by Tim Mohr
Mita was interrogated three times that first day, August 11, 1983: from 10:40 a.m. to 1:30 p.m., from 2:30 p.m. to 8:00 p.m., and from 9:30 p.m. to 12:20 a.m.
Since the other band members were being simultaneously interrogated, their apartments were being searched, and other information was being brought to bear, the interrogators learned more and more specifics during the course of the day. The questions circled back, and the questioner kept adding additional info to show how much he knew. Mita realized the Stasi had apparently had observers at the Blues Mass. At one stage, her interrogator started to quote from lyrics of the MfS song . . . SS!
Stasi officer: “Why did you take part in the performance of the aforementioned song?”
Mita: “I took part in the performance of the song about the MfS by playing drums because I like to play music and I had the possibility to do that at the Blues Mass. And besides, the aforementioned lyrics are accurate.”
Mita simply rejected much of the rest of the questioning.
Stasi: “It is further known to the investigative organ that you, together with other persons, performed songs with the titles ‘Alptraum’ [‘Nightmare’]and ‘Friedenslied’ [‘Peace Song’] at the Blues Mass. Comment on this!”
Mita: “I refuse to comment.”
Stasi: “For what reason do you refuse to comment?”
Mita: “I refuse to comment about that. I have nothing more to say to the question.”
Stasi: “What other public performances did you take part in?”
Mita: “I have nothing to say about that.”
Stasi: “Why don’t you have anything to say about that?”
Mita: “I have nothing to say about that.”
Stasi: “Who among you wrote the lyrics of the aforementioned song?”
Mita: “I have nothing to say about that.”
Stasi: “How did your hairstyle come about?”
Mita: “I have nothing to say about that.”
Stasi: “Since when have you been living on Stargarder Strasse?”
Mita: “I have nothing to say about that. I’m tired.”
Stasi: “Why do you refuse to answer even easy personal questions?”
Mita: “I have nothing to say about that.”
At the end of the marathon sessions, Mita had to sign a typed, condensed transcript of the various interrogations, and then she was led to a cell to sleep for a few hours. Mita was still seven months removed from her eighteenth birthday—a minor.
32
The next day, August 12, Mita, too, was transferred to pretrial detention in the prison in Pankow. When she was admitted, she had in addition to her clothes—described as “ripped” in the official inventory—four marks and fifty-one pfennigs, and a pair of leather cuffs.
She was rushed upstairs, this way, that way, hands behind your back, halt! Mita was disoriented and trying to remember a few things her mother had told her to keep in mind if arrested.
This way, halt!
A door.
“Come in.”
Mita and her interrogator shook hands.
“Guten Tag.”
“Be advised,” the officer began when her interrogations continued at the new facility, explaining the protocol by rote, “that preliminary proceedings as a result of urgent suspicion of criminal acts pursuant to Paragraph 220 are being initiated against you by the Ministry for State Security.”
Paragraph 220 of the East German penal code was a legal holdover from the Nazi era. It functioned as one of several catch-all clauses frequently employed against what in the West would be called political crimes; the paragraph made slandering the system illegal—a malleably vague crime that carried up to a three-year jail sentence.
Mita had to repeat this back to the officer: “I have been advised that preliminary proceedings . . . ”
Mita tried to remember her mother’s advice.
“I want to ask who has been notified of my arrest,” she said.
Stasi: “Your mother.”
Mita: “And who will I be allowed to speak to?”
Stasi: “Also your mother, but that will be a while yet.”
And then it began again.
Stasi: “For what reason did you, together with other persons, perform a song at a Blues Mass the contents of which warned the attendant audience to be wary of the Ministry of State Security?”
Mita: “The content of the aforementioned song is in my opinion simply a statement and not slander.”
Stasi: “Why did you, together with other persons, publicly urge the audience members to be wary of the MfS through the aforementioned song?”
