The Stasi Poetry Circle, page 16
The Chekist flame had burnt through its wick. A big demonstration at the Soviet war memorial in November had failed to rally the nation behind the Stasi. Two weeks after this show of solidarity at Treptower Park, the GDR’s Council of Ministers had renamed the secret police the Office for National Security, but the new body didn’t even last a month: on 8 December 1989, the new East German Prime Minister, Hans Modrow, ordered its dissolution. District offices had already been wound down after protesters forced their way into Stasi buildings in Erfurt, Suhl, Schwerin and Leipzig, shouting ‘We want to see our file’ to the tune of the popular Bavarian-dialect ditty Ja, wir san mit’m Radl da (‘Yes, we’ve turned up on our bikes’). If there was still a flicker of hope in the blacked-out rooms of the headquarters on Ruschestrasse, it was because some thought the Stasi could still be reformed by dividing it along the model of Western intelligence agencies, with one body focusing on foreign espionage while the other was solely dedicated to ‘protecting the constitution’.
But public opinion was blowing in the other direction, and in the dying days of the GDR the public was hard to contain. On 14 January 1990, citizens’ committees had announced a protest outside the Ruschestrasse headquarters at 5 p.m., and thousands of ordinary Berliners answered their call. Many of them brought bricks and mortar, to symbolically seal up the entrance to the home of the hated agency. In flyers and on placards, they called for the Stasi’s immediate dissolution, a stop to all plans to form a successor agency, and for all its employees to be barred from entering the buildings where the Ministry’s archives were held. The suspicion was that the old guard was deliberately slowing down negotiations with the citizens’ committees in order to win time to destroy records that could incriminate key figures in the old system. Their fears were not entirely unfounded: for the last few weeks, remaining Stasi employees had been queueing up across the courtyard to access the cellar behind Haus 2, where a green mill was working day and night to mix paper files and water into a mush. Shredders were worked until they broke down. Some rooms were filled to the roof with intelligence confetti.
That day, most of the Stasi’s employees had already left the building by 3 p.m., to avoid provoking the protesters. But a number of higher-ranking officers were still inside, sitting in darkened rooms. Willi Opitz, the head of the Stasi academy, had suggested they move their desks into rooms facing the courtyard, and that staff cars should not be parked in the streets outside the headquarters. ‘You have to think of the optics,’ he said. Members of the Feliks Dzerzhinsky Guards Regiment had been ordered to guard the building and prepare for the national emergency their unit was set up for. Last-ditch hopes had rested on the weather forecast: perhaps icy roads would keep the number of protesters down. But by late afternoon it was clear that the winter of 1989–90 would continue to be a mild one. Some Stasi officers suggested diluting the demonstration outside the gate by infiltrating it with young soldiers, but the plan was short-lived: it soon became clear that the crowd was simply too large.
Knauer started brewing coffee in the head of department’s office in Haus 4 at 6 o’clock in the evening: him and his colleagues were bracing themselves for a long night. On the way to work, he had seen a poster with the slogan Mit Fantasie gegen Stasi und Nasi, calling on protesters to use ‘imagination against Stasi and Nasi’, the abbreviation for the new National Security agency. Over-confident on matters lyrical to the last, Knauer couldn’t stop himself thinking that the slogan didn’t really rhyme (the stress in Fantasie falls on the final syllable but on the a in Stasi). While the coffee machine was sputtering away, he fumbled around the dimly lit room for his cigarettes. Knauer’s gaze fell through the back-facing window: around thirty people were standing in the inner courtyard. They weren’t wearing uniforms. Some of them appeared agitated, zigzagging from one building to the next, rattling at the doors on the ground floor and pointing at the upper floors. Knauer realised that his building, Haus 4, was the only one with lights burning on the staircase. He slowly stepped back from the window.
