Tunnel 29

by Helena Merriman

‘What for?’ the Stasi officer asks.

  And that’s when Siegfried crumbles, admitting everything: how he brings this landlady a bottle of Vermouth and two packs of cigarettes every week so that he can spend evenings in a room that she rents to his lover.

  Siegfried pauses. And then, in a moment of inexplicable honesty, he adds another detail: his male lover.

  This changes everything. Not only is Siegfried guilty of smuggling, but he’s guilty of a more serious offence: homosexuality. In 1960s East Germany – as in most of the world – homosexuality is illegal. Only a few decades before, Berlin had been the gay capital of Europe, the Ku’damm stuffed with bars and private clubs where it was the height of cool to turn up with someone of the same sex. Forty years on, in both East and West Germany, homosexuality is seen as deviant bourgeois behaviour, a threat to the state.

  Siegfried knows he’s in trouble. He waits for the Stasi officer to arrest him, take him to prison. But the Stasi officer doesn’t arrest him. Instead, he tells Siegfried that there is a way out.

  20

  The File

  WE KNOW ALL this from the files the Stasi wrote about Siegfried Uhse after his first interrogation. They’re kept in a vault, alongside millions of other files, in the former Stasi headquarters.

  It’s a long, labyrinthian walk to get to that vault, through fluorescent-lit, stale-smelling corridors and down clunky lifts until, eventually, you come to a pair of locked double doors. Through those doors, at the top of a flight of steps, you look down onto a room containing row upon row of heavy white pull-out shelves, each containing thousands of files. The room feels like a morgue, white and clean with the whiff of bleach. The only sound is the hum of air-conditioning – the files must be kept at a constant eighteen degrees so the paper doesn’t disintegrate.

  Everything about the way those files are stored is as meticulous as that air temperature. They’ve been painstakingly catalogued so that any file can be found should someone ask to see it. And the files in that vault are only a fraction of what exists.

  When the Wall fell, protesters broke into Stasi buildings across the country, and, like detectives in a crime scene, they searched every room, looking for evidence that revealed what the Stasi had been up to for forty years. They discovered videos of protests, rallies and church meetings. They found samples of people’s handwriting, torn from letters and posters, along with graphological reports analysing their style. Then – the strangest discovery – thousands of jars, all numbered, each containing torn pieces of cloth. These pieces of cloth had been placed in suspect’s armpits or crotches during long, sweaty interrogations, then put in sealed jars as smell samples, ready to give a sniffer dog should they need to find the suspect again.

  As well as the jars, the handwriting samples and the videos, protesters found tens of thousands of sacks containing shreds of paper – the remains of the Stasi files. In the Stasi’s final hours, when they knew the end was near and as protesters surrounded their offices, they started shredding. When the shredders broke, they ripped files with their bare hands. The protesters took those sacks to Berlin, where they sat, under the care of the new government, for five years while the country debated what to do. Should the files be read, or would that open old wounds and stop the country healing from the past?

  Eventually, it was agreed that the past should be known, every inch of it, and so began the maddening task of putting the shredded files back together. In a building in a village near Nuremberg, a small group of men and women sat at tables reconnecting these dislocated pages, solving A4 puzzles of people’s monitored lives.

  It was then they realised just how many files there were, hundreds of thousands, the first dating from 17 June 1953 (the evening of the uprising that Joachim was part of), the final report dating from November 1989, weeks before it all ended. If you were to lie the pieces of paper on the ground, end to end, they’d stretch for over two hundred kilometres.

  When I began my research, I asked the Stasi Archives for everything they had on Siegfried Uhse. Two months later, they’d gathered the files together. All 2,735 pages. I went through them with my German translator Sabine, trying to work out who and what each one was about, a task made harder by the black lines put through some names by officials at the archives. But we soon learnt the lengths of certain names, deducing from that and the occasional flick of a letter above or below a black line whose file we were holding.

  The first report about Siegfried Uhse dates from 2 October 1961. It’s the six-page account of his arrest and interrogation, carried out by Stasi officer Hans Joachim.

