Joachim listens, his eyes glazing over. He finds himself back at the farm where he grew up. It’s a Sunday morning in spring, bright sunshine, and he’s walking through the forest with his father when a hunter comes running, asks if they’ve seen a stag he shot. They shake their heads, the hunter walks on and Joachim’s father takes his hand.
Joachim blinks himself back to Berlin, the memory over. He has only a few fragments like these to remember his father by. And so Joachim joins the ranks of fatherless German children and a seed of anger blooms in his stomach that he doesn’t yet know what to do with.
7
The Tank
June 1953
IF THEY’D KNOWN what would happen that day, maybe they wouldn’t have gone. Or maybe they would. Because that’s when they learn how far the party will go to protect itself.
It began in March 1953 when Stalin died. In East Germany, there was a surge of hope as people thought things might be different, that the most Stalinist country in the world might be forced to change now the man behind its politics was gone.
But they were wrong. The secret police still came for people in the middle of the night, the economy stayed stagnant. Then, in June, Walter Ulbricht, now leader of East Germany, announced that work quotas were to go up. Again. He’d raised them before, many times, everyone ordered to work harder without being paid more, but this time, something in the souls of East German workers snapped. After eight years of debilitating factory work, long hours, horrific accidents, the constant fear of a Soviet prison, it was all too much.
On 16 June, eighty workers on a building site in East Berlin put down their hammers and walked out onto the streets. Hundreds joined until there were thousands marching, chanting for free elections and an end to Soviet domination. That evening, news of the protests and a plan for a general strike spread, and made it into Joachim’s home. He wanted to be part of it.
The next day, on 17 June, Joachim and his friends meet on a street corner and set off to find the protesters.
They hear them before they see them – tens of thousands of people singing old workers’ songs as they march to Marx-Engels Square in the centre of East Berlin. Normally you’d only see this many people on parade days, when the Stalinallee was flooded with people waving flags and flaming torches, celebrating a political party that somehow always won elections with results that never added up. But today, for the first time since its creation, people have come out to bring that party down.
Joachim weaves through the protesters, excited to march alongside grown men and women. He hears that the protests have spread beyond Berlin, that workers in other cities in East Germany are marching too, and he begins to hope that this will be the day the party falls. As they march, people sidle in – from shops, bakeries, schools. At a shoe factory, a group of women lean out of windows, cheering them on.
Joachim waves up to them. ‘Come join us!’
The women shake their heads, pointing to the door. ‘We can’t! We’ve been locked in!’
Joachim ducks out of the march and helps the aproned-women climb out of the windows, over the steel gates. Soon, Joachim is at the front, helping lead the way to a government building at Rosenthaler Platz where the protesters hope that someone will come out to address them. But the windows and doors are locked – terrified party members have barricaded themselves in. Joachim runs up the stairs, banging on the shutters. Then he sees a man with one leg hobbling up to a window with his crutches. An ex-soldier, Joachim guesses. The man’s face is twisted with anger; he screams at the politicians inside, lift his crutch and starts pounding the glass: stab, stab, stab, stab, stab, stab—
Smash!
The glass shatters, revealing a huddle of petrified officials inside.
Buoyed by their success, the protesters keep marching, shouting: ‘We are workers not slaves!’ until they reach the wide tree-lined avenue of Unter den Linden, where they break into another old workers’ song:
Brothers, to the sun, to the freedom,
Brothers get up to the light,
Brightly out of the dark past
The future is shining through.
Joachim is entranced. He’s never known anything like it, the sound of that singing, the banners streaming high into the air, the feeling that this is the start of something.
But suddenly the mood changes. As the protesters wait for someone to appear, anyone from the government to answer their demands, they get restless. Groups of men break off from the march, setting cars on fire, tearing down Soviet flags and breaking into prisons.
From the government, still nothing.
Then, Joachim hears it before he sees it: a low rumble coming from the East. Whispers fly through the crowd, ‘Die Panzer kommen! Die Panzer kommen!’ – ‘The tanks are coming! The tanks are coming!’
