Stasiland_ Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall - Anna Funder [76]
In the summer of 1960, shortly after joining the Stasi, Koch fell in love with a girl from Berlin. She hadn’t been in the Pioniere or the Free German Youth, and she certainly wasn’t in the Party, but she wasn’t radical either. Koch smiles and sort of half-winks. ‘I chose my wife by her outside, not her political convictions.’ I find myself looking away, and the girly calendar catches my eye. It can’t meet my gaze because its head is cut off. I look at its map of Tasmania in the forest.
The Stasi knew everything. Koch’s boss called him in and told him, ‘That girl is inappropriate. We have plans for you, and that little one, she is GDR-negative.’
For their part, her parents were horrified: he was one of them. As soon as she turned eighteen they eloped. It was 21 July 1961.
Koch turns around and flicks a hand at the calendar. ‘You noticed that did you?’ he chuckles.
‘Hmm.’
‘Do you know what it is?’
‘What do you mean?’ I ask.
‘That is the calendar for the border troops of the GDR,’ he said. ‘Do you know what is special about it?’
‘No.’
‘That calendar was printed in mid-1990. After the Wall came down. It was printed because, even at that late stage, people here could not believe that the nation would simply cease to exist. Despite all the evidence, they thought the GDR would go on as an independent country, with an army and a border guard of its own. And that border guard would need its own girly calendar.’
‘When the Wall was built in 1961 I thought it was something we had to do because they were robbing us blind,’ Koch says. ‘The GDR was compelled to protect itself from the swindlers and parasites and black marketeers of the west.’
Because of subsidisation, prices were lower in the east, but so were wages. ‘Before there was a Wall,’ he says, ‘people thought: why should I work in the east when I could earn more in the west? So they went across to them each day and offered them their labour, when we so badly needed it here to rebuild.
‘And then at the checkpoints on their way home they’d change their west marks for eastern ones at a rate of five to one! Can you imagine?’ He says this as if rates of exchange were some kind of money voodoo. ‘They’d come back here able to buy up everything of ours. Not only that, but they’d buy up for friends in the west as well—in the mornings we used to see these people on their way to work with rucksacks full of our bread, our butter, our milk, eggs and meat. Something had to be done to stop people fleeing through this mousehole in the GDR.’
As well as leaving to work in the western sector each day, hundreds and later thousands of refugees started leaving the eastern sector for good. By 1961 about 2000 people were leaving the east each day through West Berlin.
Koch says his thinking was orthodox for the time. ‘These people were shirking the hard work that had to be done here in order to build a better future for themselves—they wanted to enjoy their lives right here, right now.’ It was as if that were a moral failure, a religious falling off the branch—who are these people who will reap where they have not sown?
The GDR was haemorrhaging. ‘And it wasn’t just the ordinary workers who were leaving! It was the doctors, the engineers, the educated people. The GDR had paid for their education and then they allowed themselves to be seduced by the lure of the west.’
So, according to Koch, Ulbricht, the head of state, decided he needed to build an ‘anti-fascist protective measure’. I have always been fond of this term which has something of the prophylactic about it, protecting easterners from the western disease of shallow materialism. It obeys all the logic of locking up free people to keep them safe from criminals.
On the night of Sunday 12 August 1961 the East German army rolled out barbed wire along the streets bordering the eastern sector, and stationed sentries at regular intervals. At daylight people woke to find themselves cut off from relatives, from work, from school.