Stasiland_ Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall - Anna Funder [80]
‘What?
‘You heard me, comrade, the plate is gone. The commandant wants the plate back.’
‘What do you know?’ Koch said to him, leaning on the open door. ‘As soon as I’m gone, the whole place falls apart. As long as I sat in that chair, that plate hung on the wall.’
‘Come on, Koch, it can’t have just disappeared. At the Ministry for State Security nothing just disappears!’
‘I’m afraid I can’t help you.’ Koch closed the door.
The commandant established a ‘Working Group on Plate Re-Procurement’. Koch was summoned back to headquarters for interviews and required to give a statement. He hid the plate in his kitchen.
A short time later they sent in bigger guns. The district attorney came by. ‘Where’s this plate?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I’ll need a sworn affidavit to that effect.’
‘Fine by me.’
Nothing further happened. Nineteen eighty-nine came, the Wall came down, and Koch started to build up his archive. He retrieved the plate from behind the sink pipe and pinned it up in his study. Now, it was a real trophy.
In 1993 a television crew came to interview him. Germany was reunited, and East Germany was a place in the past. The interviewer went through his questions before they started to shoot, so Koch would be prepared. But he was already prepared, because they were all the usual questions: Do your regret your time with the Stasi? What is your connection to the Wall? Is that what made you establish this ‘Wall Archive’?
Koch could see the strapline already: ‘Stasi man keeps Wall alive at home…’ He thought how easy it is for an interviewer to assume moral superiority by virtue of the fact he gets to ask the questions. Even in this new Germany, these weren’t really questions about how the regime possessed people, and his weren’t really answers. Koch would dutifully tell the story of his upbringing.
The interviewer was ready to roll and had started the cue-in when the cameraman called, ‘Stop!’ The crew relaxed their shoulders.
‘What’s up?’ asked the interviewer.
‘I need that plate down. It’s reflecting in my lens.’
The interviewer motioned for an offsider to step around Koch and take it down, but Koch stood up. He tells it to me as a moment of glory. ‘No,’ he said. The room fell silent. ‘I don’t care what you want from me,’ he continued slowly. ‘I will do whatever you ask—I will turn everything in this apartment upside down, I will sing the national anthem if you want. But that…plate…stays…there.’
The interviewer was puzzled. Here was a man who had worked for the Firm for twenty-five years and who now had the gall to try to make a living talking about it; a shameless moral gymnast re-performing his capitulations for the camera. And he was drawing the line at a plate?
Koch remained standing. ‘That plate,’ he said again, ‘stays there.’
‘OK, OK.’
Koch sat down. The interviewer knew when to say nothing. Koch started to tell the whole story: his theft, the establishment of the Working Group on Plate Re-Procurement, the interviews and statements, the threats and fuss. Koch says he didn’t realise that the camera was rolling. The way he tells it, he didn’t mind that it was.
The program was made and broadcast. Several days later, the doorbell rang at Koch’s apartment. Two men showed their wallet passes: Treuhand. This was the body set up after the regime collapsed to oversee the fire sale of East German state-owned enterprises to the private sector. ‘Herr Koch, we’ve come for the plate,’ said one of them.
‘What?’ This was unified Germany, westernised and democratic Germany, and still someone wanted that plate.
‘Pursuant to the Treaty of Reunification between the Federal Republic of Germany and the former German Democratic Republic, all property belonging to the latter is vested in the former. That plate was rightfully property of the GDR and is now property of the Federal Republic of Germany. We are charged with its collection.’
‘Get out.’
‘We are willing to turn a blind eye to the manner in which that plate came into your possession, Herr Koch, provided you return it immediately.’
Koch was incensed. ‘Get out of