In the distance Joachim sees a cloud of blue smoke from which a tank emerges, a Soviet commander standing on the turret, a steel helmet on his head, his cape billowing. His fists are clenched, his mouth contorting as he spits angry words into the smoke, words that are lost in the noise of the tank and now the screaming. For his tank has ploughed into protesters, teenaged limbs turned to powder under the tread of the tracks. Two men start climbing up the tank, but they fall back, hit by sniper’s bullets. As the tank mows through the square, the protesters hurl bricks, stones, even push cars into its path to stop it, but it’s pointless. Like a malfunctioning robot, the tank keeps going.
Joachim doesn’t want to leave, he’s not ready to accept it’s all over, but then behind the tank, he sees eight more. In the footage of this moment you see protesters throwing stones at the tanks, which drive forwards then pull back, as if taunting the protesters, before ploughing straight into them.
Joachim races home and doesn’t look back.
That evening, he watches from his window as tanks drive up and down empty streets, monitoring the newly announced curfew. Tuning his radio to the West, Joachim discovers what had happened at the square after he left: three hundred people killed. The following week, thousands are thrown into secret prisons and hundreds executed after show trials.
And so ends the first anti-Soviet uprising in Eastern Europe. There won’t be another in East Germany for thirty years. People have learnt the limits of what they can do.
8
A Thousand Little Things
February 1960
JOACHIM IS ON the train to West Berlin. This time there is no smuggled coffee in a briefcase. He’s out with his friends; he’s been saving up for tonight for months.
The journey to West Berlin is familiar; he comes here with friends every weekend. Usually, they head straight for the Kufürstendamm – or the Ku’damm, as they call it – a boulevard in the heart of West Berlin where they buy Coca-Cola and sweets from Woolworths, watch glamorous women in sheer stockings and moleskin fur coats wander in and out of jewellery shops, and lust after the gadgets in department store windows: washing machines, hair-dryers, vacuum cleaners. Joachim always brings his camera so he can take photos of the cars on the streets – the VW Beetles, the Borgwards and then, best of all, the American road cruisers, their freshly painted doors glinting in the sun. At home he develops the photos in home-made chemical solutions in his bathtub, pinning them on his wall. A homage to a life he can visit but not live.
Unlike East Berlin, where the buildings are all functional concrete and linoleum, West Berlin is glitzy and over-the-top. The city had had a makeover in the 1950s – old Prussian buildings were pulled down in an attempt to shake off its violent past and begin again from Stunde Null – ‘Zero Hour’. Now it is full of American-style high-rises, like the new thirteen-storey, black and white Hilton Hotel. In every way they could, West Berliners were saying we’re different to East Berlin: yes, we’re the same city, but we’re a different country.
For Joachim, coming to West Berlin is like taking a plane to the US. Stuffed with department stores, hamburger joints and all-night jazz bars, West Berlin is now the most American city outs
ide America. It’s partly down to that airlift, the American pilots who’d saved West Berlin from starvation. Like someone who falls in love with the person who rescues them, West Berliners became infatuated with everything American, and all East Berliners had to do to get a taste of mini-America was hop over the border.
Some nights, Joachim and his friends come to West Berlin to watch a film at the cinema that sells tickets to East Berliners at a discount. American rom-coms and cowboy movies play out on the screen in front of them, a world away from the Soviet films in East Berlin cinemas. But tonight they’re off to West Berlin’s biggest music arena, the Deutschlandhalle, for an evening they will remember for the rest of their lives.
Joachim leads the way. He’s no longer the runt of the pack, ever since a growth spurt when he was sixteen. On a school trip into the countryside, picking potatoes for farmers who couldn’t keep up with work quotas, Joachim had caught typhus and was put in a hospital isolation chamber. Four weeks he’d lain there – some days delirious with fever, other days listening to Western music on an illicit radio made by a friend, hidden in a cigar box. When Joachim left hospital, the world looked smaller, and when his mother stood him against the pencil-line she’d last drawn over his head on their kitchen wall, she laughed as she saw his head wobbling above it. They guessed it was a freak growth spurt, and no longer was Joachim Der Kleine – ‘Little One’. Yet his nickname stuck.
