The Stasi Poetry Circle, page 14
The psychological toll of these surveillance measures was not an accidental side effect. In the early years of the GDR, political dissidents were suppressed mainly via official, legal channels. After the building of the Wall, however, the state tried to clean up its image, declaring its commitment to human rights by signing the 1972 Basic Treaty and the 1975 Helsinki Accords. From then on, any moves against real or imagined enemies of the socialist state needed to take place ‘silently’. A 1976 directive by the Stasi head, Erich Mielke, proposed a catalogue of methods of psychological warfare called Zersetzung – a scientific term that literally refers to the chemical process of corrosion, but which would nowadays be best translated as gaslighting. Enemies of the state, Mielke instructed, should have their reputation ‘systematically discredited’ by spreading ‘untrue’ but ‘credible, non-refutable’ rumours. To destroy their enemies’ confidence, the Stasi would ‘systematically organise professional and social disappointments’. In the case of Gert Neumann this meant regular public harassment in the streets, including spot-searches by police and violent assaults. It meant the unexplained arrest of his teenage son and two of his close friends. And it meant the Stasi deliberately tried to sow seeds of doubt in Neumann’s mind about his wife’s loyalty: one directive advises operatives to ‘use existing differences between the married couple’ to further ‘unsettle’ the novelist.
A year after my first phone call I came up with another route to shed light on the encounter between Gert Neumann and Alexander Ruika: perhaps, I thought, there were duplicates of reports missing from the file of the spy that had ended up in the file of the spied upon. The archivist at the Stasi archive said she would need to contact the novelist first to obtain his permission. A week later, she called back: Neumann wanted to talk to me. He had remembered something. We met at Neumann’s ground-floor flat in Gesundbrunnen on a sweltering August afternoon. I drank fizzy water, Neumann poured himself a cup of tea with a slice of lemon. His voice was soft, occasionally trailing off into a mumble as he told me about his writing, his family history, the fraught trip to West Germany in 1987, and the taxi journey to Leipzig. It took him about an hour to get to the point: the taxi driver, he was certain, was the Alexander Ruika I was looking for.
His thoughts had started to race as soon as the driver told him that they had grown up in the same Berlin suburb, Hohen-Neuendorf, and that they had studied literature at the same university. To Neumann, this was too much of a coincidence: it had to be a cover, a made-up story designed to get him to feel at ease and talk confidentially. In fact, it did the opposite. Neumann tried to work out how he had ended up in Ruika’s car. He had asked his son to call a taxi while he was having a bath – had the phone been bugged? Or did the Stasi have people sitting around in call centres, waiting for a call from the right number? After his son was arrested aged sixteen – officially because of a scuffle outside a youth club – the Stasi had tried to sign him up to spy on his father. He had refused. Or had he? First his mother, then his wife, so why not his son too? But maybe the explanation was much simpler. Maybe this guy in the taxi had just been waiting outside the apartment on spec, and Neumann had unwittingly walked into the lion’s den. Earlier in the year, the East German government had legalised the black market in taxis: if you had a car with four doors and a few spare hours after work, you could put a taxi sign on your roof, switch on the state-regulated meter and pick up a couple of passengers. Until then, taxi drivers in East Germany had enjoyed a privileged status thanks to chronic shortages: taxis didn’t wait for you, but were waited upon. At Friedrichstrasse station people were used to queueing for several hours. And because the taxi market was as planned as every other part of the economy, drivers had to meet daily quotas and were only allowed to drive ten kilometres between journeys in East Berlin, meaning few drivers wanted to journey too far from the city centre. Now that ‘black taxis’ were legal, it was easier to book a long-distance trip, but it also meant anyone could be a taxi driver. Sitting behind Ruika, Neumann wished he had looked at the number plate. He knew exactly how to spot a Stasi car. There was a system; you just needed to crack the code. Outside the Leipzig Book Fair there were always Volvos with the numbers three to four. The lower ranks had number plates that always added up to ten. Four fours and it was a Stasi officer. He was sure of it, he told me.
