Stealing the Future

by Max Hertzberg

  “Katrin! Oh–”

  “It’s OK, I’m going already.”

  “No! I mean, please. Wait. You’re right. I should share more. Open up a bit. One more chance?”

  Katrin hesitated, a vague smile peering through her tears. She looked towards the bus stop, back at me. Maybe she did have a lecture to go to.

  “OK, do you want to go back in?”

  “No, it’s true what I just said, it’s confidential. I shouldn’t be telling you, so I definitely shouldn’t be talking about it in a café in the middle of Westberlin!”

  Katrin smiled. A grin that reminded me of her mother when we first met, before the care and the worry crept into our relationship.

  “Let’s walk a bit, here, this way. And you can tell me why you’re so cagey these days.”

  She took my arm, and steered me down a side street, as if I were an old man needing to be helped home after getting lost. It must have presented a strange sight: an attractive young woman, in trendy, Western clothes walking arm in arm with a bulky, grey headed man clad in cheap, nylon-mix clothing. But I guess everyone in Westberlin has relatives in the East, so maybe it was normal. From the side street we turned into another street. The tall buildings—delicate in yellows and creams, stucco patterns and reliefs gracing the façades—looked down on us.

  “I’m sorry about before. I shouldn’t have made fun about your coat—I mean, it’s not like you were the only one in a beige trenchcoat hanging around there.” A few more steps, another street corner, cross the road while I wonder where she saw another Ossi, then: “You know, I will come back. I am coming back.”

  I looked at her, waiting for her to continue, not wanting to break in on what I hoped she was going to tell me. She’d never before spoken to me about her plans for the future. Not since she’d left.

  “But I’m really enjoying being here, at the Freie Universität, being in West Berlin. It feels like, after all the years of, of…” she was struggling to find the words: “suffocation, I can finally… unfold. I know that amazing things are happening, over there, back home,” again the vague eastwards gesture. “And I want to be part of that. I will be. But this is me-time. Does that make sense?”

  It made a lot of sense and I wondered, if I were younger, would I be doing what she was, or would I be in the midst of this new society we were building in the East? I was thinking of the endless meetings with the other residents in my tenement block. If I were in my twenties, would I want to sit there and plan everything from the communal kitchen garden to insulation measures? Maybe the answer was yes. There were some younger people in my block and while I could see that they sometimes switched off (usually when Frau Priepert from upstairs was talking about noise levels or cleaning rotas for the communal areas), they were actually really engaged. Without them we wouldn’t have the bike workshop in the cellar, without them we wouldn’t have links with the farm on the edge of the city—the farm that brought us food. Last week when I got home they were hanging off ropes, repairing the rendering on the side of the building—it looked dangerous, the work slapdash and piecemeal, but watching them I felt a sense of pride. And the building desperately needed this attention after years of neglect.

  While my mind was wandering, Katrin had continued talking. She was telling me about her course, the other students. I tried to keep up, but I had somehow become fixated on the bike workshop. I made a mental note to take my old bike there, and get it sorted out before the weather turned too cold.

  “But you shouldn’t think you can get away with it that easily,” grinned Katrin. “Tell me all your secrets!”

  I often had a strong feeling with people who knew me well, particularly ones who cared about me, that my face simply betrayed those thoughts I wasn’t even consciously thinking. Like now, I guess I had been hoping Katrin would be sidetracked by her stories of student life, and that I wouldn’t have to tell her about West Silesia and the dead politician. Had she read that on my face? Was that the reason for the sudden change of subject, back to me.

  “Well, I had to go down to West Silesia. It’s all kicking off down there.”

  “Yeah, tell me about it! A student in my seminar group is from Görlitz, she says they have guards on the Silesian borders now. They’re wearing West Silesian uniforms, but are actually BGS.” Bundesgrenzschutz—Westgerman paramilitary border police.

  I was surprised Katrin had heard about this, I’d only heard the rumour last week. So far we weren’t clear whether the Westgermans had actually put their own troops on the Silesian borders, or whether they were just providing training and military hardware. Either way it was a confrontational move, an incursion on our sovereignty—West Silesia was still, officially, part of the GDR.

  “So, I go down there, because there’s a dead politician, probably murdered-”

  “Who?” Katrin interrupted, attracted, as so many are, by the gruesomeness of violence.

  “I shouldn’t say,” but the look on her face, how could I not say? “Maier. That slick one. But don’t tell anyone!”

  Katrin had gone quiet. Her keen curiosity had been shed the moment I said the name.

  “Fuck!” she said quietly, almost whispering.

  “Yeah. Things are going to get interesting now.”

  “Do you know who did it yet?”

  “No, not yet. But the Saxon cops are involved, so it won’t just be the Silesians dealing with it by themselves.”

  West Silesia was small, very small, and just didn’t have the resources to deal with a difficult case. Or alternatively, I reckoned the investigation, if left to the Silesians, would come up with whatever result best suited the politics of the day.

