Tunnel 29

by Helena Merriman

  A few weeks before the end of the war, Walter Ulbricht and nine other German communists had sat around a table in an art-deco room at the Hotel Luxe in Moscow, hatching a plan to return to Germany and build a new Stalinist-state. Walter Ulbricht had experience of this kind of thing – trying to persuade people of the merits of Stalinist communism. And he’d been terrible at it. During the war, he’d visited prisoner-of-war camps in Russia, delivering long speeches about communism to bored German soldiers. At one point he’d even driven a truck to the Russian front, shouting propaganda over loudspeakers for the benefit of German soldiers nearby. Ulbricht had since learnt that there were better ways of doing things. That the best propaganda was invisible.

  On 30 April 1945, the day Hitler shot himself, two Soviet planes landed on a makeshift runway, a few miles from Berlin. On board, Walter Ulbricht and nine other German communists. With the fires of war still burning, they got to work, enacting the plan they’d hatched in Moscow. Underpinning it were two principles: because of the hatred of Russia in Germany, they would never talk openly of their time in Moscow. Second, they wouldn’t refer to themselves as communists. From now on, they would be known as socialists.

  With financial and political support from Moscow, they began creating a new Stalinist government, careful not to make it look like a communist takeover. The strategy was simple: staff local government with competent administrators while putting their most trusted communist leaders in the most powerful positions – in finance departments and the police. As Ulbricht put it: ‘It has to look democratic, but we have to hold everything in our hands.’ After just a few weeks, they’d created something that looked like a government, filled with people from a range of backgrounds and parties, with all the power in the hands of communists.

  Only a few months ago, the communists had been the little people, the vermin, crushed under the black boots of the National Socialists. Now, they were the powerful ones, with the full weight of the Soviet Union and its tanks behind them. In 1848, Marx wrote that communism was the inevitable successor to capitalism. During the darkest days of the Second World War, to his disciples, the fulfilment of Marx’s prophecy had seemed unimaginable. Finally, a hundred years after Marx’s prediction, their time had come.

  5

  The Smuggler

  1949

  JOACHIM SPRINTS THROUGH the street. The ball is just ahead of him, bumping along the road. It will be his any minute – his legs are almost buckling with the effort – but as he closes in, a foot swipes in from the right and takes it. It’s a familiar feeling. He’s the smallest of all his friends. It’s why they call him Der Kleine – ‘Little One’.

  ‘Joachim!’ shouts his grandmother. ‘Get over here!’

  He runs over to her, sees something in her hands. It reeks. A bag of coffee, freshly ground.

  His grandmother waves it in front of him. ‘You need to take this to Wilmersdorf.’

  Joachim blinks back at her. He doesn’t know much about Wilmersdorf. What he does know is that it isn’t in East Berlin where they live, but on the other side of the border in West Berlin.

  Joachim’s grandmother explains that he has to get on the train, cross the border into West Berlin and meet a man who’ll give him money in return for the coffee. It won’t be easy – if border guards smell the coffee, they’ll arrest him. His grandmother puts the coffee in a rubber sack to disguise the smell. The sack goes into a briefcase. Then off he goes, not suspicious at all: a scrawny eleven-year-old carrying a briefcase.

  Joachim walks to the station, the smell of metal and oil filling the air. Hopping up to the train, he finds somewhere to sit and looks up at the passengers around him. A few, like him, are holding bags and cases. He wonders if they’re hiding secrets too. Out of the window he watches trees give way to buildings as they draw closer to the border. There, border guards will appear and he knows they’re looking for smugglers like him.

  By now, four years after the war, East and West Berlin are two separate zones. Berliners can go between them – by train, car or just by walking over the border – but going from East to West, they’re often searched by border guards looking for smuggled coffee, cigarettes and sausages. It’s an easy way for East Berliners to make money – buy something cheap on the black market in their half of the city, sell it for a profit in West Berlin. Almost everyone is at it, exploiting the massive economic gap between the communist East and capitalist West.