  The first page notes the department that interrogated him – Department II: counter-intelligence. Then it sets out his personal details. His full name: Siegfried Alfred Helmut Uhse. His date of birth: 9 July 1940 – which makes him twenty-one years old. His profession: hairdresser.

  Then his appearance: he’s 1.67 metres tall with a narrow build, back-combed ash-blond hair, grey eyes, a ‘pointed nose, a wide mouth’, and they make a special note of his slightly ‘inflamed eyes’. Then there are questions about his childhood, which, it turns out, is surprisingly similar to Joachim Rudolph’s.

  Siegfried Uhse grew up in a working-class family in East Germany and was thrown out of his house by soldiers, like Joachim, after the war. Aged four, he’d come to Berlin with his parents, though his father died when Siegfried was fourteen. (Cause of death redacted.) In 1958, three years before the Wall, Siegfried followed his mother in moving to West Germany, and that detail is important as it meant he had West German citizenship, which is why Siegfried could go in and out of East Berlin. Recently, he’d moved to West Berlin, where he now lived by himself, renting a small flat just off the Ku’damm.

  The Stasi interrogator asks about his job.

  Siegfried lists every hairdressing salon he’s worked in, their addresses and his weekly salary.

  His savings?

  Siegfried says he has 60DM in his flat (worth £5 back in 1961). Then Siegfried turns out his pockets to show his interrogator a few coins he has on him right now.

  In asking these questions, Hans is following the training he’d been given by the Stasi for recruiting informers. He would have been taught the Stasi’s ‘101-point system’, against which Stasi officers assessed potential recruits. They were taught to extract information about every area of a future informant’s life: their friends and family, their job, social position, political views, hobbies, books, body language, dress sense, ‘brain power’, moods, skills, living conditions and, finally, their sexual behaviour. Nothing was off limits, everything was important. There it was again – that principle of flächendeckend (‘covering all areas’).

  As you read the report, through Hans Joachim’s forensic questioning, Siegfried Uhse comes to life: a man who waters his beloved plants every morning, reads widely and collects drawings that he carries around in a small notebook. Hans adds, ‘there’s a certain softness in him’, before suggesting dismissively that it’s probably because of his homosexuality. At night, Siegfried goes to bars and restaurants with friends, smokes cigarettes (Stuyvesants), eats meals he can’t afford, all washed down with his favourite drink, cognac.

  Siegfried says he’s not into politics, but Hans Joachim would have been pleased when Siegfried tells him that he was part of the Free German Youth when he was a child and, more importantly, that he reads the party newspaper when in East Berlin. And it’s now that you see Hans Joachim, the Stasi interrogator, beginning to warm to him.

  ‘In a longer conversation with Uhse,’ he writes, in typical Stasi-understated-language, ‘it could be stated he’s not unintelligent. In political matters, he is not ignorant.’

  By now, it’s the middle of the night; Siegfried’s interrogation has gone on for two hours and this is when it turns.

  From talking about politics, Hans introduces a more intimate subject, with no warning.

  ‘When did you discover you were gay?’

  Siegfried pauses. ‘When I hit pubert
y.’

  ‘Have you ever been with a woman?’

  Another pause. ‘No. I’ve always run away from them.’

  ‘What kind of men do you like?’

  ‘Pretty men,’ says Siegfried, ‘like actors and singers.’

  ‘Do you have sex for money?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you have anal sex?’

  ‘No, I masturbate.’

  ‘Do you have sex with children?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Where do you meet men?’

  ‘Through my hairdressing clients or out on the streets, but I want a steady boyfriend.’

  ‘Do you think of your homosexuality as a criminal offence?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Have you ever tried to cure your “illness?”’ (By illness, Hans means his homosexuality.)

  ‘Yes,’ Siegfried says, ‘I’ve been to the doctors several times to cure myself, but I always fall back into it. My mother doesn’t know.’

