Stasiland_ Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall - Anna Funder [73]
In October of that year, the first ‘free democratic’ elections were held in East Germany. In fact, throughout the life of East Germany, elections were regularly held. On the ballot paper there were representatives of all the major parties: mirror-image replicas of the parties that existed in West Germany. There were centre-right Christian Democrats (CDU), Liberal Democrats (later the FDP), and Communists (SED). Election after election for forty years, the results would be broadcast on television: and always, overwhelmingly, the Communists were voted in. The majorities stretched credibility: 98.1 per cent; 95.4 per cent; 97.6 per cent.
None of this, though, was evident in 1946. At that time, it was possible, just possible, that somehow a socialist state would emerge which lived up to the ‘democratic’ of its name. They’d all been through hell on earth; didn’t they deserve heaven? People’s dreams had been honed by suffering, whittled into sharp and definite shapes.
Heinz Koch founded the Lindau branch of the Liberal Democrats and stood for election as mayor. September there is a month of long sunsets, late light falling through the leaves, still on the trees. Even in this land of rubble and dust there was room for hope. This was, after all, an election: there were parties, there were candidates, there were local campaigns and there were polling stations.
And there was a ballot paper on which the Communist Party candidate’s name was top of the list. It might have been a coincidence, except that next to this candidate’s name, ‘Paul Enke’, was written not ‘SED Candidate’, but, already, ‘Mayor’.
Nevertheless, when the vote came in, it was clear Heinz Koch had won the election. Lindau was a tiny place: the Liberal Democrats got 363 votes, the SED 289 and the CDU 131. People no longer wanted right or left—they wanted middle-of-the-road. ‘But Enke the Communist,’ Koch says, ‘was chairman of the Electoral Commission.’ Enke immediately called a meeting in the town hall, ‘for the evaluation of the vote’.
Koch tells me that the hall was full of women, some with children. There were several old men, but there were scarcely any young or middle-aged ones. Enke welcomed them, and then addressed the room: ‘So where are all your men?’
There was a silence, shuffling.
‘Fallen in war,’ came one answer.
‘Missing in action,’ said another voice.
One woman said quietly, ‘I don’t know.’
Then a voice came from the back of the hall. ‘My husband is a prisoner of war in Russia.’
Enke seized his moment. ‘How many of your men are in POW camps?’ he asked. The hands started to go up, at first slowly, but then there were many. ‘So how long did your husband serve in the forces?’ Enke asked a woman sitting near the front.
‘One year,’ she said. The answers started to come from all over the room: five years, three years, seven years.
‘And for that they were taken prisoners of war?’
‘That’s the way it happened,’ said the women.
‘Well, I ask you,’ said Enke, ‘do you think it right that your men, who served three years, five years, seven years in the armed forces, are in prison, when Master Sergeant Koch on my right here, who served that fascist imperialist army for sixteen years, gets off scot-free? Not one single day’s punishment?’
‘So in this way,’ Koch says, ‘my father was sentenced to seven years in a prisoner-of-war camp.’
‘What? Just like that?’ I ask.
Koch is agitated now. ‘The Russians came and took him into custody. That was just the way it worked. And the people said that