Gerd Knauer’s diary was less of a diary than a memoir, reflecting on the follies of the Stasi’s leadership. He expresses his frustration with colleagues, most of whom had refused to pop over to the West even after the border crossings had opened: it was as if they feared that the very idea of an independent socialist East Germany would go up in smoke once they set foot on enemy territory. Knauer disagreed. He had written to his superiors to appeal against the Stasi’s directive banning its employees from making any trips to the West. There were practical arguments against it: wouldn’t it make it easier to identify members of the secret police in the future, by comparing the list of those who had claimed the 100 Deutsche Mark ‘welcome money’ on the other side of the Wall against the population of the GDR? And there was a point of principle: why should East Berliners not be allowed to cross over to the other side like their relatives in the West? Knauer himself had already made the trip to the forbidden land. Only a week after the fall of the Wall, curiosity had got the better of him and he’d walked into the American sector at Glienicker Brücke, where Eastern and Western intelligence agencies once used to exchange captured agents. In the West, politicians and commentators had started to claim that the Soviet Union was collapsing because it couldn’t resist the lure of capitalism in all its garish technicolor, its sickly sweet tastes and smells. But when Knauer finally crossed over to the West with a thumping heart and bought himself a can of West German beer at a petrol station, the taste couldn’t have been more underwhelming: capitalism tasted watery. The lure of the West, he realised, was also of the East’s own making. Capitalism wasn’t beautiful enough to be banned.
The lights on the staircase were shining bright, too bright. If the protesters stormed the building, Knauer and his colleagues began to worry, they would be able to seek them out like moths to a flame. They wandered around the building for fifteen minutes, trying to find a switch to turn off the lights on the staircase. By the time they gave up, their coffee had gone cold. Knauer lit a match and walked through the open fire door from Haus 4 into Haus 2. He could hear the protesters chant: ‘Out with the Stasi’ and ‘Hang the Stasi pigs’. Something about those chants sounded different now. Then he realised why. The chants were coming from inside the building. Knauer hurried back, locked the door from the inside, switched off the remaining lights and the TV. He and his colleagues peered through the closed blinds. What did these people want, one of them whispered. Knauer wondered if they’d rather be down there with them, protesting against the failures of their own government. Someone pressed down the door handle of their room. Once tentatively, then again with force. One of Knauer’s colleagues resignedly slumped into his chair, whispering: if they find us, they are not going to waste any time asking questions. They counted the number of times someone tried to open their door: fifteen attempts in the space of an hour, then the rattling stopped.
Around 9.30 p.m., the group dared switch on the television set, to find East Germany’s main news programme broadcasting live from the complex of buildings they were in. A strange sense of calm spread around the room: it was as if they were no longer historical actors, but characters in a film. They learned that the broadcasters had followed the demonstrators who stormed Haus 18, which contained a hairdressing salon, a bookshop and a supermarket in which Stasi employees could purchase all sorts of Western goods inaccessible to ordinary citizens. Some protesters had broken into one of the archives and made a show of emptying them into the courtyard: sheets of A4 were raining from the sky. Knauer remembered that the files stored in Haus 18 were largely irrelevant – most of them were just holiday requests from Stasi employees – and wondered if some Stasi agents had managed to infiltrate the stream of protesters and direct them to the wrong building. Perhaps this wasn’t the last night of East Germany’s secret police after all.
Knauer had spent the previous weeks hatching plans. He was trying to work out if there was a way in which the reputation of the Stasi could be saved, if it committed itself outright to a reform programme. His hope was that a figure with both knowledge of the secret police’s inner machinations and credibility as a critical thinker, perhaps ‘super spy’ Markus Wolf, would be installed at the top of the agency. But Wolf had kept his head below the parapet. Knauer took pen to paper and wrote himself into a rage. He composed a seven-point plan. The Stasi had to go on a final public relations offensive, at last showcasing some of the more useful and harmless work it had done, exposing conditions to which the ministries had turned a blind eye, such as the poor state of the motorways or the lack of equipment in hospitals. It had to get rid of the old Stalinist blowhards and fire corrupt officers, agree to regular press conferences and proper parliamentary oversight. Now was the time to nail your flag to the mast of a truly humane, truly democratic socialism. He had shown his manifesto to a friend and colleague, who had quickly locked it in a safe, to save him from getting into trouble. As Knauer pondered how the East German dream could be kept alive, the TV suddenly cut to a shot inside the foyer of Stasi HQ. The scene that flashed up for a few seconds on the grainy screen was easily missed. But it was enough to dispel any remaining illusions the confident young officer harboured about the future of the state he served.