Mita: “I publicly urged wariness of the MfS in the MfS song because if for no other reason you can be detained just for saying it. Because if you mention facts, suddenly, like me, your whole life can change. That does not constitute ideological freedom to me.”
Stasi: “Who else took part in the performance of the song at the Blues Mass?”
Mita: “I will not comment on that.”
And so it went, day after day. But never in a pattern that Mita could get used to or anticipate. For some stretches there would be interrogations all day every day, then suddenly they might not take her from her cell for a week. The point was to keep her on edge.
And night after night back in her cell, the worst food she had ever tasted shoved through a trapdoor, the footsteps of the guards in the hall, commands shouted through the door.
Mita spent three days in isolation, then had a series of cellmates. The second cellmate, Luise, had participated in a candlelight peace vigil in front of the U.S. embassy; she was in jail for only a week but sobbed inconsolably the entire time—she had small children on the outside and didn’t know what would happen to them. Mita hated her third cellmate, Christa, a woman arrested on Alexanderplatz for standing around with a sign that said i want to go to the west. Mita suspected they put Christa in the cell just to piss Mita off. It worked.
By late August, the Stasi was trying to assemble a detailed picture of Mita’s background and beliefs. In describing her childhood, Mita talked about how much she disliked the fact that she could be labeled an “enemy of the state” by leaders of the communist youth organizations just for speaking her mind. She went on to say that she wanted to be free to live the way she wanted to live as opposed to having to live according to rules and regulations and prescribed paths, and she wanted to dress however she felt like and wear her hair however she liked.
They began to press her for details of her connections within the church, asking her about events she had attended over the years and people she had met, asking who had arranged the Namenlos gigs and where the instruments had come from, probing, probing, probing, and Mita always parrying, never giving more information than the questioner revealed in his questions.
Still, the interrogators knew so much: they showed her photos of the Namenlos gigs in Halle and Karl-Marx-Stadt, they asked her about specific visits she had paid over the years to ministers and deacons in Berlin. They seemed to know everything about her and the band.
Then in late August, the authorities decided to give Mita—a minor—a psychological exam to decide whether she could be held criminally liable for her actions. They drove her in a closed prison van to a hospital on the outskirts of town, where she spent the day with a doctor, talking, playing clinical games, taking tests. The doctor determined that Mita had experienced an unusually high level of individual freedom in her household growing up. And despite an IQ test that established Mita had genius-level intelligence, the doctor described her as child-like and naïve, arguing that she wasn’t able to understand the gravity of her situation. While acknowledging her “superb” intelligence, he argued that her intelligence was untrained and poorly developed. For various reasons, including her extremely anti-authoritarian upbringing, her personal development was retardiert—“retarded”—and her understanding of the world lagged approximately four years behind her numerical age.
Instead of a punk, the doc
tor wrote in his report for the Stasi, Mita was a “babypunk.” Mita, the doctor concluded, should not be held responsible for her actions in a court of law.
After seven weeks in custody, Mita was released. And in December, the Stasi would officially drop the case against seventeen-year-old Mita based on the psychological assessment, though they maintained the veracity of the facts of the case—namely, that together with a punk music group Mita had slandered the state as well as the practices of state organs.
The Stasi continued to interrogate her three fellow band members and would take them to trial.
Härte gegen punk!
They would make the other three pay.
33
Like A-Micha and Mita, Jana hadn’t been too worried when the police took her down to Keibelstrasse that morning of August 11, 1983. They all knew the day would come when they would be hauled in by die Firma, the company—another nickname for the Stasi.
When her interrogator began to pepper Jana with questions, she figured it was pointless to deny the basic facts. It wasn’t that she shared A-Micha’s compulsion to tell the truth—for A-Micha it was always ideological—but it was assumed that the Stasi had informers everywhere, including inside church-based events, so certainly they must have known about the gigs. Yes, she admitted, they had played songs at the Erlöser Church . . . peace songs, she said.
