1989

by Peter Millar

  On the ground floor, just below the flat there was a bar called Wörther Eck (Wörther Corner), because it was on the corner of Wörther Strasse. It was a grimy place with vinyl-topped tables, and a secret staircase at the back that I would only become aware of once it was no longer used. There was a shop on the corner opposite that bore the catchy label ‘Obst-Gemuse’ (fruit and veg). The communist government had replaced all traditional or family names of shops with functional ones. That Germanic insistence on exactitude was however let down by reality. The fruit and veg shop never had much of either. It certainly never had anything green, although the white cabbage occasionally had a greenish tinge. The stock-in-trade was hoary carrots and bruised onions.

  Across the road was the equivalent of a neighbourhood supermarket. It announced this with the word Lebensmittel (foodstuff), which included milk that wasn’t always sour, tomato juice imported from Romania as well as barely drinkable red wine, and, thankfully, an almost unlimited supply of still surprisingly excellent beer. The beer and the tomato juice – and some remarkably foul Russian mineral water – all came in identical half-litre bottles which were either brown or green irrespective of content, so it meant it was well worth paying attention to the label, even if it was usually faded.

  The flat itself had a long, high-ceilinged corridor with a door to the stairwell at either end, three doors off to the left and three to the right. Those on the right were the bathroom, kitchen and a separate toilet; those on the left, in succession, the office, the living room, and the bedroom. The rooms were big and though it was far from luxurious it was as good a first marital home as many young couples in London could afford. The downside, of course, was that it also housed the office: I would be not so much working from home as living in the office.

  And the office was the realm, let there be no mistaking it, of Erdmute. This improbable first name was derived from ‘Earth Mother’, and sounded just as preposterous to most 1980s Germans as it did to me. The exceptions were those old enough to sympathise with children of the thirties and forties who had been given names thought appropriate to the latent paganism of National Socialist ideology. (There are still middle-aged Russians today who labour under the name Melor, derived from Marx, Engels, Lenin, October Revolution – most of whom were called Melsor until Stalin fell out of favour). Erdmute had been employed as secretary since the opening of the office in 1959. Back then she had been a ‘slip of a thing’, she claimed; by now she was a jovial, self-possessed woman in her forties with heavy glasses and a shock of bright red hennadyed hair.

  As the one fixed element in a relatively transient world of young men who came and went over the years, Erdmute had a naturally possessive attitude to the Reuters office. This extended to previous correspondents, even – up to a point – those who predated her. Chief among these was one old man who was one of my first visitors in the East Berlin office: a tall thin Englishman called John Peet, who had been Reuters chief correspondent in occupied Berlin in the late 1940s and also a convinced pacifist. One day in the early summer of 1950, only months after the Soviet zone had declared itself a separate state – in response to currency reform and consolidation in the Western zones – Peet failed to turn up for work. London – to their disbelieving horror – soon found out why. He had left a neat roll of telex tape with instructions for the office clerk to send it over the wire to London. It was, in Peet’s usual manner, a well-crafted little news story, properly formatted in the correct Reuters house style. But it caused pandemonium in London, swiftly followed by disbelief. As a result Reuters were scooped on their very own story when, a week later, Peet turned up at a press conference in East Berlin accompanied by a senior member of the communist politburo to announce his defection.

  Erdmute was slightly disapproving of him, whereas she absolutely doted on one of my predecessors whom I believe she regarded as her ‘star pupil’. In 1963 the office in East Berlin had been occupied by a young Reuters man, Frederick Forsyth, who had yet to turn his hand to the thriller-writing that would make him a fortune. The famous anecdote about him on the World Desk back in London was that he had come close to sparking World War III by sending in a flash report late one October night that massed tanks were heading for the city centre (and by implication West Berlin). He was right, but only just. And his interpretation of the ‘evidence’ of his eyes was dodgy to say the least. They were being redeployed for the next day’s ‘Anniverary of the Republic’ military parade. To be fair, as Erdmute insisted I should be, that had been just four months after JFK’s ‘Berliner’ speech, and only two years since Western tanks and East German soldiers had faced each other on the night the Wall was built. It still gets a bit of a laugh though in journalistic circles.

  Erdmute also lived up to the stereotypical Prussian love of order. Every word of copy sent to London since 1959 had been kept, neatly arranged in chronological order on yellowing telex paper in box-files stacked like ministerial archives around the walls of the office. This orderly filing system had the curious result that such historical gold dust as reports of the first reactions of Berliners to the building of the Berlin Wall and the eyewitness account of the Reuters man who was the first to pass through it, were buried amongst obscure coverage of football results. One such game between Lokomotiv Leipzig and Ballymena, Northern Ireland, was the first story it was my privilege to file; a rude reminder that even in the espionage capital of the world the job wasn’t all glamour.

  There was also a cupboard off the hallway which contained a flush toilet and a pile of yellowing newspapers: Neues Deutschland, the official organ of the central committee of the Communist Party, also dating back to the opening of the office. Erdmute liked to portray this pile of decaying newsprint as a secret treasure trove, it being theoretically illegal to hoard old newspapers, for two reasons: firstly, it was considered wasteful in a society where recycling was done for economic rather than ecological reasons, but also because the communist authorities regarded archive material as something only they should control: history was also deemed to be at the service of the party.