The taxi journey to Leipzig was not the first time Gert Neumann had found himself in a confined space with someone trying to squeeze him for information, and he had a tried-and-tested strategy for moments like these: spamming the system. The aim was to overload his interviewers with information, to give them too much detail to fit into a single report. So Neumann played along with Ruika’s questions, railing against the state, talking about the political change that was in the air, openly pondering whether the GDR was heading for inevitable collapse. He used the informal du, which he normally hated. Then he tried to turn the tables: so you are a writer too, he asked. He told Ruika he was involved with two literary magazines in Leipzig that always needed fresh blood. How about he submitted a couple of the driver’s poems? When they arrived in Leipzig, on Georg-Schwarz-Strasse 118, Neumann handed his driver a copy of his novel Eleven O’Clock and a 100 Deutsche Mark note, and told him to keep the change. Before he slammed the car door shut, he said he would be back in Berlin next month to do a reading, at the church on Zionskirchplatz. Why didn’t Ruika come along and bring some of his own poems?
To the Stasi, Gert Neumann’s philosophical world-view may have been a room behind double-locked doors, but there was also an escape route, a window that let in fresh air. He explained this to me as he poured himself another cup of tea. The East German regime had poisoned the German language to the extent that it was useless to describe the reality of life in the socialist state. But there was something beyond reality: Wirklichkeit, or ‘realness’. Realness wasn’t found in writing but in encounters, in conversations. A conversation was a process that broke down prejudices. After reunification, Neumann had tried to set up a programme that enabled conversations between the oppressors and the victims of the old system, called the ‘Workshop for Metals, Texts and Situations’, in which people would be encouraged to talk to each other while working together. He’d even received funding from the Saxony Culture Ministry, but the project had fallen at the last hurdle. A conversation is what he had tried to strike up with his spying taxi driver, Alexander Ruika. He thought that may have succeeded. The funny thing, Neumann said as he looked over the photocopies I had made at the Stasi archive, was that Ruika’s reports on their taxi journey gave away very little of what was actually said.
It was getting dark. I thanked Neumann for his time and got up to leave. Halfway through the door, I had a thought: how would he feel about meeting up with his spy to continue their conversation? If the proposal came from him rather than me, perhaps Ruika would finally respond? Neumann said he would think about it. A month later I received a letter from Neumann, which he asked me to forward to Ruika: he wanted to invite him to a meeting in Hohen-Neuendorf, the suburb where they had both grown up. The letter was six pages long and included a story about a poisoned orange. Weeks passed, then months. On 12 June 2019, at five minutes to six, just as a thunderstorm was about to break over Berlin, my mobile rang. ‘I received a letter from you about a meeting.’ It was Ruika.
*
Driving always came naturally to the young man who had spent his early years teetering between wanting to become a writer or a fighter. Self-doubt evaporated when he sat behind the wheel. Alexander Os Ruika was only fourteen years old when, while his parents were out at work, he took his father’s moped for a spin, and he had never looked back. His first car wasn’t a bog-standard Trabant or a Wartburg, but an elegant classic DKW Union, built in 1935, which he bought as a wreck for 2,500 Ostmark and nurtured back to life. Some people hire a big band on their wedding day, or splash out on an extravagant meal – when Ruika married in 1983, he borrowed his friend’s Volkswagen Mk 1 Golf for the day and sped down Unter den Linden with his bride, Phil Collins blaring out of the car stereo. After his military service in the Guards Regiment had come to an end in 1984, he spent a year jobbing as a driver for the Free German Trade Union Federation, East Germany’s sole trade union, where his talent behind the wheel didn’t go unnoticed. Sometimes he heard foreign visitors sing his praises in Russian or English from the back seats: what kind of driver this is, they said, so smooth! He had a knack for sensing how far you could push a car before it started to groan, how to take a corner at speed without losing your grip on the road.
