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.

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.

It’s perhaps crass of the artist to make comparisons with the Stasi, but the stencil makes its point.

Sometimes puerile though often political, the simple medium of stencil art is enabling a new generation to make their point all over Europe – using striking images instead of cliched sentences.

This follows in the tradition of such groundbreaking agitprop as the Berkeley 4973 posters of the 60s. A picture tells a thousand words. And it’s difficult to shout down a drawing…

It’s difficult to imagine that Prenzlauerberg was ever anything but a playground for the stylish young professionals of Berlin. Boutique shops sell the latest retro sportswear look for local hipsters, while tattooed 20-somethings brush the pavement outside low key bars that will later be filled with creative and media types sipping on premium beers. Yummy mummies drop into the local bakery for some of that richly fibrous bread that Germans adore and which makes them turn their noses up at anaemic British breakfast offerings.

There are kids everywhere in what was recently declared one of the most fertile spots in Europe; the ratio of children to adults shot up as it became the place to settle with your firstborn when suburbia is a wrench too far for the still young parent who has yet to leave books, bars and me-time behind. And it is very civilised. Having dodged HGV’s in London’s erratic and intermittent cycle lanes, it’s a sight to behold these phalanxes of mothers – and the odd father – sedately crossing the boulevards on dedicated cycle paths with their own set of signals. You know for a fact that everything is recycled here.

And the art! The walls are a living canvas. Ironic exchanges of postcommunist banter: “Capitalism sucks” then the answering “Communism sucks” mix with the latest in stencil art. Huge dayglow pink letters on flyposters seem to challenge you to a fight as they announce “F*** Amerika”. Dark stone buildings from another age have their gravitas subverted with rampant spray can colours and a plethora of pop art posters.

But these contradictions run deeper than the imposition of 21st Century culture onto pre-war buildings, where parents obliviously push their single child under a sign for a club which shouts “B*stard”. When I told a German girl I was going to visit my friend on Kastanienallee (Chestnut Tree Avenue) she immediately said: “Well she’s not from the East then, if she lives there”. She smiled as she said it, but with that trace of a raised eyebrow that accompanies a point being made.

And indeed, my friend isn’t. She’s an academic who moved to Berlin and did reasonably well for herself, and so moved to the steadily-gentrifying Prenzlauerberg to enjoy the fruits of her labour, in every sense. This was my first inkling, as someone new to Germany, that ‘unification’ is a small word for a long drawn out and incomplete process.

The area aroud Schonhauser Allee is the setting for the hilarious vignettes recounted in Vladimir Kaminer’s book Russian Disko. Just like my first time in Prague in ‘97, I had missed by a mile the early wave that the Zeitgeist-chasers spotted years ago, and I pondered how much the area had changed and the disappearance of that naïve sense of freedom that must have followed Die Mauerfall.

But the done-and-dusted appearance of that era’s history belies rifts and the baggage of unfinished business. History is not comprised of discrete boxes that slot neatly next to each other in the academic’s bookcase, but instead of thousands of strands which overlap like a bowl of spaghetti. On one side of the street, a crane, probably engaged in building a cool apartment block for more cool people who want to live in a cool neighbourhood where they can cycle to work and drink coffee in the morning with similarly fashionable friends.

But on the other side of the road is a huge piece of graffiti which some enterprising individuals have managed to put on the side of a 5-storey high building. apartment block despite it being around five storeys high. “Diese stadt ist Aufgekauft!!!”. Something about the size and font instantly tells you this is not some tagging rubbish from juveniles, but a protest. It says: “This state is bought”.

Just down from the street, past an army surplus store with a suitably sinister fighter pilot’s helmet in the window – black and red-starred – is White Trash Fast Food. Here, check-shirted German rockabilly staff serve burgers in a Chinese-themed room to an international crowd who lap up country tributes from visiting American retro bands.

But over the road, and a little more discreet, is the legendary Kaffee Burger. One of the great things about Berlin – in a city where so many are single and so many are disenchanted with the meat and two veg’ daily fare of more ‘vanilla’ capitals where they couldn’t find what they were looking for – is that you can go out alone to a bar or café like this and not feel awkward.

As midnight approaches and it starts to fill up, I’m relaxing at the bar when I get talking to Wolfgang and his girlfriend. A native, like many others, he has been priced out by the ‘yuppy invasion’. “I live further out now, in Wedding. A lot of people live out there, artists and musicians, because we can’t afford it here in Prenzlauerberg. Foreign investors are buying apartments and then they push up the rents so the locals can’t afford it.”

It’s a familiar story, from Shoreditch to Barcelona – gentrification causing dislocation. The uneven spread of prosperity which is capitalism, carving up a previously static population and diluting the local identity with outsiders.

And there are strong differences. I had come to Kaffee Burger to hear some open-mic German poetry. I don’t speak the language, but it’s possible to appreciate the rhythm and I wanted to see what it was like. You’re always guaranteed an interesting crowd too. One particular poem was drawing a lot of response from the crowd, and I could tell by the tone that something or someone was being mocked.

Asking someone on the periphery, they told me that the politician Wolfgang Bohmer was getting it in the neck for his dig at the folk of the former-DDR. That week he had been in the news, after allegedly saying that Godlessness had encouraged a cavalier attitude to abortion and even infanticide. Statistics had struck again, but no-one wanted to hear any conclusions.

Needless to say, this touched a nerve and many of these east of the former divide were incensed. It suggested a primitive populace who have still not caught up with their western brothers, despite millions of marks poured into their ailing infrastructure by a victorious west – an investment resented by some on the ‘winning’ side. I tried asking a few mothers on Kastanienallee what they thought, but they said hadn’t been following the news – and they would have been Wessis anyway, living in the protective bubble that money provides.

Just like the tv tower which looks down on so much of East Berlin, the present is  ambiguous. Shades of grey replace the black and white clarity of the polarised past. On the one hand, this shiny space rocket is symbolic of an energetic and arty city which draws people from all over the world; a European version of San Francisco, a playground where you can reinvent yourself. On the other, it’s a reminder of recent revolution and of a scarred pysche.