  That gap began straight after the war, when the Russians stripped East Germany of its gold, metal and machinery. For a country recovering from a war, this was disastrous – like beating up someone already in a coma. Then its new socialist government introduced its new socialist economy, going further than even Stalin had expected.

  Walter Ulbricht nationalised banks, businesses and factories – now called People’s Own Factories. Then he turned to the farms, throwing out landowners and forcing small-scale farmers to join communal farms, pooling their crops. The technical term is ‘forced collectivisation’, one of those phrases that somehow takes the sting out of things. Anguished letters written by farmers describe watching their wheat and potatoes rotting in the fields, their ‘beautiful horses’ taken away to be slaughtered.

  Next, Walter Ulbricht turned to shops and supermarkets, taking them for the state. The government would now decide what they’d sell and for how much. Everything would have a set price: a potato from one shop would cost the same as a potato in another, and ration cards allocated weekly allowances of food and clothes. Tiny HO letters soon appeared on every government-controlled shop representing the state trade organisation that decided what they could sell.

  Behind all of this were inspiring ideals: life would improve. No more poverty. No more unemployment. Free healthcare and education for everyone. And these ideas fell on eager ears: many were hungry for change, and the promise of a new system that would share wealth equally, give everyone free education and somewhere to live was intoxicating. But the shelves in the shops got emptier.

  Walter Ulbricht promised it would be worth it in the end – that the economy would soar and people would be better off than their neighbours in West Germany. But the economy never took off. Worse, it was becoming clear how far the government would go to keep East Germany under control.

  Stalin and Ulbricht created a new political party, the Socialist Unity Party (SED). Stalin hoped the SED would win enough votes to take power without violence, but in the first post-war elections, the SED did terribly, despite their campaign to intimidate people into voting for them. And so Stalin and Ulbricht decided it was time to play dirty: if they couldn’t win votes through love, they would win them through fear.

  They created police units that dragged anti-Soviet workers and activists off the streets and took them to repurposed Nazi concentration camps. In a horrific irony, while in one breath the Soviets proudly announced that they were arresting and executing ex-Nazis, at the same time, they sent at least a hundred and fifty thousand people to Bautzen, Hohenschönhausen and other concentration camps, re-using Nazi torture instruments that had once been used on them.

  By 1948, three years after the Second World War ended, the relationship between the Soviet Union and the West had broken down. It was clear that Stalin wanted the whole of Germany, not just the East, and it was only a matter of time before he would try to take it.

  In June that year, he made his move: Stalin switched off the electricity supplying West Berlin, then blocked British and American access. Since Berlin lay a hundred miles inside the Eastern Soviet zone of Germany, the Western half of the city relied entirely on trucks, canal boats and trains from West Germany for its food and coal. With access blocked, Stalin knew that two and half million people in West Berlin would starve.

  After just one month, West Berliners began to run out of food. What saved them was one of the most ambitious operations in history: the Berlin airlift. For a year, British and American pilots flew food, clothes, medicine and cigarettes into West Berlin. In th
e busiest period, a plane landed at Tempelhof airport in West Berlin every sixty-two seconds. What made this even more extraordinary was that the American planes that brought food were the same planes that a few years earlier had dropped bombs. Now, instead of bombs, as they approached Tempelhof airport, American pilots threw hand-made parcels of sweets and chocolates down to children, who watched the planes from the edges of the airfield. Rosinenbomber – ‘the raisin bombers’ – the pilots were called.

  A year later, after 300,000 air-drops, Stalin gave up. The Red Army pulled down the barriers to the city, allowing British and American trucks back into West Berlin. Tens of thousands of West Berliners cheered the British and American soldiers as they drove in, throwing flowers onto their tanks and holding up posters that read:

  HURRAH! WE’RE STILL ALIVE!