  Erdmute was not a party member. But she was an employee of the communist state. Her contract with Reuters was handled through the wonderfully named Dienstleistungsamt für Ausländische Vertretungen, the ‘agency for provision of services to foreign representations’, DLA for short. It was to the DLA that any Western body, be it embassy, company or news organisation was obliged to apply if they wanted to employ East German staff. The DLA was then paid in West German Marks, and paid its workers the same sum in East German Marks, which on the black market were worth barely a quarter.

  If the British Army had shown me West Berlin from the air, Erdmute showed me East Berlin by car, a bottle-green Wartburg – named for the castle where Martin Luther took refuge in the Reformation and a significant one up on East Germany’s most common runabout, the Trabant (for a start the Wartburg’s chassis was actually made of metal). ‘Soviet Embassy, British Embassy, Humboldt University, Foreign Ministry, Alexanderplatz People’s Police Station,’ she would rattle out as we whizzed along the broad, empty thoroughfares. ‘Marx-Engels Square, Council of State building, Palace of the Republic’. The last of these was a giant showpiece conference/concert hall cum cultural exhibition centre, built on the site of the old Hohenzollern Kaisers’ palace, bomb-damaged but torn down by the communists in 1950 as a political statement. The asbestos-ridden Palace of the Republic has since been demolished and a replica of the Hohenzollern palace is being re-erected, including the only bit that survived, having been preserved by Erich Honecker, the de facto dictator, as a balcony for his Council of State building.

  She would test me on what I had learned that day back in the office over coffee and biscuits provided by Helga. If Erdmute was the fusspot, Helga was the honeypot: the ‘cleaner’. Helga was a dark-haired, dark-eyed, slender beauty of maybe thirty – a couple of years older than I was – divorced with two young children. She, like Erdmute, was officially employed by the DLA state organis
ation, in the role of cleaner and general housemaid. But the role she had played throughout most of the tenure of my predecessor had been that of mistress.

  ‘Wir lebten zusammen, wie Mann und Frau,’ (We lived together like man and wife), she told me one day, at the door to the bedroom, her big brown eyes staring pointedly into mine.

  Helga had for the previous few weeks become something of a pal. It was hardly a bad thing to have an attractive woman, the nearest person to my own age I had come across, to show me what there was to a fun side of East Berlin. We went for a drink in a couple of bars together, we even went to a disco of sorts once where youngish East Berliners drank heavily – the East Germans thought booze rather than religion an allowable opium for the masses – and indulged in fairly dirty dancing – think John Travolta without the white suit – to domestically produced pop music or, more rarely, an officially sanctioned Western hit. And Helga could writhe with the best of them.

  We even went swimming together once, along with her children, at one of the many lakes of the Brandenburg countryside to which East Berliners, unlike the hemmed-in West Berliners, had unrestricted access. But all along, I was wondering just what game Helga was playing. For she was undoubtedly playing a game, as became clear when she spilled the beans about her sexual relationship with my predecessor in a way that clearly suggested that if I was interested, the privilege went with the job.

  The man I had taken the place of in the office, if not the bedroom, had little in common with me physically – apart from a relatively diminutive stature – and even less in personality, being a ruthlessly ambitious career journalist with his eyes already set on a high executive position he eventually achieved. It seemed unlikely to me, therefore, that Helga found us both equally attractive. That left only two other possible solutions, both of which were equally credible, and may even have intermingled: first, that she was merely a young divorcee looking for a man who had easier access to the finer (i.e. Western) things in life than most of her compatriots, or, secondly, that she was an employee of the Staatssicherheitsdienst, the state security service, the infamous Stasi.

  The likelihood that both these possibilities co-existed is the one that I found most plausible at the time, and continue to do so today. The greatest – and in the end most frightening – element of the Stasi’s control of the East German population was not through direct monitoring (though there was enough of that, as I was to find out) but through a vast network of IMs, an acronym that stood for Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter, ‘informal collaborators’. These were people recruited either because they volunteered, occasionally for ideological reasons but more usually for personal advancement, or who had themselves been compromised, or had simply been told that the job they were in required such ‘active collaboration’. There were tens of thousands of them in a population of just seventeen million, and IM ‘skeletons’ keep turning up in the cupboards of prominent people, including politicians and show business figures, even today in a Germany reunited for nearly twenty years. Everyone knew of the existence of the IM network, but nobody admitted being one. But as I was to find out, the result was that everyone watched what they said in the company of strangers. And often even friends.

  So was Helga Stasi? Or at least an IM? I don’t know for sure, but from records I have seen since, I suspect the answer is as complicated as the question. It was impossible that anyone working for the DLA, given that they were employed exclusively in the service of foreign organisations, was not at the very least required to answer any questions that may be put to them as to their immediate employers’ activities. It was also absolutely certain that among her friends would be at least several IMs. The same thing obviously applied to Erdmute, but if the Reuters correspondent was actually sleeping with the maid, it would be the easiest thing in the world to keep tabs on almost every other aspect of his life, both private as well as professional.