East Germany goes down in history for the infamous distinction of having endured two different dictatorships on its soil within the space of a century. Calling the GDR a dictatorship is indisputable – even if, as the British historian Richard J. Evans has argued, its ‘German’ character can be questioned with view to Moscow’s control over Berlin. This is not to say these two dictatorships were essentially the same. The Third Reich ended with a genocide of six million Jews and five million other persecuted victims. The GDR ended with an uprising that remained bloodless: there were no burnt bodies, only pulped files. Nazi Germany radicalised itself until it went up in flames, with fervent supporters of a fascist regime fighting on even when their cause was lost: East Germany drained itself of hope, with Stasi officers resignedly watching their own demise on a television screen. But it did leave behind a heap of broken promises, some of which were specifically cultural. The promise that a country could learn from its immediate history and build a new state around its literary heritage. The promise that high literacy will necessarily bring out the best in us. And the promise that politics could be trusted to respect culture as an equal, ‘a great sovereign power’ in Becher’s turn of phrase, instead of co-opting it for its own ends.
The picture on the TV set around which Knauer and his colleagues had gathered was a wry comment on this state of affairs. It showed the bottom of the staircase in Haus 18 of the Stasi headquarters, next to which stood a glass vitrine displaying artistic works by Stasi employees: clay sculptures, oil paintings, and some poems produced by the Stasi poetry circle, including Gerd Knauer’s own verses. Einblick in unser Volkskunstschaffen was written in white paint on a beige plaque: ‘A Peek at our People’s Art’. But overnight the glass of the vitrine had been smashed. Some prankster had crossed out a couple of letters. VOLKSKUNSTSCHAFFEN had become VOLKSUNSCHAFFEN: ‘The People’s Art’ was now ‘The People’s Mis-accomplishments’. Somewhere behind him, Knauer could hear a voice, muttering to itself: ‘Those vandals.’
Lesson 12
EPITAPH
A form of words written in memory of a person who has died, especially on a tombstone.
Three weeks after the storming of the Stasi headquarters, East Germany’s government gave orders that its secret police should be dissolved by 31 March 1990. By then, East Germany’s first free elections for the People’s Chamber had been won by the Alliance for Germany, made up of the Christian Democratic Union, the German Social Union and Democratic Awakening – the spokesperson for the latter was a young chemist called Angela Merkel, who had throughout the previous decade worked at the Central Institute for Physical Chemistry across the road from the Guards Regiment. On 22 August, the People’s Chamber voted for the GDR to sign up to the constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany. East Germany was no more.
A printing permission for the Circle of Writing Chekists’ last anthology was issued on 31 December 1989. But it never made its way to the printers. In the final manuscript, the original title Writing Chekists is crossed out and updated with the correct new name for their employers: Lyrical Circle in the Office for National Security. A dedication to the fortieth anniversary of the foundation of the GDR and the Ministry for State Security is also crossed out: the anthology now merely bears witness to the ‘thoughts and feelings, motivation and deeds of our time and our struggle, to the love of our socialist homeland and the solidarity with the workers in our country’.
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Jürgen Polinske worked as an archivist at Berlin’s Humboldt University from 1990 until his retirement in 2018. For the last fifteen years of his employment, the job involved looking after the university’s science collection, which is held in an outpost in Adlershof, less than a hundred metres from where the Stasi poetry circle used to meet. The Feliks Dzerzhinsky Guards Regiment’s Culture House has been torn down; some of the former barracks now house a job centre, the Agentur für Arbeit. Polinske still writes his own verse, and runs a poetry circle in Adlershof.
