And Others’ Lives Again
RC2’s been watching The Lives of Others
The whole thing’s worth reading, about the efforts to piece back together a warehouse full of documents shredded when the Stasi started to figure out its time was up (with a particular passage about “a Christian” who felt out of place on a campus of leftist radicals “praising East German communism and cursing the US”. I thought it was interesting that they’d make that “Christian” distinction). It’s structured around a girl that got blackballed as a teenager and spent the next fifteen years as one of the most surveilled women in East Germany, and the bit that stuck with me is around the end:
The truth is, for Poppe the reconstructed documents haven’t contained bombshells that are any bigger than the information in the rest of her file. She chooses a black binder and sets it down on the glass coffee table in her living room. After lighting a Virginia Slim, she flips to a page-long list of snitches who spied on her. She was able to match codenames like Carlos, Heinz, and Rita to friends, coworkers, and even colleagues in the peace movement. She even tracked down the Stasi officer who managed her case, and after she set up a sort of ambush for him at a bar — he thought he was there for a job interview — they continued to get together. Over the course of half a dozen meetings, they talked about what she found in her files, why the Stasi was watching her, what they thought she was doing. For months, it turned out, an agent was assigned to steal her baby stroller and covertly let the air out of her bicycle tires when she went grocery shopping with her two toddlers. “If I had told anyone at the time that the Stasi was giving me flat tires, they would have laughed at me,” she says. “It was a way to discredit people, make them seem crazy. I doubted my own sanity sometimes.” Eventually, the officer broke off contact, but continued to telephone Poppe — often drunk, often late at night, sometimes complaining about his failing marriage. He eventually committed suicide.
March 10th, 2008 at 5:31 am
I was over in East Berlin one New Year’s Eve in the mid-70s. Fresh-faced girls were offering themselves for hard currency outside the U-bahn station on the Alexanderplatz. The nearby public news ticker was broadcasting that there were 15 million unemployed in Britain, and that Todor Zhivkov had sent fraternal greetings. A gaggle of little boys surrounded a policeman as he set off a succession of not-very-good penny bangers. The guard of honour goose-stepped in front of the monument to the victims of fascism and militarism.
Then I looked into a church - Catholic - which was packed to the rafters with people absolutely intent on the service. I’d never seen such attentiveness. It was then I knew that Communism would soon be as dead as the Assyrian empire that I’d just viewed the remains of in the Pergamon Museum.