She figured if she gave a little she could avoid spending the next day listening to officers shouting “We know you’re lying! We know you were there!” And then, she figured, she’d be released again anyway, since otherwise they would need a proper arrest warrant.
Like the others, Jana was interrogated all day and late into the night.
Stasi: “What about the way your parents live do you disagree with?”
Jana: “I would describe my parents as sticks-in-the-mud. Even though they are relatively young, they never go out, they just sit in front of the TV night after night. They’ve never tried to make anything out of their lives. And they expect the same of me.”
During one of the breaks she heard a familiar voice wafting in the window. Was that . . . Kaiser, the bass player from Planlos? Sure enough, it was, she could tell as Kaiser started to lecture his interrogator on England and the history of punk, all full of enthusiasm. Kaiser was such a music fan, she thought, as his voice echoed and she tried to have a peek at the files on her own interrogator’s desk while she was alone. Then she realized: They got the wrong bass player! They think he’s with Namenlos!
At another point she heard a cough—through the window? out in the hallway?—that she recognized as A-Micha’s. So he was here now, too.
The interrogation resumed.
Stasi: “Why did you become part of the ‘punk scene’ in the DDR?”
Jana: “What I’d like to say about that is that I feel very comfortable as a punk. I like to wear punk clothes because it’s fun . . . And since, in my opinion, I am discriminated against by the DDR as a result of my outward appearance, a certain amount of aggression has built up inside me over time . . . I sing to let off steam . . . I’d just had it with all the harassment by the police and the Stasi.”
After her long day and night of interrogation, Jana was marched to a cell, told to remove her shoelaces, and locked in for the night.
Early the next morning they unexpectedly presented her with the arrest warrant, and quickly marched her out to a van with six tiny cells built into it. She caught a glimpse of the other band members as she was shoved into the van—they had now apparently apprehended the correct bass player, Frank Masch. They were all driven up to the pretrial detention center in Pankow. It was difficult to tell how long the ride took when jammed into the tiny mobile jail cell, her knees aching in the dark.
Fear and panic were starting to seize her.
As the interrogations began again at the new facility, she began to worry about Wotan, the dog. The last she knew, the dog had been delivered to A-Micha, but A-Micha was now somewhere in this same prison.
“What happened to the dog—does somebody have the dog? Where is he now?”
Aha, her interrogator realized, the dog was important to Jana.
“If you cooperate with us, you’ll be out soon enough and you can see your dog again,” said the Stasi officer.
Jana was never going to cooperate, but the Stasi interrogator now continuously applied subtle and not-so-subtle pressure on her based on the dog. They’d found a soft spot in the otherwise steely eighteen-year-old, and they exploited it for weeks and then months.
Jana had a friend who’d been convicted of hooliganism a while back and had been sentenced to six months—that, in her mind, was still the worst-case scenario; there was no way she’d get more than that for some silly songs. But then her pretrial detainment stretched to three, four, five months, and she realized she was facing something more serious, maybe the talk of years in prison wasn’t just bluster, maybe she really was going to be shut away for years. Years.
Her interrogations concentrated on the song lyrics. The words of the songs, who wrote which lines, who sang various parts. Nearly every interrogation covered the same material, but the interrogators always had more and more information. Jana, who had tried to reimagine the songs with lyrics about peace and pass those off as authentic, couldn’t figure out where the additional details were coming from. Did they have recordings they were transcribing? Were her bandmates admitting things?
Prison was slowly crushing Jana’s spirit. There was nothing to do, nothing to divert her attention from her immediate surroundings. A few times she called out through the ventilation ducts and was able to hear A-Micha’s voice from the floor below—they exchanged an occasional “Gute Nacht” or “I love you”—but that was strictly verboten, and when she got caught she was thrown in an isolation chamber in the cold wet basement of the prison.
Jana had requested deacon Lorenz Postler as her designated visitor. That was denied. Since she had direct relatives, she had to designate one of them. She resigned herself to monthly visits from her mother.
