Sound of silence

The text below is an edited version of the introduction to a new edition of Stasiland, by Anna Funder, to be published this month by the Folio Society. Keep a look out for it, it is a book well worth reading.

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Sometimes a mistake can be so big that it is invisible to you. This is the kind of mistake that might underpin a project like Stasiland. Or it might be the kind that underpins a life, like the lives of the Stasi men.

I didn’t think much about the reception of this book while I was writing it. My expectations, if I had any, have been far surpassed around the world. Except in Germany.

When I encountered Miriam, Julia, Frau Paul and Klaus Renft, what they told me was deeply thrilling. Not only in the sense of the bravery it took to climb the Berlin Wall or dig an underground tunnel or defy a governmental declaration that you “no longer exist”. The thrill was more fundamental. I felt I was witnessing, alive and breathing and drinking coffee opposite me, heroic human decency. During the GDR regime these four people by their actions had said, “I don’t care what you do to me, I will not betray those around me. Because if I do, I will no longer recognize myself as a moral being”. They did this while living in one of the most savage surveillance regimes ever known, a regime structured as a pyramid of fear, to be climbed by serial betrayal. Twenty years later I can see that these encounters have been one of the greatest privileges of my life.

My great mistake was to imagine that the stories of resistance, courage and decency would be well received by Germans. I knew how some brave resisters to the Hitler regime had been honoured, such as Hans and Sophie Scholl, who were executed for distributing anti-Hitler leaflets in 1943. The famous brother and sister are remembered with plaques and prizes, with streets and schools throughout Germany named after them. I thought German people might be proud of the heroes among them I had found, who so bravely resisted this next dictatorship on ­German soil. Instead, I found a reaction as divided as the country itself: between West and East Germans and, within the former GDR, between those who had supported the regime, those who had resisted and, most unexpectedly, a large inscrutable group of quiet folk or fellow travellers in between.

It might have started to dawn on me that ­Germans were not reading the book as a celebration of heroism when it was rejected by twenty-two German publishers. But it didn’t. I believe I felt that I hadn’t had my share of rejection and probably had it coming (a beginner’s luxury). The twenty-third publisher, formerly an East German house, was kind enough to give a reason. They wrote that “in the current political climate” they could not see their way to publishing Stasiland. That was in 2002. Was it that the ex-Stasi were generally ascendant in politics and public life? Were they running the publishing house? Or was the problem a more general one – that stories about inhumanity and resistance to it were unwelcome in a society trying to knit itself back together? People were being urged to “get along” and perhaps this could only happen if the crimes of the ex-Stasi went largely unpunished, their victims scantily recompensed and the heroes not honoured. I had no way of knowing. When the book was bought by a small West German publisher I was pleased.

Something might possibly have dawned on me when the publicist who was to accompany me on a ten-city book tour of Germany in 2004 emailed saying, “Wear a flak jacket”. I didn’t know the German word for flak jacket, and had to look it up. But I do not remember being apprehensive. I remained awed by the courage of those in the book and thought everyone else would be too.

Stasiland was launched in the ballroom of the former Stasi Offices in Leipzig, the Runde Ecke. My publisher, a West German woman in a fancy fur coat, got up on stage to make her speech. I waited in the wings. By this time I did have a few butterflies. As an outsider I felt that I could hardly be telling new stories to the people here, who had lived them. But when I looked at the publisher as she gripped the podium I saw that her knees, visible between the fur coat and the top of her boots, were shaking. Between a gap in the curtains I glanced down to see what she was looking at. The first two rows of seats were filled with ex-Stasi (or perhaps ex-Party) men. I know this because they were in the ex-Stasi (or ex-Party) uniform, which consists of polyester trousers with a nice firm crease, a bomber jacket and a significant amount of Brylcreem. They were sitting in their former ballroom, legs splayed, arms crossed, looking daggers at us.

