Chapter 1: Berlin, Winter 1996

It occurs to me that the purpose of disinfectant globules was to mask the smells of human bodies with something worse. Chapter 1

… it was one of the longest structures ever built to keep people separate from one another. (About the wall) Chapter 1

But I liked the sticklebrick nature of it, building long supple words by putting short ones together. (Funder about the German language) Chapter 1

The Stasi was the internal army by which the government kept control. Its job was to know everything about everyone, using any means it chose. Chapter 1

In its forty years, ‘the Firm’ generated the equivalent of all records in German history since the middle ages. Chapter 1

The Stasi had developed a quasi-scientific method, ‘smell sampling’, as a way to find criminals. Chapter 1

Later, Frau Hollitzer told me about Miriam, a young woman whose husband had died in a Stasi remand cell nearby. Chapter 1

Chapter 2: Miriam

Sometimes, I wonder what it would be like to be German. (Funder) Chapter 2

Uwe had a similar amount of TV-journo energy to Scheller, only Uwe’s was sexual not chemical. Uwe’s girlfriends are always leaving him and he is, therefore, at most times of day and in almost any company, deeply distracted by desire. (About Uwe Schmidt) Chapter 2

As the government controlled the newspapers, magazines and television, training as a journalist was effectively training as a government spokesperson. Chapter 2

‘But eventually,’ Miriam says, ‘they break you.’ Chapter 2

Chapter 3: Bornholmer Bridge

‘I don’t know why it didn’t attack me. I don’t know how dogs see, but maybe it had been trained to attack moving targets, people running across, and I’d gone on all fours. Maybe it thought I was another dog.’ (Miriam) Chapter 3

‘Relations between people were conditioned by the fact that one or other of you could be one of them. Everyone suspected everyone else, and the mistrust this bred was the foundation of social existence.’ (Miriam explains why her story was unbelievable) Chapter 3

Chapter 4: Charlie

‘When I got out of prison, I was basically no longer human.’ (Miriam) Chapter 4

‘It was silly. I stopped thinking I’d ever get out. They were playing with me like a mouse.’ (Miriam) Chapter 4

‘Essentially, the deportation came eleven years too late,’ she says, ‘and six months too early.’ (Miriam) Chapter 4

For Miriam, the past stopped when Charlie died. Chapter 4

Chapter 5: The Linoleum Palace

And it was furnished if, as Julia warned me, ‘only sparsely’. This was even truer now. (About the apartment, a metaphor of GDR) Chapter 5

What surprises me about living here was that, no matter how much was taken out, this linoleum palace continues to contain all the necessities for life, at the same time as it refuses to admit a single thing, either accidentally or arranged, of beauty or joy. (Funder) Chapter 5

I am curious about what it must have been like to be on the inside of the Firm, and then to have that world and your place in it disappear. (Funder) Chapter 5

To remember or forget-which was healthier? To demolish it or to fence it off? To dig it up, or leave it lie in the ground? (About Hitler’s bunker – Funder’s thoughts about the past) Chapter 5

Chapter 6: Stasi HQ

‘You must understand that it was very hard for some of us now to get jobs in this new Germany. We are discriminated against and ripped off blind from one minute to another, in this-this Kapitalismus. But we learn fast: so I ask you, how much you are prepared to pay for my story?’ (A potential interview for Funder) Chapter 6

‘We are not immune from villains among us,’ he told a gathering of high-ranking Stasi officers in 1982. ‘If I knew of any already, they wouldn’t live past tomorrow.’ (Recalling of Mielke to the Stasi) Chapter 6

But the men running the GDR were ossified. They were not interested in reform. Chapter 6

… it was all over, and people from east and west were climbing, crying, and dancing on the Wall. Chapter 6

Chapter 7: The Smell of Old Men

Chapter 7: The Smell of Old Men Quotes

But this was done in such an orderly fashion – whole drawers of documents put into the same bag-that now, in Nuremberg, it was possible for the puzzle women to piece them back together. Chapter 7

Germany was the only Eastern Bloc country in the end that so bravely, so conscientiously, opened its files on its people to its people. Chapter 7

