by Ann Wroe
Mr Mielke operated with few restraints. In 1957, when he became head of the Stasi, an abbreviation of Staats (state) and Sicherheit (security), it was just one of a number of bodies designed to protect East Germany against the western “imperialists”. Mr Mielke so expanded the Stasi that, by the time he was toppled some 30 years later, he was the most powerful man in East Germany after the party leader: “the master of fear”, as West German popular newspapers liked to call him.
Erich Mielke scrutinised the lives of East Germany’s 17m people with a thoroughness that probably even exceeded the Gestapo’s. No detail was too minor to be noted on the Stasi files. Political views of course, but also reading tastes and sexual inclinations, even a preferred drink. From a dossier, a decision might be made about a citizen considered a threat to the security of the state, and consequently jailed, or shot. When the Berlin Wall was built in 1961, as a result of Mr Mielke’s urging, the entire population became prisoners of the state.
It is estimated that some 2m people were informants for the Stasi at one time or another. Most of the files kept in the Stasi’s vast complex in Berlin’s Normannenstrasse have become accessible to those deemed entitled to view them. As a result people are distressed to find that close friends provided information about them; that there were treacheries even within families. Mr Mielke’s own reflections to his subordinates are there. One is, “All this twaddle about no executions and no death sentences, it’s all junk, comrades.” Sometimes he would leave his desk and conduct his own interrogations. “I’ll chop your head off” was one of his customary threats to anyone he suspected of betraying the party.
The Stasi tentacles extended into West Germany, where Mr Mielke had informants in many government ministries, among opposition groups, in NATO, American military bases, even in the churches. In 1974, the then chancellor, Willy Brandt, resigned after a Stasi spy was found to be working in his office. The East Germans knew about Helmut Kohl’s misdemeanours long before they were revealed to the world. Even those who loathed Erich Mielke acknowledged that he ran an extremely well-informed service. As more Stasi files are made public it may turn out that the East Germans were also privy to intrigues in other European countries whose participants would prefer to remain secret.
Yet there was a sort of innocence about Erich Mielke. He seemed unable to comprehend why anyone should want to be other than a communist. The party had always looked after him, recognising that there was talent in the poor boy from a Berlin tenement; giving him an education in Russia, followed by experience among the comrades in Spain and France. In East Germany after the war he rose swiftly in the Stasi until he was allowed to fashion it his own way. Wanting “to know everything, everywhere”, as he put it, seemed the
only way to protect the state. When an angry crowd confronted him after he was deposed, he shouted back, “But I love you all.”
In prison the unloved Erich Mielke was said to be cheered up when he was provided with a disconnected red telephone with which he could talk to imaginary agents. It was assumed that he was going mad, although sceptics, suspicious to the last, said that he was just feigning madness to avoid facing new trials.
Arthur Miller
Arthur Miller, playwright, died on February 10th 2005, aged 89
FOR most of his life, Arthur Miller was a carpenter. At 14, with the money made from delivering bagels on his bike round Harlem, he bought enough wood to build a back porch on the family house. In his old age, living on 360 acres in Connecticut, he made tables, chairs, a bed, a cabinet. To make extra-sure the angles were right, he once consulted a mathematician.
He loved making plays – which he did better than any other American of the 20th century, with the possible exception only of Tennessee Williams – for much the same reason. They gave him “an architectural pleasure”. He tried novels occasionally and wrote, in “Timebends” in 1987, a chaotic autobiography. But he revelled in the structure of the drama. He thought of Ibsen and Sophocles, his early influences, as master-carpenters, and of his own best plays as careful constructions of “hard actions, facts, the geometry of relationships”. It was no accident that his male characters were often skilful with their hands, even if they were good at little else.
Yet Mr Miller’s plays were not conceived as simple artefacts. He meant them to move minds. If they could not do so, there was no point in writing them. His intention was to show the audience, in ordinary characters they might see every day, truths about themselves that they half-knew but would not acknowledge. Realising they were not alone in whatever they foolishly feared or unwisely hoped for, they might find the courage to change.
