Free Stasiland by Anna Funder

unofficial collaborators. I know I probably won’t find many who will speak to me. They are the most hated people in the new Germany because, unlike the uniformed Stasi officers and administrative staff who went off to their bureaucratic jobs each day, these informers reported on family and friends without them knowing. ‘ Moment , bitte ,’ I say, and I put the phone in my lap. I remember Miriam telling me that informers routinely argue that their information didn’t harm anyone. ‘But how can they know what it was used for?’ she asked. ‘It is as if they have all been issued with the same excuses manual.’
    I pick up the receiver and say no. How can I reward informers a second time around? And besides, I don’t have the money.
    The phone keeps ringing. I make a series of assignations with Stasi men: in Berlin, in Potsdam, outside a church, in a parking lot, in a pub and at their homes.
    My kitchen overlooks the yard. I often see movement behind the windows of the other apartments. Today in one of them a man stands, staring out absent-mindedly. He is naked. I’m on the telephone and I look away, hoping he has not felt observed. When I turn to put the receiver down he’s still there—for a moment I think he may not have seen me. But then I notice he has pulled the curtain across his penis, where he holds it in a gesture of static modesty, a polyester toga.
    I need to get out of the house, and away from the phone.
    Outside the cold is bitter and soggy. There’s no wind; it is as if we have all been refrigerated. In the stillness people trail comets of breath. I catch the underground to the national Stasi Headquarters at Normannenstrasse in the suburb of Lichtenberg. The brochure I picked up at the Runden Ecke shows a vast acreage of multi-storey buildings covering the space of several city blocks. The picture is taken from the air, and because the buildings fold in at right angles to one another the complex looks like a gigantic computer chip. From here the whole seamless, sorry apparatus was run: Stasi HQ. And, deep inside this citadel was the office of Erich Mielke, the Minister for State Security.
    On 7 November 1990, only months after the citizens of Berlin barricaded this complex, Mielke’s rooms, including his private quarters, were opened to the public as a museum. The ‘Federal Commissioner for the Files of the State Security Service of the former GDR’ (the Stasi File Authority) has taken control of the files. People come here to read their unauthorised biographies.
    I see through a window into a room where several men and a woman sit each at their own small table. They look at pink and dun-coloured manila folders and take notes. What mysteries are being solved? Why they didn’t get into university, or why they couldn’t find a job, or which friend told Them about the forbidden Solzhenitsyn in their bookcase? The names of third parties mentioned in the files are crossed out with fat black markers so other people’s secrets are not revealed (that Uncle Frank was unfaithful to his wife, that a neighbour was a lush). But you are entitled to know the real names of the Stasi officers and the informers who spied on you. For the moments that I stand there at least, no-one is crying or punching the wall.
    I make my way to the main building like a rat in a maze. I want to get a sense of the man who ran the place, before meeting some of his underlings face to face.
    The name Mielke has now come to mean ‘Stasi’. Victims are dubiously honoured to find his signature in their files; on plans for someone to be observed ‘with all available methods’, on commands for arrest, for kidnapping, instructions to judges for the length of a prison term, orders for ‘liquidation’. The honour is dubious because the currency is low: he signed so many. Mielke’s apparatus, directed largely against his own countrymen, was one and a half times as big as the GDR regular army.
    After the Wall fell the German media called