Stasiland_ Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall - Anna Funder [86]
I’ve been reading about Pannach’s death lately. He died prematurely of an unusual kind of cancer, as did Jürgen Fuchs and Rudolf Bahro, both dissidents and writers. All of them had been in Stasi prisons at around the same time. When a radiation machine was found in one of these prisons, the Stasi File Authority began to investigate the possible use of radiation against dissidents. What it uncovered shocked a people used to bad news.
The Stasi had used radiation to mark people and objects it wanted to track. It developed a range of radioactive tags including irradiated pins it could surreptitiously insert into a person’s clothing, radioactive magnets to place on cars, and radioactive pellets to shoot into tyres. It developed hand-pump sprays so Stasi operatives could approach people in a crowd and impregnate them with radiation or secretly spray their floor at home so they would leave radioactive footprints everywhere they went. Rudolf Bahro’s manuscript was irradiated so it could be traced to recipients, even in the west. To detect the marked person or object, the Stasi developed personal geiger counters that could be strapped to the body, and would silently vibrate if the officer got a reading. And in the prison and remand centres, the Stasi sometimes used radiation machines as well as cameras where the prisoners’ mug shots were taken. The File Authority report was cautious. It found no evidence that radiation was used to kill off marked men and women. But it did find that it was used with reckless disregard for people’s health. And it recommended that former prisoners of the Stasi get regular medical check-ups.
Although Pannach died, Kuno is well, and he is now fronting the reformed Klaus Renft Combo. They are on tour again through the old GDR, playing to sell-out crowds hungry for something that was theirs, that was untainted, and that was good. They play a mixture of old and new songs. Their latest album is called As If Nothing Had Happened. The cover is a picture of a full ashtray, emtpy beer cans and an open bottle of whisky. Part joke, part revenge, and part explanation for the lost years, the last item on the CD is the authentic 1975 recording of the Oelschlägel interchange, declaring them to no longer exist.
Our conversation is sliding back and forward. Klaus is still thinking about my question of whether it took courage to turn down the initial offers to leave, or to play along with the Stasi. ‘I don’t know whether it was courage,’ he says. ‘More like some kind of naivety, that protected me, I think.’ I think he’s right here, but it is a naivety that is carefully nurtured and maintained, an innocence that he did not let them damage. ‘I mean, we didn’t all get huge villas on the Mugglesee like the Puhdys, but I can look at myself in the mirror in the morning and say, “Klaus, you did all right.” Material things are not what matter to me.’
He leans back. The smoke leaving his mouth obscures it in a haze of grey, and grey beard. ‘I think the Stasi people have been punished enough.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Well, if they’ve got any conscience at all…’
‘And if not?’ I think of Herr Winz and Herr Christian and Herr Koch and the different kinds of conscience there are.
‘I’m not that interested,’ he says. ‘I didn’t let them get to me.’
This, I think, is his victory. This is what stops him being bound to the past and carrying it around like a wound. If there was ‘internal emigration’ in the GDR, there was also, perhaps, internal victory.
He looks at me. Over the evening he seems to have become more insightful and nimble-minded while I am inert as a sponge. ‘Do you want to hear something beautiful?’ he asks. I nod. He puts on a video of the band performing a song Pannach wrote shortly before he died. Kuno looks now like a butcher or a bikie, but his voice is mellow and grand, fine as it ever was.
I sing my blues for a man
Who could tell you
How red the dreams were in the ruins
Where the concrete towers are now
And do you want to know what’s left
Of