In “Death of a Salesman” (1949), the play that brought him global fame, he displayed in Willy Loman the futility of a salesman’s life, the fragility of his dreams, his longing to leave a lasting mark on the world – and also, though Willy could not see it, the persistent strength of his family’s love for him. In “A View from the Bridge” (1955) he anatomised, in Eddie Carbone, the unacknowledged terrors of incestuous passion. In several plays, the last written only a year before his death, he tried to unravel his own relationship with Marilyn Monroe, his wife for almost five years. She remained surrounded, however, by “a darkness that perplexed me”.
He also plunged into the past in order to illuminate the present. His account of the 17th-century Salem witch trials in “The Crucible” (1953) gave him the metaphor he needed to describe McCarthyism, a plague that touched him directly when he was called before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee in 1956 for attending meetings of communist writers. (He refused to name names, was held in contempt of Congress, fined, and had his passport withdrawn.) His play “Broken Glass” (1994), ostensibly about the 1930s, was intended as a commentary on public indifference to the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. His audiences did not always notice these parallels, but they were always meant to.
Throughout his work, his message was consistent. Actions had consequences, and the individual was responsible not only for his own acts, but for what he knew others were doing. In “All My Sons” (1947), his clearest statement of this philosophy, a father had secured the future of his family by shipping defective aircraft parts that had caused pilots to die; eventually, his own son reported him. There were moments, Mr Miller wrote, “when an individual conscience was all that could keep a world from falling.”
On the other hand, his characters were seldom that strong. Outside forces – destiny, law, political authority, sudden catastrophe – often overwhelmed them. As a child during the Depression, he had seen his father’s coat-making business destroyed and his mother, whom he remembered in fox-fur and diamonds, reduced to eking out shovelfuls of coal. His father and his colleagues, he noticed,never blamed anyone but themselves for what had happened. Mr Miller, already imbued with his lifelong socialism, tried to persuade his shellshocked father to blame the capitalist system too, and accept that profit was wrong. His father, naturally, could not begin to understand him.
His career was not all adulation. He had a dry patch in the 1960s, when he felt he did not speak with the accent of the time, and by the 1980s the all-powerful New York critics (whom he loathed) seemed to be tired of him. Constantly, critics objected to his blatant stage moralising: “like neon signs”, one wrote, “in a diner window.”
Mr Miller was unapologetic. He had a purpose, he confessed, even beyond teaching. Though he seemed to be didactic, he was in fact asking questions: “How can we be useful?” “Why do we live?” He was, he once admitted, “in love with wonder ... the wonder of how things and people got to be what they are.” The aim of each of his plays was to discover which commitment or challenge his main character would accept, and which he would walk away from: “that moment when out of a sky full of stars he fixes on one star.”
He remembered his own such moment, when he decided to be a writer. It came when, reading Dostoevsky’s “The Brothers Karamazov” as a teenager, he discovered that among the most breathtaking passages were accumulatio
ns of hard, simple fact: “the kind of bark on the moonlit trees, the way a window is hinged”. As well as the playwright, it was the carpenter speaking.
Théodore Monod
Théodore André Monod, a naturalist sage, died on November 22nd 2000, aged 98
Long ago, long before the earth had acquired its hordes of friends, long before nations were blaming each other for destroying the environment, Théodore Monod was giving warnings about the growing menace of pollution. An odd man, some said. And indeed there was something mildly alarming about his passion for what he considered the pure life. The problem for purists in an impure world is that they are necessarily against many things. Mr Monod had a long list. He was against the personal pollutants of tobacco and alcohol and never touched either. He was against eating meat; animals had to be respected, he said. Hunting should be banned. Bull-fighting was simply appalling.