  I have to say here, however, that it was not on account of such professional scruples that I declined the apparently obvious invitation. Nor was it that I didn’t find Helga attractive: she was gorgeous, intelligent and apparently – insofar as appearance meant anything – honest. It was just that I was already spoken for. I was happily engaged and planning – albeit at a distance – my wedding to the woman I was intending to spend the rest of my life with. If Helga was bait, tasty bait she might be, but the fish wasn’t biting. A few months after my wife arrived, Helga was transferred elsewhere – she wouldn’t say where, and I have never seen her since. Her successor was a hatchet-faced little woman in her sixties.

  That we were spied on was a given. The extent of it was something I would discover only later. We simply assumed there were microphones in the walls. Everywhere. Even in the bedroom. If it felt uncomfortable at first, it surprisingly quickly became just something you lived with. It could be tempting to fall into what John Le Carré would call ‘tradecraft’: turning on the radio or the water taps and whispering if we had something to say we preferred not to share with the secret policemen. But at least in the early days when our circle of acquaintances among the native population was extremely limited, there was less of that than you might imagine. We weren’t spies. And although the regime was repressive, we weren’t its citizens. East Germans under a similar level of surveillance might, we assumed, have felt obliged to watch every utterance. But I didn’t have to worry about what I said. My antipathy to the ‘workers’ and peasants’ state’ was something the minders took for granted. I represented, after all, ‘the class enemy’. I was a ‘tool of the imperialist powers’. If I felt like shouting ‘Erich Honecker is a wanker’ aloud in my own flat, I could. Although I would have been advised not to shout it out the window.

  I did undertake one minor act of sedition: on the occasion of the wedding between Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer, a month before my own, I inflated and released a dozen ‘Charles and Di’ balloons from the window of the flat. Not because I was or am a committed monarchist, but just because they were there. My Reuters bosses would no doubt have sternly disapproved. There was a presumption of a sort of Star Trek ‘first directive’ on Reuters correspondents not to do anything to influence local conditions. My dozen balloons in any case hardly created a diplomatic incident; I noticed a couple lying burst in the gutter a few hours later. I would have liked to think a small child somewhere found one and was allowed to keep it. But I doubt it.

  In any case I had more important things on my plate: I still needed to learn to drive. I had bought myself an East German bicycle. In a country dedicated to sport as a means to cement its international reputation – and with ten-year waiting lists for cars – a bicycle was one of the few consumer commodities that was relatively easy to come by. The problem was that even though cars could be taken through Checkpoint Charlie, for some mysterious reason, bicycles could not. To cross to West Berlin, therefore, I was reduced to cycling to Checkpoint Charlie or to Friedrichstrasse station and then proceeding on foot. Friedrichstrasse station was where the overground S-Bahn railway network in East Berlin came to a brutal end. The same line, of course, ran on through West Berlin, but the trains no longer did. The station was divided into two. Anyone getting off the S-Bahn in the East would have thought this the end of the line. And for most of them it was. But Friedrichstrasse, once the busiest station in Berlin, was still most famous to ordinary East Berliners. It was the only spot where those entitled to go to the West – mostly pensioners considered no longer of economic purpose to the state – could cross.

  Long lines of them could be seen in the downstairs underpass where they queued for access to the closed-off half of the station, waiting to pass one by one through the steel border control gates where their documents were inspected. To cross here I had to join them. The platform itself looked like a scene from some Hollywood vision of a World War II movie, with the silhouette of a jodhpur-clad guard with automatic weapon slung over his shoulder marching along the gantry against the glass wall below the arch of the station roof. From here incre
asingly dilapidated trains ran their Cold War shuttle service to the West. The tracks and trains themselves were one more of the surreal anomalies of divided Berlin. With partition in 1947, the railway lines in Western Germany belonging to the old Deutsche Reichsbahn had been renamed the Deutsche Bundesbahn (federal railways). The lines in the communist East, however, had – despite its imperial and Nazi connotations – retained the old name. And because Berlin’s S-Bahn overground urban rail service had always been operated by the Reichsbahn, it still was: the trains that ran through West Berlin were owned by East Berlin, and still ran the same old run-down rolling stock. A bizarre counterpoint to this was that several of the old U-Bahn (underground) lines started and finished in West Berlin but passed under East Berlin, where the stations, however, had been closed and the entrances bricked up. But these trains, owned and operated by West Berlin public transport still passed through extra slowly in case someone tried to jump aboard.

  Despite being employed by East Berlin public transport, the staff of the S-Bahn in West Berlin of course had to be West Berliners (otherwise there would have been queues of East Berliners trying to join), but their uniforms were supplied by the East and they were paid by the East (in Western D-Marks). For a time after the Wall went up West Berliners had boycotted the S-Bahn as a token protest, refusing to give money to the regime that had built it. They gradually drifted back, but in the meantime service and timings had deteriorated to almost Eastern standards.