The man looks uncomfortable, but he also shrugs as if to say, ‘it was just my job’. (Cemetery worker on video admits to leaving ovens on for Stasi to cremate bodies) Chapter 7

‘I conformed, just like everybody else. But it’s not true to say the GDR was a nation of seventeen million informers. They were only two in a hundred.’ (Cleaning lady at Stasi HQ) Chapter 7

‘Women couldn’t get past colonel rank and there were just three of them anyway. This was a ‘Mannerlub.’ (Cleaning lady at Stasi HQ) Chapter 7

‘It was the smell,’ she says, ‘of old men.’ (Cleaning lady at Stasi HQ) Chapter 7

Chapter 8: Telephone Calls

If I were Miriam and had told the most painful and formative parts of my life to someone, I’m not sure I’d want to see that person again either. (Funder) Chapter 8

Does telling your story mean you are free of it? Or that you go, unfettered, into your future. (Funder considering Miriam) Chapter 8

Klaus Renft was the legendary ‘Mik Jegger’ of the Eastern Bloc. Chapter 8

But in Potsdam people come up and say – he puts on a small sorry voice – ‘You were right. Capitalism was even worse than you told us it would be’. (Herr Winz) Chapter 8

Chapter 9: Julia Has No Story

‘There were no drunks before the Wall came down,’ Julia says. ‘I mean,’ she corrects herself, ‘in the park. No-one was homeless as they are now.’ Chapter 9

‘Long story,’ she says again. I am realising this was code for ‘no story’. Chapter 9

Like her father, Julia believed in East Germany as an alternative to the west. Chapter 9

Chapter 10: The Italian Boyfriend

‘I lived with this sort of scrutiny as a fact,’ she says. ‘I didn’t like it but I thought: I live in a dictatorship, so that’s just how it is. It was clear to me as a simple act of GDR-logic: I am with a western foreigner; now I will be under observation.’ (Julia) Chapter 10

‘It was a condition of sanity both to accept “GDR-logic” and to ignore it. ‘If you took things as seriously as people in the west think we must have, we would have all killed ourselves!’ (Julia) Chapter 10

‘That was when it got hard for me.’ (Julia) Chapter 10

‘I said, you are not unemployed! You are seeking work!’ and then, almost hysterically, ‘There is no unemployment in the German Democratic Republic!’ (Julia, recounting Woman at employment office) Chapter 10

Chapter 11: Major N.

Chapter 11: Major N. Quotes

She was remembering as I watch, summoning presences more real than mine. ‘There are some things-‘ she stops. ‘I don’t think I’ll be able to remember this. I haven’t remembered this.’ (Julia) Chapter 11

I want nothing more to do with him. He wanted to own me. I knew if I stayed with him I would not be able to determine my own life.’ She added, ‘I never want to see him again, even as a friend.’ (Julia to Major N. about Italian boyfriend but ironically suits the Stasi too) Chapter 11

… Julia rides back to her barricaded tower, full of things she can’t leave, but can’t look at either. Chapter 11

Chapter 12: The Lipsi

Everyone, always, was claiming innocence here. Chapter 12

‘The Black Channel’ was broadcast in the east from 1960. It was intended as a countermeasure to the western program ‘Das Rote Optik’ (The Red View), a critique of socialism being broadcast into the east from West Germany. Chapter 12

‘Lipsi’ was colloquial for ‘Leipzig’ but it wasn’t just the regime’s overt attempt to manufacture a trend for the masses, as if it had come from that hip city. (About the Lipsi dance seen on the Black Channel) Chapter 12

Chapter 13: Von Schni-

‘What makes me sorry,’ he says in a withering tone, ‘was what was dished up to people today on that piece-of-filth television. For instance that, that idiotic program-whatsit called?’ (Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler ironically referencing the Big Brother TV) Chapter 13

‘More! Than! Ever!’ He brings his fist down. … ‘I did not “consider” it necessary. It was absolutely necessary! It was an historical necessity. It was the most useful construction in all of German history! In European history!’ Von Schnitzler answering Funder about the Wall.’ Chapter 13

‘… And there was Erich Mielke at the top, a living example of the most humane human being.’ (Von Schnitzler on Mielke) Chapter 13