He was a foe of nuclear power, which his native France uses to produce three-quarters of its electricity, and inevitably of France’s nuclear-weapons tests in the South Pacific. He fasted each year on August 6th, the anniversary of the atom bombing of Hiroshima, a day he said marked the end of the Christian era. Christianity, of a fairly individual sort, guided Mr Monod’s long life, and he could defend his intolerance of the world’s waywardness by pointing out that eight of the Ten Commandments are in fact prohibitions.
His father was a priest, but a Protestant one in mainly Roman Catholic France, and an outsider even within his own minority dogma. He told his son he could, if he wished, choose Islam or Buddhism rather than Christianity. Young Théodore emerged from this confusing instruction with a notion of a world with one composite religion whose adherents would protect the earth and, he hoped, be vegetarians.
It cannot be said that much of this agenda has caught on. President Jacques Chirac praised Mr Monod this week as “a guide and a sage”, but the French themselves remain enthusiastic carnivores and Europe’s keenest hunters. Mr Monod was listened to, if not heeded, because he was one of the world’s most eminent naturalists, following perhaps the least blameworthy of scientific occupations. And he did much of his work in that most intriguing of places, the Sahara, the world’s largest desert.
Théodore Monod first glimpsed the Sahara when he was 20. He joined a team of researchers sent to Mauritania by the Museum of Natural History in Paris, an institution he was to be associated with all his life. After a year most of the team returned home, but Mr Monod stayed on. He acquired a camel and started on the first of his many safaris looking for interesting things.
He was hooked, as many Europeans have been. But, being a Monod, his view of the Sahara was different from that of his celebrated compatriot Antoine de Saint-Exupéry or of László Almásy, the Hungarian portrayed in the novel and film “The English Patient”. Saint-Exupéry wrote evocatively about the Saharan wilderness as seen from an aeroplane. Both he and Almásy were as fascinated by the mechanics of exploring a previously almost impenetrable territory as they were by the territory itself.
Théodore Monod’s explorations were
more in the style of those of a British archaeologist, Sir Wilfred Thesiger, who in the 1940s went on foot and by camel across the “empty quarter” of the Arabian desert. Mr Monod loathed the petrol engine. He once came across the tracks in the sand of a model T Ford that had crossed the Egyptian desert in 1911, the first car to do so, and was most displeased. He was equally unhappy about the annual Paris–Dakar motor rally in which dozens of rugged vehicles roar through the Sahara, churning up the sands.
He set aside his prejudice only during the second world war when his knowledge of the desert was put at the disposal of the British fighting the Germans and Italians in North Africa. He loathed the fascists even more than he did the car. Otherwise, he believed that the only transport compatible with desert life was the camel,travelling at three miles an hour. He saw himself as a kind of white Bedouin. He was married in the traditional costume of a camel-rider (although his bride preferred white). He said that if you could survive in the desert, as he did, it proved that you did not need meat for stamina.
In the course of more than 70 years of active adult life, Mr Monod covered many thousands of miles, even at camel speed. He found hundreds of previously unknown plants and animals, about 80 of which are named after him. He dabbled in the associated discipline of archaeology and discovered a series of rock drawings. He wrote numerous books and scientific papers, and collected just about every honour in his field of study.
In French newspapers Théodore Monod was sometimes called the Methuselah of the desert. If only he were, he said. Late in life, he felt that he was only just beginning to get to know the Sahara, and needed a few hundred years more of study. “The desert is beautiful because it is clean and never dies,” he said. But it needed to be watched. Humans had been rather careless about living things. But were they perhaps more caring these days? “Probably not,” he said gloomily.
Akio Morita
Akio Kyuzaemon Morita, the man who made Sony, died on October 3rd 1999, aged 78
At a restaurant in Düsseldorf in the 1950s Akio Morita was served with a bowl of ice-cream decorated with a miniature parasol. The friendly German waiter pointed out that the paper bauble was made in Japan. For Mr Morita it was a disheartening experience, that the world associated “made in Japan” with trinkets and cheap imitations. For the rest of his working life he sought to prove to foreigners that “made in Japan” meant originality, quality and value for money. Keizo Obuchi, the Japanese prime minister, got it right when he said this week that Mr Morita was “the engine that pulled the Japanese economy”.