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Uwe Berger’s publisher informed him three months after the fall of the Berlin Wall that they would allow his contract to expire the following month. His request for a reissue of his 1987 memoirs, showing his ‘turn to perestroika’, went unanswered. In 2006, Der Spiegel confronted Berger with the reports showing that he had spied on his students at the Stasi poetry circle. ‘From a contemporary standpoint I cannot explain my behaviour, nor make excuses for it,’ he told his interviewer. ‘I ask those affected for forgiveness.’ In his diaries, self-published as an e-book in 2013, Berger complained that the resulting article was ‘one-sided’ and noted that West Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, the BND, had also tried to gather information on Der Spiegel: ‘No intelligence agency can do without so-called reports.’ Two years after his death in February 2014, a new poetry prize in Uwe Berger’s name was to be set up at a literature festival in Berlin’s Köpenick district. The prize was renamed following objections by Berger’s former colleagues and contemporaries from the East German literary scene.
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Björn Vogel works as a caretaker and a private driver for hire. On his Facebook page, he shares YouTube videos arguing that the Covid-19 pandemic is a ploy to prop up ailing Western economies and establish a dictatorship of global elites.
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After Rolf-Dieter Melis’s death, Hilde finished building the house in Königs-Wusterhausen on her own and still lives there today. She says she misses the good old GDR.
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Annegret Gollin still works as a tour guide at the German Chancellery. After retirement, she will receive a monthly state pension of 414 euros and compensation of 300 euros a month for East Germans who spent more than 180 days in prison, but because the GDR systematically denied her regular employment it is unclear if she can draw further state support that she would otherwise have been eligible for. Her monthly living costs are around 1,000 euros. The German state still pays the pensions of former Stasi employees, on average around 1,400 euros a month. Annegret Gollin no longer writes poetry.
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Gerd Knauer has changed his name and works as a tax adviser. Some of his clients used to be senior officers in the Stasi. After reunification Knauer wrote three crime novels under the pseudonym Max Adam, which were published in the same years as the first three books in Henning Mankell’s Wallander series, though with less commercial success. He is working on his memoirs.
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Gert Neumann has moved to Wittenberg, to spend more time studying Martin Luther.
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Alexander Ruika never completed his literature degree. After the fall of the Wall, he worked as a detective at a department store, then as private security for a German recycling tycoon, and eventually set up his own agency offering security and surveillance services. He is now retired, and spends his time repairing vintage motorbikes and occasionally writing poems.
SOURCES
Adam, Max D., Yeti sei tot (Das Neue Berlin, 1992)
Arendt, Hannah, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Penguin Classics, 2017)
Arndt, Erwin, Deutsche Verslehre (Gondrom, 1989)
Bailey, James, and Tatyana Ivanova, An Anthology of Russian Folk Epics (M. E. Sharpe, 1999)
Baumann, Christiane, Das Literaturzentrum Neubrandenburg 1971–2005 (Robert-Havemann-Gesellschaft, 2006)
Bittorf, Wilhelm, ‘Nun erfüllt sich der bittere Rest’, in Der Spiegel, 5 February 1984
Becher, Johannes R., ‘Das poetische Prinzip’, in Bemühungen II (Aufbau, 1971)
——— ‘Macht der Poesie’, in Bemühungen II (Aufbau, 1971)
——— ‘Selbstzensur’, in Sinn und Form, May 1988
Berger, Uwe, Der Schamanenstein (Aufbau, 1980)
——— Die Neigung (Aufbau, 1984)
——— Pfade hinaus: Episoden der Erinnerung (Mauer, 2005)
——— Ungesagtem lauschen: Aus dem Tagebuch der Jahre 2000 bis 2012 (Edition digital, 2013)
——— Weg in den Herbst (Aufbau, 1987)
Bergmann, Christian, Die Sprache der Stasi (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1999)