Chapter 14: The Worse You Feel

‘Lots of things, personal things. I think that the whole Wende in 1989 and everything I went through around it-I think that I experienced it more intensely than others.’ (Julia) Chapter 14

‘It has to do with how I can’t subject myself to any sort of authority. It’s now to the point where I can’t commit myself to coming anywhere on time.’ (Julia) Chapter 14

Shortly after the Wall came down, prisoners held in the GDR, mostly political prisoners, were amnestied…. The man was huge. He bashed Julia and held his hands over her face. …. He threatened to kill her if she screamed, to kill her if she called the police…… The next day she managed to get herself to the police station. She received no counselling, no medical care, and no sympathetic treatment there. (Julia’s rape) Chapter 14

‘For anyone to understand a regime like the GDR, the stories of ordinary people must be told. Not just the activists or the famous writers.’ (Julia encourages Funder) Chapter 14

I’m making portraits of people. East Germans, of whom there will be none left in a generation. And I’m painting a picture of a city on the old fault-line of east and west. This was working against forgetting, and against time. Chapter 14

Chapter 15: Herr Christian

‘I’ve always had an acute sense of duty to obey the law,’ he says, ‘and I thought it was the right thing to do.’ (Herr Christian) Chapter 15

‘Yes, being a blind man was the best way to observe people.’ (Herr Christian) Chapter 15

Chapter 16: Socialist Man

‘No, no, no, no. It didn’t work like that. You had to be chosen.’
Apparently this was one of the fundamentals of the system: don’t call us, we’ll call you. (Hagan Koch to Funder) Chapter 16

‘My upbringing was so…’ he searches for the words, ‘so… GDR.’ (Hagan Koch) Chapter 16

‘You have to understand,’ he says, ‘in the context of my father, and of the propaganda of the Cold War-the GDR was like a religion. It was something I was brought up to believe in…’ (Hagan Koch) Chapter 16

To start a new country, with new values and newly minted socialist citizens, it was necessary to begin at the beginning: with children. Chapter 16

Chapter 17: Drawing the Line

‘I chose my wife by her outside, not her political convictions.’ (Hagan Koch) Chapter 17

‘The GDR was haemorrhaging. And it wasn’t just the ordinary workers who were leaving! It was the doctors, the engineers, the educated people.’ (Hagan Koch) Chapter 17

… to build an ‘anti-fascist protective measure’. … which had 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. Chapter 17

‘Just like my father: he went back to his wife, and I went back to mine.’ (Hagan Koch) Chapter 17

I wonder how it worked inside the Stasi: who thought up these blackmail schemes? Did they send them up the line for approval? Did pieces of paper come back initialled and stamped ‘Approved’: the ruining of a marriage, the destruction of a career, the imprisonment of a wife, the abandonment of a child? Chapter 17

Chapter 18: The Plate

His replacement would come in, and no-one would know the difference. He was interchangeable
with any other uniform and bad crewcut. (About Hagan Koch) Chapter 18

‘My little private revenge,’ he says. ‘That plate’-he looks straight at me-‘was all I had the courage for.’ (Hagan Koch) Chapter 18

Chapter 19: Klaus

He was grumpy and friendly at the same time, just warming up. (About Klaus) Chapter 19

In the ersatz world of the Lipsi, Renft was something authentic and unauthorised. But there was only one record company, AMIGA, and Klaus says that the lyrics to every one of their songs were changed before they could be recorded. Chapter 19

‘… GDR wasn’t just Stasi, Stasi, Stasi. It was “Sex und Drugs und Rock’n’Roll”,’ he says in English. By drugs he means alcohol and cigarettes … (Klaus) Chapter 19

At one point Mielke asked his officers in Leipzig, ‘Why can’t you just grab them? Why aren’t they liquidated?’ (Mielke about Klaus’ band) Chapter 19

‘And then she said to us, “We are here to inform you today, that you don’t exist any more”.’ (Klaus recalls a woman from the committee about Klaus’ band) Chapter 19

‘I didn’t let them get to me.’ This, I think, was his victory. This was what stops him being bound to the past and carrying it around like a wound. (Klaus) Chapter 19