At the arena in West Berlin, Joachim and his friends weave through thousands of people to the front and they watch her as she comes out and everyone goes wild.
Ella Fitzgerald.
The drums begin, then the piano – the three-note-refrain of ‘Black Magic’, the first song in tonight’s set. Ella gives them romance in ‘Love Is Here to Stay’, she gives them swagger in ‘The Lady Is a Tramp’, she brings them all down to silence with a slow version of ‘Summertime’, then, with a nervous voice, she sings ‘Mack the Knife’ for the first time. ‘I hope I remember all the words,’ she jokes, but she doesn’t and she freestyles from halfway through until everyone is delirious with excitement and love for her, and Joachim leaves, walking on air, until he’s back on the train home and he thumps down to reality, along with everyone else on the carriage.
He looks around the train. Most of the people on it are Grenzgänger – ‘border-crossers’ – people who live in East Berlin but work in West Berlin for jobs that pay better. Crossing into the West in the morning, they come home in the evening, but there are always fewer workers on the return journey. Bewitched by West Berlin, many decide that instead of coming home at the end of their shift, they’ll stay in West Berlin. It’s like a gateway drug: once people get a taste for West Berlin, it’s hard to go back. From West Berlin, if you have the money, you can buy a plane ticket and fly anywhere.
Joachim arrives home and flops into bed. By now, Joachim, his mother and sister are living in a new apartment with an oven, TV, even a bath. Once a week, Joachim runs down four flights of stairs with a zinc bucket to collect coal to heat the water. Each time he tries to beat his record, taking up heavier and heavier bucket-loads, after which he climbs into the bath, his skin pulsing as he lowers himself into the burning water and basks.
Some nights, he creeps out to meet his friends, sitting under carpets that are hanging out to air, a Chesterfield hanging from his lower lip, feeling all grown up as he watches the smoke rise into the night.
They’ve come a long way since those days in their bombed-out flat, begging for food and living off fish heads. Like most in East Germany, they’re living far better than before. The party had invested heavily in the plastics industry, so people now cook with plastic spoons, eat off plastic plates and sit on plastic chairs on Sprelacart floors. People who can afford it fill their homes with Bauhaus-inspired furniture – glossy yellow stools and red table lamps. It’s a colourful new plastic world that Walter Ulbricht and his party hope will smell and feel like the future. Give people enough of these shiny, bright new things, their thinking goes, and maybe they won’t leave the East.
The party is always looking for ways to make people stay, to persuade them that the East has everything they need. They produce TV adverts, showing grinning shoppers in East German supermarkets buying hard-to-find things like bottle openers and hoses. ‘Tausend kleine dinge!’ goes the jingle at the end – ‘a thousand little things!’ But people rarely find those little things, and even if they can, they never work as well as things in the West.
The party fills magazines with photos of sausages, sweets, biscuits and fruit, but they are in such short supply that when they do appear, Sozialistische Wartegemeinschaften – ‘socialist waiting communities’ – made up of friends and family, phone each other to spread the news and they race to the shops, joining queues that snake down the street. Then there are the car adverts for cute pastel-coloured Trabants – or Trabis, as East Germans call them. The cars look great, but the average waiting time is seven years, sometimes fourteen, and in any case most can’t afford one. And though holidays are permitted (trips to Hungary or Prague, or even Black Sea cruises on a ship named Völkerfreundschaft – ‘Friendship between nations’), the party only issues holiday permits to people it considers model socialist citizens.
