a bicycle permit—to construct or confirm a story of his father’s innocence during the war? There’s clearly a portion of the past here that cannot be pinned down with facts, or documents. All that exists is permission to ride a bike.
Immediately after the war ended the Allies divided up their conquered enemy. The English, Americans and French took over the western parts of Germany and the Russians took the eastern states of Thuringia, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, Mecklenburg-West Pomerania and Brandenburg. Berlin was divided among the victors in the same way: its western suburbs to the English, French and Americans, its eastern ones to the USSR. But, because the city lay deep in the eastern zone, its western suburbs became an odd island of democratic administration and market economy in a Communist landscape.
In their zones, the western powers set about catching prominent Nazis and establishing democratic systems of governance: a federated system of states, the division of political, administrative and judicial power, and guarantees of private property. In 1948 they handed over these institutions to the newly created Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) together with massive injections of funds from the Americans’ Marshall Plan.
The Russians ran the eastern parts of Germany directly until the German Democratic Republic was established as a satellite state of the USSR in 1949. Production was nationalised, factories and property turned over to the state, health care, rent and food were subsidised. One-party rule was established with an all-powerful secret service to back it up. And the Russians, having refused the offer of American capital, plundered East German production for themselves.
They stripped factories of plant and equipment which they sent back to the USSR. At the same time, they required a rhetoric of ‘Communist brotherhood’ from the East Germans whom they had ‘liberated’ from fascism. Whatever their personal histories and private allegiances, the people living in this zone had to switch from being (rhetorically, at the very least) Nazis one day to being Communists and brothers with their former enemies the next.
And almost overnight the Germans in the eastern states were made, or made themselves, innocent of Nazism. It seemed as if they actually believed that Nazis had come from and returned to the western parts of Germany, and were somehow separate from them—which was in no way true. History was so quickly remade, and so successfully, that it can truly be said that the easterners did not feel then, and do not feel now, that they were the same Germans as those responsible for Hitler’s regime. This sleight-of-history must rank as one of the most extraordinary innocence manoeuvres of the century.
In Dresden once, on a blue bridge over the river Elbe, I saw a plaque commemorating the liberation of the East Germans from their Nazi oppressors by their brothers the Russians. I looked at it for a long time, a small thing dulled by grime from the air. I wondered whether it had been put there immediately after the Russians came into a vanquished Germany, or whether a certain time had been allowed to elapse before things could begin to be rewritten.
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