  Reading through this part of the report feels voyeuristic. The questions are intrusive and offensive, but in the file, there’s only one moment where you get a sense of what Siegfried might have been feeling. Hans notes that: ‘it takes a while for Siegfried to open up about “his problem”’.

  It’s hardly surprising. Siegfried is sitting in front of a Stasi officer in the middle of the night, answering questions about the most intimate parts of his life, talking about things he couldn’t tell his mother. And the unspoken backdrop to these questions was the threat of prison: something Siegfried knew all about. The report notes that in West Germany, where homosexuality was also illegal, someone had discovered Siegfried was gay, told the police and he’d been arrested, given a suspended sentence. Siegfried knows where he could end up today if he doesn’t do what the Stasi officer wants.

  It’s now morning; Siegfried has been answering questions all through the night. No sleep. No rest. No food. No water. But now, finally, Hans Joachim offers Siegfried breakfast. After Siegfried finishes eating, Hans delivers the proposition he has been building up to all night: come and work for us.

  Holding the report of that interrogation is like looking at a version of Siegfried caught in amber, an unfinished version of the man he might have been had he not been caught that night. I picture him: a softly spoken, plant-loving hairdresser, just twenty-one years old and exhausted, a terrible choice having been forced upon him.

  Like thousands before him, and many tens of thousands after, Siegfried has to pick a side. This is something East Germany excelled at: it’s what they’d done when they built the Wall, forcing people to choose between East or West, and it’s what they did every time they asked someone to become an informant. The choice was simple: collaborator or dissident. Saying no meant risking prison, your career, your family. Saying yes meant you were now one of them.

  There are no details in the file about Siegfried’s reaction, his emotions. After all the questions about his sexuality, would he have felt shame? Was he thinking about the unspoken threat of a prison sentence, wondering what life would be like as a gay man in a Stasi jail? Or did Siegfried see this as his chance to take revenge on West Germany, the country that had arrested him for his homosexuality?

  It’s impossible to know. None of that is recorded in the file. Instead, in a neat black line, typewritten at the bottom of the page, the file records the end of his interrogation:

  ‘It came to a fruitful conclusion,’ it says. ‘At 10 a.m. in the morning on 30 September, Siegfried Uhse declared by his free will that he would work for us.’

  The next page in that file is handwritten. In an elegant hand, it’s Siegfried Uhse’s so-called letter of commitment; every new informant wrote one. It’s a clever move; new recruits would have felt part of something, no going back. In another bit of astute psychology, the Stasi even allow Siegfried to choose his own codename; they want their informants to feel a sense of ownership in their new identity. Siegfried’s chosen name is so incongruous it’s almost comical.

  I, Siegfried Uhse, voluntarily consent to actively support the security forces of the GDR in their righteous fight. Furthermore, I pledge to maintain absolute silence to everyone about my co-operation with the forces of the Ministry of State Security. If I break this commitment I can be punished according to the current laws of the GDR. For my co-operation with the forces of the Ministry of State Security, I choose the codename Fred.

  Then, finally, they let him go.

  A few days later, the Stasi send an investigator to Siegfried’s house to check his story. The investigator talks to a group of cigarette sellers on the street, friends of Siegfried’s, as well as other tenants in the building. The investigator is happy with what he finds. He notes in his report that Siegfried lives a quiet life, he’s clean, polite, his finances are in order and he doesn’t make trouble. Siegfried’s recruitment is approved and the Stasi schedule their first meeting with him: 8 p.m. on 4 October at Presse Café in East Berlin.

  Siegfried Uhse had made his decision, picked a side. He belonged to the Stasi now.

