Stasiland_ Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall - Anna Funder [77]
Koch was called to the garrison on 13 August, the day the Wall went up. It was a state of emergency and they were to stay on alert. ‘Two days later, I was called in to the commandant. He looked at my boots and pronounced them too shoddy for the mission. He ordered me to accompany a group, including Honecker, along where they had rolled out all the barbed wire, where the Wall was starting to be. And he ordered me to get new boots.
‘It was an ordinary summer day. When we got to where Checkpoint Charlie was to be, there were crowds of protesters on the western side shouting at us. I had my left leg in the east, my right leg in the west, and I drew my white line across the street. I concentrated on the line, and not on what was happening around me. I thought to myself that those in the west were enemies, looters and profiteers.’ Koch then walked with Honecker and the others the length of the border through the city, nearly fifty kilometres. I’m surprised he doesn’t have more to say about this day, which one might consider the beginning of his life’s obsession. ‘I was only twenty-one years old,’ he says, ‘I just concentrated on my job of drawing the line.’ Then he adds, ‘The next day I could hardly stand. You know how it is with new boots.’
He leans forward. ‘People ask me why I didn’t cross the line when I was drawing it along the streets? Why didn’t I just step over to the west and keep on walking? Because I was in love! I’d been married three weeks. So of course I went back to my young wife, it’s only natural. Just like my father: he went back to his wife, and I went back to mine.’
But his father went back to his family under threat of deportation to a POW camp. Koch didn’t need to be threatened: trained by his father, he had become Socialist Man.
Koch says he is the only person alive who can represent, in his documents and photocopies and photographs, the Wall from the eastern side. Perhaps this is because most people on that side want to forget it. In fact, it seems now most people on both sides want to pretend it was never there. The Wall has been erased so quickly that there is hardly a trace of it in the streets. Only a small part of the most colourful section remains, like a gaudy headstone.
In 1966 Heinz Koch traced his biological father, who lived in Holland. The grandfather came to the GDR on a day visa to meet his son. He came as an ordinary tourist. ‘And because I was with the Stasi,’ Hagen says, ‘my dad, aged fifty-four, was thrown out of his job.’
‘Because he was a close relative to you, so he was not allowed to have Westkontakte?’
‘Because I hadn’t told them about the visit.’ The Stasi had to know everything about the extended families of everyone, but most particularly about their own. ‘That was when my father first told me about his illegitimacy, about running for mayor, and about the threats to him if he didn’t make me into a good socialist.’
I wondered what it would feel like to find out that you had been brought up by your parents as a paragon of a regime they did not believe in.
Koch said to his father, ‘Dad, if that’s the way it is, I’ve had it. I want out.’ He thought: if my working here is a reason my father can’t meet with his father, I don’t want to be here any more. ‘I handed in my letter of resignation,’ he says.
The same day he was arrested and put into a cell. Criminal charges were laid. They were: ‘Preparation and Reproduction of Pornographic Material.’
‘What?’
He enjoys my surprise, and reaches once more into his box. He pulls out a stapled handmade pamphlet. It has roneo-purple handwriting on it, and cartoon pictures. Koch made a dozen copies of the booklet to celebrate a friend’s wedding. In traditional German style, it sent up the groom, the bride