When she came to the end of her speech, the publisher was clearly relieved. “And after all”, she said, closing her notes, “what unites us here today, Easterners and Westerners, is what we, as Germans, have in common. And what we have in common is: betrayal.”

I felt sick in the pit of my stomach. I walked to the podium. When I looked down, the Stasi men were whispering to one another but their eyes were fixed on me, narrowed with scorn. As I opened my book to read they uncrossed their arms, reached into their bomber jackets and took out – notebooks. And then, as I spoke, they started scratching notes. At which point my butterflies disappeared, replaced with something steelier.

What file could they possibly keep on me now, and what could they do with it? I saw in their faces that frightening people had its pleasures, and I did not want to give them any more of those. Also, I had my own notes.

After the reading, the floor was opened for questions. No one spoke. The Stasi scraped their chairs back and walked out down the middle aisle, their steps audible on the faux parquetry. Only then – and this happened in every former East German city on my tour – only once these men were gone, would an ordinary person stand up and speak. In Leipzig that evening it was a woman. “I was a political prisoner”, she said, “my son also. It happened to so many. Why does no one, now, tell these stories?” I felt her answer had just fled the premises.

I don’t know what those men did with their notes. But I do know what they – or others like them – did to mine. One day back in Sydney I was working in my attic when I received an email. It said that a group of ex-Stasi (formerly Das Insiderkomitee, now renamed, with zero irony, the Society for the Protection of Civil Rights and the Dignity of Man – known in ­Germany by its initials GBM) was suing my German publisher. The GBM objected to a paragraph in the book in which I outlined allegations already on the public record about what groups of ex-Stasi had allegedly done to torment former dissidents after the fall of the Wall, into the 1990s – such as cutting their brake leads, detaining their children after school, sending their wives unwanted pornography. So now they were coming for me. I decided I needed a cup of tea.

I went downstairs and turned the tap. No water came out. And in that millisecond I had a flash of paranoia no less real for being self-aggrandizing: They have extended their dark net of chicanery across the globe, and they will cut off my water supply.

Of course it was council work in the street, and I’d missed the notice. In the end, the publisher bent to their demands. I felt I’d been party to some of the tactics ex-Stasi use so they can insist on an airbrushed reputation they do not deserve to have, by claiming refuge under the bizarrely broad German privacy law, against which truth is no defence. In this way they can continue their careers in business, media, the law and politics, among other things. I changed publisher. In the most recent German edition I asked for the paragraph to be reinstated, but blacked out, with a footnote attributing the redaction to the litigious ex-Stasi group. In this way, German readers can see the reach the regime continues to ­command, well beyond its apparent demise.

If this is how they threaten me, safe on the other side of the globe, how must it feel to speak out as a former victim in Germany? Later on that German book tour I found out. I was invited onto Johannes B. Kerner’s television talk show, if Miriam Weber would come on too. At our first meeting in 1997, “Miriam” had said she didn’t care if I used her real name or not. I gave her a pseudonym because I felt that neither of us could gauge how comfortable or how safe it would be for her to have her story widely known when the book was published. By 2004 Miriam was working at one of the public broadcasters. Her immediate boss was a former Stasi informer, and a more senior boss had been high up in the GDR’s Ministry of the Interior. They knew Miriam had been a political prisoner and disliked her for it. They disliked, too, that she sometimes objected to the news directors relegating an item showing the GDR or the Stasi in a bad light to the end of the bulletin, or not broadcasting such pieces at all. She objected to what she saw as strenuous efforts, in the public broadcaster, to show the GDR as a harmless, safe welfare state with high ideals; she objected to the rampant Ostalgie, the Verharmlosung (rendering harmless), and the Schönreden (whitewashing). Miriam had spent almost her whole life battling the Stasi, and they were still there. She was tired, on a short-term contract and vulnerable. It would simply have made her working life too difficult to publicly “out” herself. She decided not to come on television.

