Free Stasiland by Anna Funder Page B

ran the country.
    Mielke was an invisible man, but Honecker’s picture was everywhere. It was in schools, in Free German Youth halls, in theatres and over swimming pools. It was at the universities, in police stations, at holiday camps and in the border guards’ watchtowers. He always wore a suit and tie, large dark-rimmed glasses and his hair, first dark then grey, combed back off a high forehead. Other than being small, Honecker was unremarkable-looking, except for his strange, full-lipped mouth which seemed to widen, only partially, for a smile.
    Honecker’s background was not dissimilar from Mielke’s. His father was a miner, and he joined the ‘Jung-Spartakus-Bund’ at eleven, and the Communist Youth at fourteen. He was apprenticed as a roof-tiler, before spending 1930–31 at the Lenin School in Moscow, then working underground for the Communists against the Hitler regime. In 1937 he was arrested by the Gestapo and sentenced to ten years imprisonment for ‘preparation of high treason’. He escaped shortly before the end of the war, when he began, steadily, to make his career in the Party running East Germany.
    The Stasi’s brief was to be ‘the shield and sword’ of the Communist Party, called the ‘Socialist Unity Party of Germany’ ( Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands ) or SED. But its broader remit was to protect the Party from the people. It arrested, imprisoned and interrogated anyone it chose. It inspected all mail in secret rooms above post offices (copying letters and stealing any valuables), and intercepted, daily, tens of thousands of phone calls. It bugged hotel rooms and spied on diplomats. It ran its own universities, hospitals, elite sports centres and terrorist training programs for Libyans and the West Germans of the Red Army Faction. It pockmarked the countryside with secret bunkers for its members in the event of World War III. Unlike secret services in democratic countries, the Stasi was the mainstay of State power. Without it, and without the threat of Soviet tanks to back it up, the SED regime could not have survived.
    The foyer of Stasi HQ is a large atrium. Soupy light comes through the windows behind a staircase that zigzags up to the offices. A small woman who reminds me of a hospital orderly—neat hair, sensible white shoes—is showing a tour group around. The visitors are chatty, elderly people, who have just got off a bus with Bonn numberplates. They wear bright colours and expensive fabrics, and have come to have a look at what would have happened to them had they been born, or stayed, further east.
    The group is standing around a model of the complex, as the guide tells them what the demonstrators found here on the evening of 15 January 1990 when they finally got inside. She says there was an internal supermarket with delicacies unavailable anywhere else in the country. There was a hairdresser with rows of orange helmet-like dryers, ‘for all those bristle-cuts’. There was a shoemaker and, of course, a locksmith. The guide crinkles her nose in order to push her glasses up its bridge; a reflex which doubles as a gesture of distaste. She explains that the neighbouring building—the archive—was invisible from outside the complex, and a copper-lined room had been planned for it, to keep information safe from satellite surveillance. There was a munitions depot here, and a bunker underneath for Mielke and a select few in the event of a nuclear catastrophe. She says Berliners used to refer to this place as the ‘House of One Thousand Eyes’.
    I start to look about the atrium. An arrow points towards a library, another up the stairs to an exhibition room. It smells of dust and old air.
    Then I hear the guide say something about a ‘biological solution’. The westerners are silent. She says instead of waiting for a revolution she and her friends had pinned their hopes on the old ‘ Marxisten-Senilisten ’ in power dying off. After all, she says wrinkling her nose,