Chapter 20: Herr Bock of Golm

‘Spezialdisziplin was the science of recruiting informers. Spezialdisziplin was the art,’ he says, ‘of the handler.’ (Herr Bock) Chapter 20

The internal service of the Stasi was designed to spy on and control the citizens of the GDR. The only way to make sense of its name was to understand the Stasi as defending the government against the people. (Herr Bock) Chapter 20

‘It would not have occurred to anyone that our country could somehow cease to be. Just like that.’ (Herr Bock) Chapter 20

‘And I don’t mind telling you that some of us actually thought the paragraphs became a little too wide.’ I nod. If, by the mere fact of investigating someone you turn them into an Enemy of the State, you could potentially busy yourself with the entire population. (Herr Bock) Chapter 20

‘Well, some of them were convinced of the cause,’ he says. ‘But I think it was mainly because informers got the feeling that, doing it, they were somebody. …. They felt they had it over other people.’ (Herr Bock) Chapter 20

Chapter 21: Frau Paul

Everything here is, as my mother would say, ‘spic and span’, and so was Sigrid Paul. Chapter 21

‘The Wall Went Straight through My Heart.’ (Heading on Frau Paul’s notes) Chapter 21

‘I went to see him that time and of course I wanted more,’ she says. ‘I wanted more.’ (Frau Paul) Chapter 21

She seems to have, in fact, very little distance from what happened to her. Things remain close, and hard. (About Frau Paul) Chapter 21

Chapter 22: The Deal

Memory, like so much else, was unreliable. Not only for what it hides and what it alters, but also for what it reveals. Chapter 22

If she does not admit to having known, it was because for this knowledge she was made a criminal in the GDR, and because, saddest of all, she still feels like one. Chapter 22

.. Then they continued the interrogation day and night- they liked to do it when one was sleep-deprived. They didn’t give me any rest.’ (Frau Paul) Chapter 22

‘Me-bait in a trap for Michael! And of course that was an absolute no. I couldn’t.’ (Frau Paul) Chapter 22

There was no right answer here, no good outcome. Chapter 22

Chapter 23: Hohenschonhausen

‘I hate this place, but I’m still here.’ (Frau Paul) Chapter 23

I know there are places that I don’t visit, some even that I prefer not to drive past, where bad things have happened. But here she was in the place that broke her, and she was telling me about it. It was part bravery, like the bravery that made her refuse the Stasi deal … Chapter 23

‘She’s a very courageous woman,’ Hinze continues, ‘I have a great deal of respect for her. I’m also grateful to her. But at the same time I don’t think I need to feel guilty … ‘. (Michael Hinze about Frau Paul) Chapter 23

‘And when I took him in my arms for the first time and held him to me he must have thought, “What does this old lady want with me? She says she was my mother, but what was that, a mother?’ (Frau Paul about her returning son, Torsten) Chapter 23

I admire them for what they did.’ He seems to have learned to contain both longing and regret. ‘It doesn’t occur to me,’ he says, ‘to think that perhaps they might have done things differently and things might have worked out differently.’ (Torsten) Chapter 23

He had learned not to play the ‘if only’ game… (about Torsten) Chapter 23

Chapter 24: Herr Bohnsack

Herr Bohnsack was in Division X, responsible, as he put it on the phone to me, for ‘disinformation and psychological warfare against the west’. Chapter 24

‘For me,’ Bohnsack says, ‘that was the most terrifying thing. That instead of shooting cardboard figures we’d have to shoot our own people. And we knew, just like under Hitler, that if we refused we’d be taken off and shot ourselves.’ Chapter 24

‘I destroyed everything, all day long.’ There was so much paper to burn the oven nearly collapsed. A cloud of black smoke hung over him in the sky. Chapter 24

‘I can’t stand here before you all and undo it, take it all back.’ After that I sat down. I drank a beer and I just sat there.’ (Herr Bohnsack to the pub crowd after the fall) Chapter 24

After she died, grief came down on me like a cage. It was another eighteen months before I could focus on anything outside an immediate small area of sadness, or could imagine myself into anyone else’s life. All up it was nearly three years before I came back to Berlin. (Funder after her mother passes) Chapter 24