Every few weeks, they moved Jana to a different cell. Her second cellmate had just tried to kill herself by slitting her wrists with the square end of a toothpaste tube. The woman cried all the time.
I can’t take this.
I’m going to lose it.
And Jana did. One day she couldn’t hold it inside any longer. She started throwing things around the cell and screaming—slamming chairs against the cell door, “Get me out of here! Let me out, you pigs!”
Down to the basement. Things were bad, but there was always something worse looming. Like this, the isolation chamber, cold and wet.
The only breaks were the interrogations, and since her interrogator didn’t get physical or scream, she began to see him as a human being. Not that it changed her strategy. But as perverse as it seemed, she sometimes looked forward to the change of pace—march to the interrogation room, face the wall, hands behind your back, come in; a different room, a different face, a conversation, no matter how trying and fraught with danger.
And through it all, the dog, always the dog.
Wouldn’t you like to see Wotan?
In the end, the Stasi figured out the real lyrics of six Namenlos songs that had been performed at the Blues Mass at the Erlöser Church. Among them: the MfS song and “Nazis wieder in Ostberlin,” or “Nazis back in East Berlin.”
Then an odd thing happened: unbeknownst to each other, both Jana and A-Micha claimed to have authored all the songs in their entirety—each was trying to shield the other.
The Stasi decided to take both to a joint interrogation, where the two of them—in the presence of an interrogator—agreed to tell the truth about who had done what.
But then, on November 9, 1983, a new piece of evidence suddenly emerged. Somehow the Stasi had uncovered a seventh song, with the complete lyrics. And it was a cracker. The song was their “Lied über die Staatsgrenze,” or “Border Song.”
Minefields and barbed wire so
nobody risks going over
Walls and electric fences, they’re snatching away our freedom
Automatic firing devices and minefields so we like it here
In our beautiful country, in our beautiful country
Where the fuck did they get that, Jana wondered. This was actionable material. The Stasi knew it. Jana knew it.
She was led to believe that bassist Frank Masch had coughed up the song lyrics as part of some kind of deal. In actuality, Frank shared A-Micha’s urge to be honest about the material, and in the end, out of frustration, he had simply confirmed lyrics the Stasi had already figured out. There had been no deal: he would stand trial alongside A-Micha and Jana.
There was no way for Jana to know it then, but she would never see her beloved dog again. Wotan had long since been killed by the Stasi.
34
Jana, A-Micha, and Frank were cuffed and taken to court on February 2, 1984. The trial was closed to the public, but that morning Mita went and stood on the stairs inside the municipal courthouse in Pankow. She managed to touch Jana’s hand before she disappeared into the courtroom with the others. A few other friends of the band had also gathered. They waved and shouted to Jana, A-Micha, and Frank as they passed by.
The months between her own release and the trial had been tough for Mita. In fact, she wished she’d never been let out. She had cried for weeks, overwhelmed with depression; she worried that people might think she had turned on her friends or agreed to become a Stasi informant in exchange for an early release.
Behind the closed doors of the courtroom, the trial progressed quickly, despite hectoring from pro-punk minister Georg Katzorke, of Elias Church, who had been granted admission to the trial. Eventually the judge ordered Katzorke to be removed from the courtroom. He refused to go quietly and had to be carried out.
Fortunately for the band, the Stasi had never been able to establish hard evidence that Jana had sung the offending “SS” in the “MfS song”—the rest of the song’s lyrics were bad enough, but at least they escaped being accused of making a direct comparison between Honecker’s security forces and Hitler’s. Likewise, they had been able to convince the interrogators that “Nazis back in East Berlin” was about right-wing activity among youth, not a direct comparison of the East German Socialist Unity Party to the Third Reich’s NSDAP. In the eyes of the authorities, however, there was another ideological problem with the song: “East Berlin” did not exist in government speak. The region was officially referred to as “the capital of the DDR,” not merely a sector of a larger city.