  Katrin seemed distracted, she looked at me. “Thanks, Papa. Thanks for talking. But I have to go—that lecture. You can find your way back to the station?”

  “Hang on, you said there was something you wanted to talk to me about?”

  “Oh! Look, I should go, we’ll talk another time!”

  15:22

  I wandered around a bit more after Katrin left, stopping at a Currywurst stand to get a coffee. I stood by the booth, enjoying the weak sunlight, but not enjoying the weak coffee that I was sipping from a cardboard cup. I was next to a crossroads regulated by traffic lights, and every couple of minutes a shrieking, roaring stream of motorised metal hurtled across the junction, first from one side, then the other. It was loud and smelly, and made me appreciate the fact that there were so few cars on the road in Eastberlin. A couple of years ago we probably had as much traffic as here, although the cars were neither as large nor as shiny, but the collapse of the Eastern European trading bloc, Comecon, in January 1990 meant that we were now paying market prices for the Russian oil we imported. The price of petrol and diesel had shot up, and on top of that it was rationed, the lion’s share going to industry and agriculture. There were attempts to find other fuel sources, using feed maize and sugar beet, but we needed the land to produce food for ourselves and to earn hard currency through export. Fuel for personal transport just wasn’t a priority. Raising the sour coffee to my lips I smiled—it was ironic, just a few years ago our tiny plastic cars with their two stroke engines symbolised freedom. Now we had real freedom, political freedom, and we didn’t have cars. Or, at least not the fuel to put in them. I wondered if there was an inverse relationship between freedom and the number of cars. If there were, then I had to feel sorry for the people here in Westberlin.

  Upon reaching the dregs of both my coffee and my ruminations on transport and freedom I set off again, looking for an underground station.

  Exiting at Olympia I asked around until I found the British base on the Olympic stadium site. A guard wearing fatigues, rifle slung over his soldier, examined my RS pass and told me to present myself at the gatehouse beyond. A second check, this time of both my RS pass and my identity papers, then I was asked to wait. After a few moments a sergeant came to fetch me, asking me, in English, to follow him. We crossed a grassy courtyard and entered a red-brick
single storey building. It looked fairly new, no more than 10 years old, and all the paint work was fresh, but somehow the overall impression I had was of shabbiness. Inside the building the ceilings were low, and the brickwork unplastered, just covered in glossy grey-green paint. A wooden door with a frosted glass window stood partly open, and the sergeant knocked, then saluted to whoever was in the room.

  “Mr. Grobe here to see you, sir,” he reported, not pronouncing the final E in my name.

  “Very good, show him in will you? Thank you.”

  The sergeant looked over to me, gestured towards the open door, muttering something which could have been sir, then disappeared back outside. I went through the door to find a major sitting behind a large desk, head bent over some paperwork, pen in hand, poised perhaps to sign or correct. He looked up as I shuffled in, a vague smile playing at the corner of his lips.

  “Martin! Welcome, Tom Clarie, Tom or Clarie to friends, but never both. Defence Intelligence Staff, yes, quite, really ought to be SIS that receives you, but somehow we get the honour. This is your first visit, I understand? Well, yes, welcome!”

  He’d spoken in German, and was now getting up, his fatigues rustling as he pushed his chair back and extended his right hand, damp and limp. I took it, saying my name, then feeling foolish because he was clearly already in possession of this basic fact.

  “Please, please sit down. A cup of tea and a biscuit, perhaps?” his finger hovered over an intercom system on his desk, and he slowly, almost reluctantly moved it away when I shook my head. My stomach was unhappy about the cardboard coffee I’d had less than an hour ago, and it certainly didn’t like the thought of some over-brewed tea made with a tea bag, and definitely not with milk in it. But I was intrigued by being offered just one biscuit, and wondered what kind of biscuit it might be.

  “I’m very pleased to meet you. I gather you are my counterpart from the other side? Quite odd, we used to deal with the chaps from your Ministry for Foreign Affairs, but actually you’re from the Interior Ministry, aren’t you? Well, the world changes, as we’ve so clearly seen these last few years, what, old boy?”

  I really didn’t know what to say, this chap seemed to be straight from the Babelsberg film studios. His German was perfect, but with a deliberate English accent: an oversized plum in his throat. Although his fair hair and blue eyes made him look more Prussian than British, his language was that of an officer and a gentleman. Fortunately Major Tom (as I had already christened him in my head) ploughed on, neither waiting for nor expecting a response.

  “Now do forgive me, but I’m actually frightfully under prepared—not something that you would expect from a British intelligence officer, eh? But we got a call from your office first thing this morning—they seemed awfully keen to get us chaps to meet up a.s.a.bloody-p. if you see what I mean. So, all things said and done, I’ve been caught on the hop. Just reading through my notes from the last liaison meeting, actually, but perhaps you have something for me?”

  Major Tom peered at me over gold rimmed spectacles, as if he hoped I might just have the answers that had eluded him throughout his career as an intelligence officer.

  “Er… no. I gather that this is more of a social call, so we can get acquainted,” I improvised, not understanding why the Minister felt it so urgent that I meet the Russians and the British.