At heart, the man who made Sony a worldwide name was a tinkerer. He retained a childlike curiosity in pulling things apart to see how they worked. Even back in the 1930s his wealthy parents had many of the trappings of western life: a car plus all the electrical appliances of the day. The teenage Akio spent hours dismantling the family record-player and rebuilding it. His other passions were physics and mathematics. In the second world war, while serving in the Japanese navy, he met a fellow enthusiast for technology, Masaru Ibuka. In 1946, the two started a telecommunications company called Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo, with 20 employees, the precursor of Sony.
As things turned out, Mr Ibuka looked after research and product development while Mr Morita went out to raise the money and sell the goods. Mr Morita’s great early coup was to persuade America’s giant Western Electric to license its transistor know-how to his tiny firm (a move that infuriated Japan’s powerful trade ministry, which was by-passed). After his chastening experience in Düsseldorf, Mr Morita journeyed on to Eindhoven in the Netherlands where the great Dutch electrical group, Philips, had its headquarters. Here was a company in a small country that had created a global brand. “If Philips can do it,” he wrote home to Mr Ibuka, “perhaps we can also manage.”
Clearly, the tongue-twister, Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo, had to go. Mr Morita combined the Latin word for sound, sonus, with the English expression “sonny-boy” to give an impression of a company that was full of energy and youthful exuberance. Keeping things to essentials underlay many of Mr Morita’s creative decisions. In the late 1970s he asked the engineers at Sony to build a miniature stereo sound system. People could listen to music while exercising, he said. The Walkman has become synonymous with Sony, and immensely profitable. Sony charges a hefty premium for the creative content its brand name implies.
There were disasters too. The Betamax video recorder was one. Though considered marginally better than the VHS recorder launched a year later in 1975 by the Japan Victor Company (both were based on an American design), the Sony version left little room for future improvement. Worse, Mr Morita upset manufacturers who wanted to make the Betamax recorder by driving too hard a bargain. The VHS design prospered and Mr Morita’s Betamax lay dead in the water. A foray into Hollywood in 1989 also turned out to be an ill-judged, costly adventure. With that, the man who built up Sony as a global enterprise almost bro
ught it to its knees.
Mr Morita gave the impression of being a contradiction. Those close to him speak of the two sides to his personality. There was the strict Japanese traditionalist, the eldest son of a 300-year-old sake-brewing family in Nagoya who disinherited his own eldest son, Hideo Morita, for marrying without his consent. To the outside world he was a jovial, talkative and incandescent personality who illuminated a room and fired imaginations. It was an act Mr Morita worked hard to perfect. With his tanned skin from skiing and tennis, bluish eyes, rare among Japanese, and mane of white hair parted in the middle, he looked the dandy. Hideo Morita called his father a “consummate performer” whom no one outside the inner family ever saw unmasked. “He had to act as the most international-understanding businessman in Japan,” was how the son described him to John Nathan for his book “Sony: The Private Life”, published in September. Like Soichiro Honda and other entrepreneurs of his generation, Mr Morita embraced the outside world, America especially, because there was so little to be exploited in post-war Japan. The domestic market was sewn up by pre-war giants such as Toshiba, Hitachi, Mitsubishi and relative newcomers like Matsushita. But embracing the outside world did not mean that Mr Morita enjoyed it.
He had to subjugate his traditional
sense of decorum; he had to learn not only to speak English but also to think English; he had to learn to say yes or no when the weight of a dozen generations of family tradition pressed him to be ambivalent. On occasion, he misread foreign sensitivities. He tried to prevent the English translation of a book, “A Japan that Can Say No”, of which he was co-author with a right-wing politician, Shintaro Ishihara, and subsequently distanced himself from it. Mr Morita’s lifelong campaign to embed Sony in the hearts and minds of foreigners seems to have been a painful struggle. He bore the pain well.