  If you’re looking for the moment the Cold War began, this was it. East and West Germany were now two separate countries with two irreconcilable ideologies: capitalism and communism. That year, West Germany was officially created, its occupying powers – the US, Britain and France – introducing a Western model of democracy, with free elections, free media and private ownership. Six months later, the Soviets declared the creation of the German Democratic Republic (GDR); a communist one-party system with a state-run economy under Soviet control.

  Only a few years earlier, the West and the Soviet Union had come together to defeat Hitler. Now, the two were bitter enemies, limbering up for a new war that would soon spread to every corner of the world, dividing it in two, Berlin their battleground.

  Yet an eleven-year-old boy could still take a train from one political system to another in the hope of making easy money. At the penultimate station before the border, Joachim scrunches his nose. In a flash of terror, he realises he can smell the coffee. His heart thumps. Pulling his briefcase closer, Joachim tries not to think about what could happen when border guards enter the train, if they smell the coffee. He tries not to imagine what the prison cell would be like, how long he might be kept there.

  Joachim eyes the door, knowing it will open any moment. And that’s when the idea hits him. Running to the doors, he stands next to them, and when they eventually open and two border guards board the train, all they see is a scrawny boy holding something, the smell obscured by fumes from the platform.

  Joachim’s body slumps with relief, and when he reaches his stop in the West, he skips off the train and takes the coffee to the address his grandmother gave him, where he is rewarded with a handful of coins.

  That afternoon, little one is his family’s hero and eleven-year-old Joachim learns that though tiny, he is tough, with a mind that finds solutions just when he needs them.

  6

  The Radio

  1952

  JOACHIM IS SINGING. It’s 8.30 in the morning, and he’s at school, a building sliced in half by a bomb where girls are taught in one wing, boys in the other. Every day begins with a song, usually ‘High on the Yellow Wagon’. To keep it fresh, his teacher tells them all to sing it slowly some days, fast on others. It gets his pupils laughing. Wholesome state-sanctioned humour.

  Flutes I hear and violins

  Happy sounds

  Young people in a roundel

  Dancing around the lime tree

  Circling like leaves in the wind

  Cheering and laughing and romping

  I’d love to stay at the lime tree

  But the wagon, it rolls on.

  The song, when you listen to it now, feels nostalgic, a throwback to a rose-tinted version of Germany where everything is horse-drawn carriages, green fields and happy families. The irony is that here, at Joachim’s school, there’s not much looking back: school in the new East Germany is the place where the future is created, where the party creates model socialist citizens for its model socialist country. As East Germany’s new national anthem puts it, ‘Resurrected from the ruins, faces towards the future turned…’

  If communism is East Germany’s new religion, then the school is its church, its pupil-congregation sitting in pews, learning at the feet of priest-teachers who often have a stronger influence on their lives than their parents. Six days a week, children are in the care of its party-appointed teachers, right from kindergarten where two-year-olds are taught the principles of socialism through communal potty breaks.

  Joachim learns through repetition, his teachers discouraging questions or critical thinking, rebuking pupils who ask challenging questions, threatening to exclude them. In severe cases, children who display ‘anti-social behaviour’ (stealing, for example) are sent to Jugendwerkhöfe – juvenile correction facilities – where they carry out factory-style work, and are ‘re-educated’, sometimes spending days in solitary confinement.

  One afternoon, a man visits Joachim’s class and tells the children about a special after-school youth group that runs arts and crafts, games, even camping in the countryside. Whoever wants to join should put their name on a list. Like most of the children, Joachim is excited, writes down his name.

  When he tells his mother that evening, she’s furious. She tells him this man is from the Junge Pioniere, a scout-like youth group sponsored by the party where children in red neckties and blue bowl hats (reminiscent of the Hitler Youth) are introduced to communist principles and encouraged to report anti-socialist behaviour by their friends and teachers, even their parents.