Out of the driving seat, uncertainty set in. In 1985, Ruika took up one of the few and sought-after places at Leipzig’s prestigious Institute for Literature, where the Stasi wanted to use him to keep tabs on the next generation of literary troublemakers. But he soon got bored sitting in university halls listening to lectures on aesthetics and stopped turning up to classes. In his work as an informant, too, he was soon proving himself to be an unreliable asset, skipping meetings until the Stasi withdrew its protecting hand and Alexander Ruika was thrown off his university course. Naturally, he started driving again, this time for the taxi office in Weissensee, and when he zig-zagged through Berlin at night, he was at ease again. On a good week, the pay was decent: for long-distance trips customers paid for the outbound and the inbound journey, so he could earn 300 Ostmark for three hundred kilometres. And if you were really lucky, you ended up with someone like Gert Neumann on the back seat, who was happy to pay you a bit extra, just because he could.
Ruika had agreed to meet at a Greek restaurant with an outdoor terrace, and the grey-haired man in his late fifties was already at his table by the time we arrived, suspiciously eyeing us from behind a pack of blue Gauloises and a steaming cup of green tea. It was a warm summer evening and the restaurant was busy. Our table was within earshot of the neighbouring guests, but a large family reunion was drawing most of the attention. There was some awkwardness after we had shaken hands and sat down: Neumann began by telling us a confusing anecdote that stumbled from the Brothers Grimm to an encounter with an owl in a country house in France, and from the ancient Romans’ belief in domestic deities to the French word for a spy, mouchard. Neumann was spamming the system. His story lasted around half an hour, during which I watched Ruika’s eyes grow wide with something akin to either bewilderment or panic. We ordered some food, and the atmosphere around the table became more relaxed as Ruika explained how he had ended up as a taxi driver after Adlershof. But then Neumann looked up from his grilled goat’s cheese to look Ruika in the eye: I believe the secret police wanted to know what state I was in, and you were meant to find out on that taxi journey, he said. Neumann was a good interviewer.
Ruika said he was struggling to remember every detail of their journey. He paused, and lit another cigarette. One of the best-paid gigs for taxi drivers in East Berlin was the pick-up at Hotel Metropol just by Friedrichstrasse station, a five-star lodging which drew visitors from around the world and was rumoured to have the best prostitutes in town. But competition for the gig was stiff, and every time there was a call-out for drivers near Friedrichstrasse from the head office at Weissensee, someone else seemed to get the job. One day a friend had tipped him off about a mechanic who could boost the signal on his radio for a bung, and the next time Ruika responded to a Friedrichstrasse call-out, his call-back jumped other drivers and got him the job. But in hindsight he wondered whether maybe the stronger signal also made it easier for HQ to listen in on what was going on inside his taxi: was he driving a bugging device on four wheels? There was a microphone next to the speaker on his dashboard: what if the mechanic had made sure it was on the whole time? And what if the Stasi simply put one of their men into the office at Weissensee and kept a tape running? It seemed obvious now, even if it hadn’t seemed obvious then.
I wasn’t quite convinced by this explanation, which shifted all responsibility for the report of the taxi journey to some shadowy figures in anoraks. Would the signal have been strong enough to reach all the way to Leipzig? And after all, there was still the report with Ruika’s alias on it. Neumann must have had the same thought. Why did you file that pointless report then, he asked. Ruika said those reports were always pointless. The Stasi had approached him and wanted to find out what had happened, Ruika said, but he wasn’t into it. Neumann looked pleased. That’s it, we are done, he said. The operation was over, the rotten tooth had been pulled. Our evening at the Greek restaurant continued for another two hours, during which conversation finally flowed freely. Neumann and Ruika spoke about their university days, about Martin Luther and the poetry of Rilke, and discovered that they shared a love for welding. The magical thing about welding, Ruika said, was you couldn’t see anything the first time you tried it, just blinding light. But at some point you learned to see through the light. It was hard to explain, Neumann agreed. There was a point when suddenly you could see very clearly how the metals started to flow into one another.