The book tour continued, with more – and less – predictable results. Stasiland received an almost comically vicious review from a former East German journalist, which was to be expected. The reviews from more liberal papers or those closer to the citizens’ rights movement were laudatory. But the response of the mass in the middle was harder to read. It felt like a loud silence. It was finally dawning on me that the broad former East German public didn’t share my awe at the heroes in the book.

It wasn’t until I met Fred Breinersdorfer after a screening of his film Sophie Scholl – The Final Days in Sydney that I found a way to understand it. Standing in the foyer of the cinema, Fred mentioned that after the war Hans and Sophie Scholl’s parents had been ostracized by the others in their village as “traitors”. I recall the shock of this moment because, weirdly and for no reason at all, I recall the shape of the high arched windows behind his head. These most famous resisters’ parents shunned by their contemporaries? Fred explained that the Scholls’ “rehabilitation” or fame – the plaques and street names – did not happen for at least twenty years; it took until the late 1960s for resistance to Hitler to be honoured. It is a horrible irony of history that justice – honour and compensation – may only come, if at all, when the people to whom it is owed are old, or dead.

Frau Paul had a lot of trouble getting compensation and has since died. Klaus has died too. I’ve lost touch with Julia. Miriam has a small reparations payment and lives in very straitened circumstances. After a regime’s fall, is there an immediate period of willed public amnesia? A twenty-year black hole of continuing loyalty to the fallen regime on the one side, and unaddressed trauma and unacknowledged resistance on the other? In the more than ­twenty-five years since the fall of the Wall it has been hard, verging on impossible, to honour East German resisters as heroes. In the public discourse there are only some seasoned civil rights activists and a larger group of ­“victims”. There is, as yet, no proliferation of plaques, books, street and school names celebrating resisters. There may never be, if the Stasi win the PR war they have been waging, a war apparently supported by a general public that does not want to have to acknowledge this second lot of twentieth-century ­German evildoers.

Finally, I understood that the stories in Stasiland raise an uncomfortable question for many people: If these schoolgirls, this housewife, this alcoholic rock singer spoke up, why didn’t I? What I learnt was that we like our heroes attenuated in time so they don’t show us up. This was my great mistake, but I hope time might unmake it.

On the West German part of the tour, I was asked several times a terrible question about the Stasi regime: “What do you think it says about us Germans?” Sometimes the questioner made his or her assumptions explicit, asking whether “our German tendency to perfectionism in things” was responsible, or whether the habit of obedience to authority such “perfected” systems require is somehow reflective of national character. I am uncomfortable with constructions of “national character”. Dictatorships and genocide occur in varying cultures. To me, the question revealed both a tragic national unease and a brave habit of mind. The brave habit of mind is to try to understand the past in such a way as to take it to heart, to take responsibility. This is a habit developed, in the West, not as is often thought since the war, but since the late 1960s, after the twenty-year black hole.

Nevertheless if your interest, like mine, is in how ordinary people recognize their circumstances as outrageous and behave decently, even heroically, then you might wish to see justice done in their lifetime. Otherwise the message to the next generation is that to listen to conscience and act on it is to court destruction in one regime, and ignominy in the next.

When the Folio Society offered to make an illustratededition of Stasiland I approached Miriam, who is a gifted photographer. I remembered the pictures she showed me of herself and Charlie that she kept loose in an old suitcase. I wondered whether she might offer those. While I waited for her to get back to me, I pulled out eleven archive boxes of my own old material from storage. Some of it was fifteen years old, some of it almost twenty. When I asked Miriam to open that suitcase I knew it would be almost unimaginably painful. And yet I asked. Stasiland hinges on a question: Is it better to remember or to forget? For an individual, I do not know. Personally, I am inclined towards memory – but then I didn’t have a state try to break me.

In the end, it proved too difficult to include Miriam’s photos in this book. Which is why we are left with my pictures, taken hastily as an aide to memory while writing. They should be thought of only as the scrappy visual notes they are. The real thing is in a poor and obscure hero’s flat outside Leipzig, still in a case.

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© Anna Funder, 2016