  21

  Evi and Peter (and Walter and Wilhelm Too)

  December 1961

  EVI AND PETER Schmidt sit in their living room in Wilhelmshagen, a quiet, leafy suburb of East Berlin, a fire crackling in the corner. It’s a few days after Christmas, they’ve just put their baby to bed, and sitting with them by the fire are two friends – Luigi (Gigi) Spina – a tall, handsome art student and his shorter, funnier sidekick, Domenico (Mimmo) Sesta. Mimmo and Gigi are Italian; they’d come to West Berlin to study before the Wall was built and they’d got to know Peter at art school. With the Wall up, they were now separated: the two Italians in West Berlin, Peter and his wife Evi in the East. As foreigners though, Mimmo and Gigi could cross the border into East Berlin when they liked and they went almost every week, trying to convince Peter to escape to West Berlin.

  Peter always said no. The Wall won’t last, he’d say, we just need to wait. Five months on, Mimmo and Gigi could see Peter was struggling. He was distracted and anxious – like a caged animal, they thought. Peter had once worked as a graphic artist for a newspaper in West Berlin; after the Wall, he’d lost his job and he and Evi were now struggling for money. Peter spent most days at home, playing with their eight-month-old baby Annet, strumming his guitar. One afternoon, Peter was told he would soon have to join the East German Army and the thought terrified him – guarding the border, shooting at escapees. He wanted to escape before the military came for him.

  Evi wanted to get out too. Apart from her grandparents, there wasn’t much tying her to East Berlin. When she was six, Evi’s mother had caught tuberculosis, and to prevent Evi from getting it, her mother took her to live with Evi’s grandparents, her mother isolating in a summerhouse in their garden. A few months later, Evi’s mother died and her father then came for her – he’d divorced Evi’s mother a few years earlier. But when Evi’s father revealed that he was planning on selling her to an American major who lived in Munich, Evi’s grandparents threw him out and raised Evi as their own.

  They were kind, loving, but worried about who would look after Evi when they were gone. When Evi turned fourteen, though she was bright and dreamt of going to university and becoming a teacher, her grandparents said she must leave school and begin an apprenticeship to support herself. Evi had become a librarian, learning to write in a child-like neat handwriting as she catalogued thousands of books in a university library. But as she walked to work, in fact wherever she went in East Berlin, Evi felt the Wall looming and she wanted to escape.

  Now, as Mimmo and Gigi ask that same question, with the threat of Peter’s conscription hanging over him, Evi and Peter give a different answer: they say yes. It is time.

  But how? If escaping back in September when Joachim had crawled through a field had been dangerous, trying to escape from East Berlin just a few months later was almost impossible. The Wall was taller and more heavily guarded, with ditches running along the front filled with
hockersperren (metal shards known as ‘dragons’ teeth’), and trip-wires that triggered alarms and floodlights. And there were now dozens of observation towers from which VoPos scoured the border, looking for escapees with orders to shoot. And so the escapes had become more inventive.

  There was Harry Deterling, a train driver, who’d hijacked a steam train with his wife and four kids, along with twenty-five others, and driven it full speed into West Berlin. ‘The last train to freedom’, he’d called it, and he was right: soldiers closed the railway line the next day. Others crawled through sewers or scuba-dived through the river. By the end of 1961, over eight thousand had escaped (seventy-seven of them border guards), but the risks were increasing.

  Tens of thousands of VoPos now patrolled the border, catching and arresting anyone they found, and thirteen would-be escapees were now dead: four had fallen off roofs or out of windows, six were killed trying to swim across the river (one, a champion scuba-driver who’d frozen in the water) and three people had been shot. The party was determined that fewer people would escape in 1962 and the number of successful attempts had plummeted.

  Peter and Evi needed to come up with a new kind of escape route, something the VoPos wouldn’t expect, that would be manageable with a baby. They throw ideas around: maybe they could hire a lorry and smash through the barrier? Or what about a helicopter? Then Mimmo suggests something more subtle: a tunnel. But instead of digging from East to West Berlin as border guards might predict – this tunnel could run from West Berlin into the East. From freedom into repression. It’s the only option that sounds half sensible and they agree to talk again soon.

  After Mimmo and Gigi leave, Evi walks to the window. Her stomach is alive with nervous excitement; it’s a relief to make this decision, but it feels strange to be so powerless in your own extraction, waiting for an escape route to be dug out.