Bookpacking’s Blog

This week we’ve been drawing towards the end of the brilliant Stasiland. Some things in life are so subtle and insidious in the way they wreak their destruction, that it’s hard to convey the level of harm they do without sounding histrionic. But Anna Funder’s work steadily plots the low-key psychological violence that lay behind the Stasi’s bid to control every aspect of the DDR citizen’s life. Why draw attention to your organisation’s existence with a high profile execution when, using your network of coerced informants, you can quietly engineer a nervous breakdown for your target?

Many never found out that it was not life conspiring against them, but the state. It is this power, pulling invisible strings and playing God, that gives a stalker their thrill. Being in the secret police rewarded you for taking the path of least resistance and following your more base instincts. In a country of empty shelves, power was the only way to really feel one-up on your supposedly equal peers. And there were perks; if you were going to be thorough in your monitoring, then you had to listen to everything the target did. Who knows what you might hear through pillow talk?

Of course everybody knew the Stasi were everywhere, but doublethink was a key part of the denial and backwards-rationalisation that enabled the regime to exist. Many of the agents of the system knew what they were doing was ridiculous, but in that Emperor’s New Clothes culture the shops were full and everyone was happy, if the Party said so.

Listening to people in the former Eastern Bloc lament the passing of an era where ‘you knew where you were’, you could lull yourself into a 6th form common room rose-tinted view of communism. God only knows – or rather He doesn’t because He didn’t officially exist behind the Iron Curtain – that communism looks good on paper. But reading the intensely personal accounts of state persecution that Funder recorded, one becomes increasingly incredulous at such extreme cynicism; in a culture of suspicion where it seems flippant to apply that overused adjective ‘Kafka-esque’.

The subject – and there were many given there was a Stasi employee for at least every 10 people – was presumed guilty until proven guilty. With a relentless drip of propaganda and the steady application of duress, the authorities corroded the individual’s integrity and morality. They undermined the most basic bonds of humanity in a whole society, to prop up a worldview they only half-believed themselves. Like a twisted pyramid scheme, a citizen who was under suspicion could make it easy on themselves by informing on another suspect, who was informing on someone else who was spying on somone else…

The Nazi war machine, with its industrial might, used the direct route: bullets. But with the DDR’s threadbare infrastructure and austere economy, and the need to create jobs to maintain full employment, it suited the Nazis’ successors to maintain this huge and hidden army of grey men to slowly drain the life out of the individual. They called themselves the Sword and the Shield of the Party but, in a twist on the description sometimes applied to Prussia (and coincidentally the geographical boundaries overlap), this was not a state with a secret police force; but a secret police force with a state.

It’s fascinating, if slightly wearing for anyone with any capacity for empathy.  One’s rising incredulity is inversely proportional to the characters’ dwindling reservoirs of self-belief; slowly ebbing away as a ‘template for undermining’ takes its toll. They certainly killed people, using locations in Leipzig and Dresden for secret executions, and Putin was allegedly stationed in Dresden as the local KGB presence. But for the majority of their victims, they preferred to wear them down until they became a shell of their former selves. And if you finally accepted you never going to make it to the West, it was tempting to retreat instead into your own mind. This withdrawl from daily life even had a name, ‘internal emigration’. Some might say that was the biggest crime of all. Not the  killing of hundreds, but the burying of Hope for millions.

 Bulgaria; Sofia; The Apartment

It’s Valentines Day in Sofia. But for the lone traveller like Bookpacking, they can console themselves that 14th February is also the feast day of St Trifon – crying into your glass is just fine today, as long as it’s wine at the bottom of it.

It’s an interesting day, hooking up with a couple of locals who work in travel & tourism for an informal tour of the town. Today the washed out colours of a European winter jarr with the E-number red of Valentines Day balloons from sellers  – like here in front of the Popa statue. A local landmark, it’s the place to meet if you’ve got a rendezvous.

The stone figure of a 14th Century religious leader made contrasts sharply with the vivid man-made material of 21tst Century tat. In front of the National Palace of Culture there is another one of those juxtapositions that seem to leap out at you in this region. A group of old people stand in front of a memorial, drinking wine and eating small pieces of some kind of sweetbread. With their heavy coats and a drooping flag, they are commemorating the death of General Hristo Lukov who was killed by communists. We shouldn’t get too sad though, because he was apparently pro-Nazi; history never seems to be neutral in this part of the world.