  “Ah! Splendid, splendid. Very civilised, actually. So there’s nothing in particular you feel we have to talk about right now? Splendid.”

  He glanced around the office as if to find something to talk to me about. My eyes followed his, and settled on the bookshelves. Several shelves held weighty tomes on economic theory, everything from Mill to Marx, by way of Keynes, Locke, Smith, Friedman and Proudhon.

  “You’re interested in economic theory?”

  “Why, yes, actually. Are you a fellow economist? Not strictly in my job description, but a firm economic understanding is essential in this post, I find. Take your country, very interesting indeed. Sadly I don’t get intelligence reports on economic affairs, and what one can read in the papers over here is pure propaganda, not worth wrapping your fish and chips in it, as far as I’m concerned. But tell me, is your government really not going to privatise industry? Surely you need the capital investment?”

  “Actually it looks like things are going the other way: most workplaces are being mutualised, sometimes formally by some kind of agreement, but often just because of the impact the Works Councils are having.”

  “Oh, really?” the major interjected politely, but without enthusiasm.

  “Even though a lot of the larger factories and organisations still have a hierarchical structure, the Councils are involved at every level of decision making, and represent the workers.” I persevered. “That means everyone can be involved in every decision, whether that’s to do with production or work conditions. I think it’s inevitably going to lead to some kind of syndicate system—as people get more confident, and more aware of the kinds of decisions that need to be taken, and why. We’re all getting more involved in running our own workplaces.”

  “But that’s not going to sort out questions such as what needs to be produced, and in what quantities,” Clarie was more interested now, warming to the debate. “The communist planned economy failed, so you need some other way to make those decisions.”

  “Yes. The Marxists were arrogant, thought they knew best. But the capitalist systems of the West aren’t any more efficient—look at how resources were wasted in the boom years of railway building in your country, or the redundancy and waste prevalent in the Westgerman healthcare system. And capitalism isn’t efficient in allocating resources either—isn’t it immoral, having both poor people and rich people in the same economy? In the GDR that would be unconstitutional. No, the economy has to be structured from below, by the people, just like everything else in our country. We need to get the balance right—between what we can produce and what we need to produce, and like everything else in our society that’s going to take a lot of negotiation. Think of it as central facilitation rather than central planning.”

  “But that’s impossible—surely one of the reasons that the planned economy system failed was because it’s simply impossible to calculate all the factors!”

  “Maybe, but it doesn’t have to be perfect, just better than the alternatives. And let’s face it, Adam Smith and his followers haven’t done such a great job of it either,” I gestured towards the Wealth of Nations on the bookshelf. “There’s no perfect information to allow supply and demand levels to be correctly recognised, the whole system skews supply towards those with the greatest access to means of payment, rather than those with the greatest need. And we’re not starting from scratch, pretty much everybody in my country has an understanding of what is broken in our economy, where there are shortages or gluts in production. We need to build on that, find new ways of sharing information on production and to make decisions together on the larger economic issues.”

  “Shades of Hertzka, if you ask me,” Clarie paused long enough to look pleased with himself. “But it’s rather naïve to expect everyone to become an economic expert.”

  “Not really. Every household already makes economic decisions. I think we need to experiment with how best to share economic information, honest information, and trust that people will behave in more rational and fair ways—whether they’re deciding what to buy, or what they should be producing in their workplace.”

  “Seems a bit optimistic to me, if you don’t mind me saying, old chap.”

  “Perhaps, but I think it’s got a better chance of working in a society that is already making those links—being involved and making decisions together at home and work.”

  Clarie just grunted, I’d lost his interest. His eyes wandered the bookshelves again. I could tell he was unconvinced by what I was saying, but I didn’t mind. After all, just a few years ago anyone dreaming about a grassroots revolution in our country would have been called a naïve fantasist. It was
all a big experiment, and it probably wouldn’t work too well, but as I’d said, to justify itself it only had to be marginally better than the alternatives.

  Finally the major’s eyes returned to the desk in front of him, and he shuffled together the papers he had been looking at when I came in. Picking them up, and slapping the sides of the bundle of papers against the desk to square them off, he casually waved them at me.

  “Minutes. Presumably you’ve read them, have you? Your predecessor, our meetings, I mean?”

  “No, I was only tasked with liaison yesterday, the paperwork hasn’t caught up with me yet.” In fact, until now I hadn’t even thought that I ought to look through the minutes of previous meetings.

  “Well, I’m sure you know the ropes already, no need to tell you about it all? Basically you and I will stay in touch, any problems with the MLM or BRIXMIS, you know? And we’ll see each other on the 7th as well, along with the others.”

  The 7th of October, Republic Day, when we celebrate the founding of the GDR, it used to be a day of official marches past the Communist Party leadership, nowadays it had become a 24-hour street party. But now it sounded like I’d be wearing a tie and jacket and getting bored at some formal international function in the Palace of the Republic.

  “Of course old Mikhail Vassilovich will be there too, you know from SERB?”