And so by 1960, though most East Germans are living far better than in the years after the war, though there is free education, free healthcare and subsidised rent, the comparison with the West makes them feel poor. When people watch TV, soap operas from West Berlin remind them how people over the border live – the supermarkets that not only sell fruit, but twenty kinds of fruit. And while there is almost no unemployment in the East, many people work long hours in jobs they don’t like, for not much money. And people have heard the rumours about government ministers: how they live in idyllic walled-off woodland retreats with boathouses, private chefs, swimming pools and cinemas; how they shop at special supermarkets stuffed with imported products and holiday in luxury resorts.
While there are some who share the Stalinist ideals of the party – those who believe the struggle is worth it for the promise of creating a socialist utopia that will one day bloom – most feel frustration and bitterness at their lives and how little they control. And though there is camaraderie in youth groups and factory sports-teams, as Joachim puts it: ‘what kind of camaraderie is enforced?’
Then, behind it all, ever since that day when the tanks crushed the protesters, there’s the backdrop of fear. People who criticise the government lose jobs, disappear in the night. Never seen again. There are whispers about the organisation behind these disappearances, these arrests. No one knows much about it or the people who run it. Just the name.
Stasi.
9
The House of One Thousand Eyes
THERE ARE VARIOUS ways of describing the Stasi. East Germany’s ‘internal army’. Or ‘the Firm’, as some called it. But perhaps the best way to explain it is to start with the man who ran it for thirty-two years, a man whose name came to be synonymous with the Stasi: Erich Mielke.
Like Walter Ulbricht, Erich Mielke was surprisingly short. Unlike Ulbricht, he was muscular and charismatic. With his squat frame and the rolls of neck that spilled over tight white shirts, he looked like a bulldog and in many ways he was. In 1931, aged twenty-four, the Communist Party he was a member of set Erich Mielke on two Berlin policemen, giving him a mission to kill them. Shooting the policemen with a nine-millimetre Luger pistol at point-blank range, Erich Mielke fled to Moscow, where he proved his loyalty to the party, learning Russian and becoming one of the top students in the International Lenin School. Things go murky at that point. Mielke was in Spain during the civil war, then in France, but what he was doing there is unclear, as was his role during the Second World War, which remains a closely guarded secret. He must have done something impressive though, as after it ended, Erich Mielke was awarded a string of medals with grand communist titles – the Order of the Red Banner, the Order of the Great Patriotic War First Class and the Order of Lenin, twice
. By the time he returned to Germany, with his faultless Russian and passion for singing Prussian marching songs, Erich Mielke was a trusted member of the Soviet secret police and they had big plans for him.
Within months, Erich Mielke was working for the Soviet secret police in Berlin in a secret unit called K-5. It was stuffed with German communists like him; people who’d survived the concentration camps of the Nazi years, or escaped to the Soviet Union and were now returning after exile. Their circle of trust was small and they arrested anyone they didn’t like – not only former Nazis but communists too, sending hundreds of thousands to former concentration camps.
Over the next five years, Eric Mielke worked his way up K-5, until, in 1950, a new organisation was created: the Ministry for State Security (MfS). No one really called it that though. Instead, it was known as the ‘Stasi’, and within a few years Erich Mielke was running it, recruiting thousands of young men (only one-fifth were women). Poorly educated, often fatherless from the war, they looked up to Mielke and other veteran communists as father figures.
In just a few years, Erich Mielke turned the Stasi into one of the most powerful secret police forces in history and he became the most feared person in the country, the very mention of his name instilling terror. The Stasi’s job was simple in purpose: to keep the party, the SED, in power, or, as Mielke put it, the Stasi was to become the ‘sword and shield of the party’, a phrase he’d copied from the Soviet secret police, the KGB, which the Stasi was modelled on. It was the Stasi’s job to protect the government from underground organisations and opposition activists; for example, people linked to the Battle Group Against Inhumanity (the KgU), a group based in West Berlin that encouraged resistance in the East, at one point sending thousands of helium balloons over the border, dropping leaflets with anti-communist messages. As well as throwing stink bombs into Communist Party offices, KgU activists in East Germany burnt Communist Party banners, and even bombed a bridge. The Stasi arrested hundreds of them, sentencing them to hard labour, even beheading two.
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