  At eleven, Joachim is learning that the party presents itself in all kinds of ways. Like a shape-shifter, it’s not always easy to spot. At school the next day, Joachim crosses his name off the list. He’s never part of the Junge Pioniere, or the Free German Youth, which the pioneers graduate to aged fourteen, where they’re given Marx’s Das Kapital and taught Ulbricht’s ‘Ten Commandments of Socialist Morale’.

  But there’s one subject Joachim loves: physics. Sitting at his desk, legs dangling above the floor, Joachim watches as his teacher – a double amputee from the war – chalks up equations on the board. Here, there is no talk about the party or socialist values. There are just numbers, which Joachim finds he can understand as easily as a child’s puzzle. In the school library, Joachim pulls thick books down from the shelves and spends hours studying long lines of numbers cradled between parentheses, spotting patterns.

  Soon, his teacher introduces the class to electronics and Joachim is entranced by machines that seem to work like magic. He thinks back to the grain thresher in the barn back home, these new inventions like new tunes that riff on a theme he’s beginning to understand because the basics are the same. Circuits. Motors. Conduction. Induction.

  He puzzles over diagrams of radios in electronics manuals, reverse engineering them in his mind, trekking off to specialist shops where he buys wires and cogs and batteries to experiment at home. Aged fourteen, he decides he will build a radio. At an electrical shop Joachim buys wire, a rectifier circuit and a capacitor, and with a soldering iron he joins them around a cardboard tube. Finally, he attaches headphones. There’s a crackle of static and his hearts leaps as he realises he’s tuned into a nearby transmitter in East Berlin. Lying in bed, he listens to the East German radio station, and for a few weeks this is enough, but soon he becomes curious and wants to find out what else is out there.

  One night, Joachim makes a bigger radio, with two aluminium capacitors, which means it can receive more than one transmitter. Connecting the ground wire to a radiator in his bedroom, he stretches the ten-metre antenna wire back and forth under his mattress, then, sitting in his bedroom, he hunts through the ionosphere, past the transmitter in East Berlin, searching for sounds from worlds beyond his own, until, eventually, he finds something, something he knows comes from beyond the East. It’s a song, ‘Rock Around the Clock’, and Joachim loses himself in the steel guitar, the saxophone and Bill Haley’s voice, the announcer coming off the back of it to tell his listeners that they are listening to Schlager der Woche – ‘Hit of the Week’.

  Joachim has stumbled across RIAS radio in West Berlin. Built on high
ground near the border between East and West Berlin, Radio in the American Sector (RIAS) is funded by the US and described by diplomats as one of the most powerful weapons of the Cold War. For through the transmitter of RIAS radio, Americans can reach into East German homes, dripping music and dramas into people’s ears, giving them a sonic version of life beyond the Iron Curtain. Night after night, Joachim listens to comedies and political satire such as Die Insulaner – ‘The Islanders’ – a programme that pokes fun at communism and East Germany. At the end of the night, Joachim switches the channel back to an East German station in case anyone comes round and discovers he’s been listening to the enemy.

  As a teenager, Joachim is now learning how far he can push things – both at home and at school. As one of the school’s top science students, he is in charge of the chemistry cupboard, a place of wonder crammed with jars of white powder and bottles containing liquids of every colour. Joachim soon has a favourite chemical – potassium, because of how it fizzes and bangs when he adds it to water. One New Year’s Eve, Joachim blends potassium chlorate and red phosphorus to make firecrackers, lighting them with friends in his backyard after dark. Sometimes he concocts potions at school, decanting them into plastic bottles and throwing them out of the window into the playground, where he watches them blow up. Somehow, he never gets caught.

  One afternoon, at school, his amputee physics teacher tells him about the world above the earth’s atmosphere, where nations and borders and politics don’t mean anything. Joachim starts dreaming about space and decides that when he is older, he will become an astronaut.

  Then, a few weeks later, a man comes to the house and tells Joachim and his mother that he has something to tell them. He was a prisoner- of-war in a Russian camp, the man says, and he was there with Joachim’s father. He died a few years ago.