Chapter 25: Berlin, Spring 2000

Berlin was green, a perfumed city. I realise I have never been here in full spring. Chapter 25

‘You know, television was not good for the eyes. Not healthy.’ I wonder if he was somehow watching over me that winter, seeing the flickering black and white at my window. (Man in park to Funder) Chapter 25

‘This Kapitalismus, you can’t imagine the sort of shit it’s building.’ He sniffs and spits onto the ground. Then he reaches into his pocket and pulls out a comb. ‘It was so much better before…’. (Man in park to Funder) Chapter 25

Chapter 26: The Wall

‘I don’t want to be German any more!’ he sobs. ‘I don’t want to be German any more!’ His face was tracked with silver tears…. ‘We are terrible.’ (Man on street) Chapter 26

Mielke died this week. He was ninety-two. The headlines read, ‘Most hated man now dead.’ Chapter 26

‘I’m taking a busload of tourists tomorrow along the route where the Wall was, because you can hardly tell any more.’ (Hagan Koch) Chapter 26

He is, once more, a true believer: the Wall was the thing that defined him, and he will not let it go. I think for a moment of Frau Paul, who will also not let it go. Herr Koch starts to take photographs. I look up at the angel’s long face and I think of Miriam and Julia; lives shaped, too, by the Wall. Will they let it go? Or, will it let them go? (About Hagan Koch and the others relationship with the wall and memories) Chapter 26

For one mark you can have your passport stamped with a GDR entry visa, as if you had stepped into this tent and miraculously been admitted to that place in the past. Elderly American tourists are climbing out of a bus. Chapter 26

Chapter 27: Puzzlers

I have been thinking about this place for so long as the focus of Miriam’s hopes; I want there to be stainless steel benches and people wearing hair nets and white cloth gloves … I want them to find out what happened to Charlie Weber. (The Stasi file authority) Chapter 27

The dark man says he was most shocked by how the Stasi used people’s own distress against them. ‘When they were in prison, for instance, offering to let them out on condition that they spy for the Stasi.’ Chapter 27

It shows how people can be used against one another. I’m reluctant to condemn them because the Stasi were also manipulated, they too needed jobs.’ The others are nodding. ‘On the other hand,’ he says, ‘there were lots of people who just said no. Not everyone can be bought.’ (Workers at the file authority) Chapter 27

This means that to reconstruct everything it would take 40 workers 375 years. I am speechless. Chapter 27

I look out the window, thinking about Miriam and her hopes that the torn-apart pieces of her life will be put back together in those airy rooms, some time in the next 375 years. Chapter 27

Chapter 28: Miriam and Charlie

Most of the cranes are gone. New facades of buildings in sun-yellow and dusky pink, some even gilded, have been revealed from behind scaffolding. (Leipzig) Chapter 28

I am annoyed that this past can look so tawdry and so safe, as if destined from the outset to end up behind glass, securely roped off and under press-button control. … Isn’t a museum the place for things that are over? Chapter 28

She was probably sixteen, which means she was six years old when the Wall fell. She wouldn’t remember a time without telephone boxes. (Funder sees a teen) Chapter 28

‘Things like this feed into a crazy nostalgia for the GDR- as if it had been a harmless welfare state that looked after people’s needs. Most of the people at these parties are too young to remember the GDR anyway. They are just looking for something to yearn for.’ (Miriam about Ostalgie parties) Chapter 28

Some of the men running the radio station are former Stasi informers, or, in one case, a former Stasi employee. This shocks me, but Miriam shrugs. ‘The old cadre are back in power …’ Chapter 28

For now, though, this terrible game of waiting keeps her suspended from her life with Charlie, still in contact. And underneath the need to know, was the need for justice. The regime may be gone, but the world cannot be set to rights until Miriam had some kind of justice. Things have been put behind glass, but it was not yet over. Chapter 28

…I have made myself sick with silence …
I have wandered, lost …
I hunkered down to see
What will become of me. …
I held myself tight,
So as not to scream.
But I did scream, so loud,
That this land howled back at me,
As hideously,
As it builds its houses. (From Charlie’s poem) Chapter 28