It was past midnight by the time we left, and a nightingale struck up somewhere in the trees nearby.
*
On 7 January 1988, a report from Branch IX, the arm of the Stasi responsible for investigations of political significance, landed on the desk of Erich Mielke, the Minister for State Security. It detailed proceedings at a literary event inside the Zionskirche church in Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg district, four days before Christmas Eve. The Stasi had tried to prevent the event from taking place by sealing the front door, but one of the invited writers, Gert Neumann, had been able to open the back door to the church hall thanks to his training as a locksmith.
According to an unofficial collaborator present among the audience, the event was ‘poorly attended’, with no more than fifty people, some of whom left before the end. ‘The reason for this was probably the poor acoustic conditions, but also lack of interest in Neumann’s texts,’ said the report. The author had brought along photographs of dilapidated buildings in the inner city of Halle, which he handed out to be passed through the rows during the reading, because the organisers hadn’t been able to procure a projector. The texts, the informant reported back, ‘were so cryptic that even persons with a literary bias had trouble understanding them’. The author was informed of this in the ensuing discussion, ‘but refused to accept it’. In the view of the source, the reading was ‘not a success for Neumann’.
The report was filed away to gather dust in the Stasi archives in Berlin. Six months later, though, the matter was picked up again. A note from Stasi headquarters to the local branch in Marzahn: was the informant not supposed to have passed on some of his poems to the writer Neumann, to be considered for publication in one of his literary journals? ‘Has the informal collaborator received any feedback on his works? If so, what kind?’ East Germany’s secret police, which was so easily terrified of poetry, craved artistic recognition. ‘If there hasn’t been a response,’ the letter continued, ‘is there a possibility of contacting the suspect with the aim of enquiring whether the poems were of use, or have potentially already been accepted?’
It took the informant’s handler a month to reply. The request had been received and the handler suggested that the questions would be considered when the informant received his next instructions. Doing so could take some time, however. Unofficial collaborator ‘Michael Lindner’, resident in Hohen Neuendorf, could not be contacted until the autumn as he would be spending more time in Leipzig, with a view to re-enrolling at the Institute for Literature. Alexander Ruika, who once dreamt of waking the ‘Giant of Murom’ in order to unleash the mythical defender of Russia’s ancient borders on traitorous scribblers, had been inspired once again to search for his true self and dig up his own navel. The Giant of Murom had gone back to sleep.
Lesson 11
BROKEN RHYME
A form of rhyme, produced by dividing a word at the line break of a poem to make a rhyme with the end word of another line.
The GDR had always taken pride in striding in lockstep with the Soviet Union. In the brotherhood of Eastern Bloc satellite states, it stood out amongst equals. Along with Bulgaria, it was the only state in the bloc to write the alliance with Russia into its constitution. East Germany’s geographical location on the class enemy’s doorstep meant it took a special place in USSR military planning. In return, it rarely took any political decision without consulting Russia first. East Berlin was ‘Moscow’s model student’, as an article in Die Zeit had put it in 1974: ‘No other state in the Communist world has submitted itself so unconditionally to Moscow’s leadership claim.’ But by the late 1980s, the centrifugal forces of the Soviet Union were starting to change. In March 1985, fifty-four-year-old Mikhail Gorbachev was elected as the new General Secretary of the Soviet Union’s Communist Party, and within months he admitted the unsayable: the USSR had failed to stay abreast of world developments in science and technology, and the economies of the bloc were stagnating. In years to come, Gorbachev’s rule would become associated with two concepts – glasnost (‘transparency’) and perestroika (‘restructuring’) – but the first of his reform slogans was uskoreniye, meaning ‘acceleration’. In order for the economy to accelerate, Gorbachev soon realised, the state had to loosen the reins of the command economy, allowing state enterprises to determine their output based on demand rather than centralised control.