Meanwhile, in another part of the park, a PA system is pounding. Girls in modern dress are dancing on a stage in front of the dilapidated national monument while a young guy dressed as a giant condom hands out free prophylactics for what looks to be the Red Cross. The OAPs come from an era where the lucky few survived, the young people from an era where the unlucky few die. Will they come to monuments like this when they are that age, and reflect on past injustices while the younger generation parties on in ignorant bliss? One hopes they won’t have to.

Later, on the edge of town – past even the Panelka – we find ourselves at an obscure concrete monument full of bells. Some sort of UNICEF project to symbolise solidarity between the world’s children, it speaks of another century. With bells donated from countries which no longer exist or have been renamed, like the DDR or Kampuchea, it feels like time has stopped. Even the huge double-stacked tv’s in the security guard’s shack (to stop “gypsies” stealing the metal) look like they came from another era with their wood-effect sides.

There is no-one else here, and in the late afternoon gloom, the sentinel-like main tower cuts a dark angular silhouette against a uniformly grey sky. Dogs prowl and on the main road prostitutes stamp their feet as cars fly past on the dual carriageway. Horns sound as excited men impulsively leer, but no-one stops.

Walking through a field strewn with rubbish, to the start of the housing estate where the bus waits and a lone dog stands territorially on the potted tarmac, this feels like a frontier. Not so much the edge of town, as the edge of civilisation. An old game, with old risks, for those girls.

So when we get to back to town, and the safe warm confines of one of Sofia’s coolest ‘bars’ Apartment – “It’s not a bar, it’s the Apartment” – the soothing sea sounds in the aquatic-themed room we’re led to are all the more appreciated. Sinking into the sofa with a Leffe and some organic chocolate cake, we can reflect that the world changes. But not that much.

The Fernsehturm looks pretty now, this 1,200ft long futuristic rocket to the stars. It welcomes you to an ultra-modern city where individuality is welcomed and self-expression encouraged. But spend a few days in Berlin, and read your Stasi history, and you start to see it in a different light.

There it is again, as you cross a street. And over your shoulder as you drink a coffee outside. It’s never out of your view for more than a few minutes. It’s like being shadowed by an impassive silvery spy. Outwardly symbolic of communist construction skills –  and a giant “Up yours” to West Berlin – it would also have jammed TV pictures and Radio Free Europe, just like its Prague counterpart.

And that mirrored glass; maybe a too little like the windows in an interrogation room or the shades on the guy who always happens to turn up when you do in the cafe. The tower once served – like all communist architecture – to dwarf those below it; to remind you that you were nothing compared to the collective, namely the state and its many tentacles. There is a reason why dictators build big, just like they did at the imposing Tempelhof under a different – but equally totalitarian – regime. Always there. Always watching. Always bigger.

Little could they know they would be building one of the city’s top tourist attractions, bringing the enemy from all over the globe to spend their ill-gotten capitalist gains. It is now the drab socialist showpiece of Karl-Marx-Allee that shrinks beneath the tower. And at night, looking up from Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, this trophy of the former anti-fun state resembles a glitter ball in a decadent disco. The Spartacists must be turning in their spartan coffins.

 Hungary; Budapest; Terror House

History is very much alive in this part of the world. A couple of decades is nothing, and even if the teenagers of today don’t remember Communism, their parents do. And while some countries try to move on as quickly as possible, glossing over the past with a ’sleeping dogs lie’ attitude, others take time to remember what went before.

Contrasting with the Slovakian indifference we found in Bratislava, here the excellent Terror House museum not only commemorates the victims – it names the guilty. From the menacing Soviet tank which sits under victims’ mug-shots, to the chapel-like cellar which contains their names, the moving exhibition tells reminds us not to forget the victims of one of the Eastern Bloc’s relatively moderate regimes. The museum is situated in the very building where the Secret Police of both Nazi and Soviet regimes operated, and it rams home the point that Fascism and Communism were but different brands of the same kind of systemic oppression and control.

But surprisingly, another wall names and shames some of the torturers. Or perhaps that’s not surprising. Perhaps what’s surprising is that there isn’t more of this in the other countries we visited. Is this testament to the power of forgiveness, or an indication of unfinished business and a lack of lustration? Only time will tell.