Stasiland Read Free Page A

Scheller said. He was tapping the eraser end of a pencil on the desk.
    ‘This man says he left Dresden after the war. He asks whether we might do an item on what things are actually like now for the East German people instead, as he says, of “always broadcasting what is being done for the poor cousins”.’
    ‘Puzzle women,’ Uwe muttered.
    I took a deep breath. ‘And I agree with him—we’re always talking about the things that Germany is doing for people in the former GDR. It would be great to do an item from the eastern point of view. For instance, to find out what it’s like to wait for part of your file to be pieced together.’
    ‘You know we don’t broadcast domestically,’ Scheller said, ‘so there’s no point us doing items on the Ossis for their gratification.’
    I looked to Uwe, off to one side with his feet up on Scheller’s acreage of desk. He was rolling a fountain pen over his knuckles, lost in a reverie. Puzzling over women.
    ‘I know, I know,’ I said to Scheller. ‘But East Germany—I just think we should show some of the stories from there. From here, I mean.’
    ‘What sort of stories?’ Scheller asked. Behind him the computer gave off a glockenspiel beep signalling new email.
    ‘I don’t know,’ I said, because I really didn’t know. ‘There must be people who stood up to the regime somehow, or who were wrongfully imprisoned.’ I felt myself warming up, a little dangerous. ‘I mean, after World War II people searched high and low for the smallest signs of resistance to Hitler—as if a tiny piece of national pride could be salvaged and tied onto a couple of student pacifists and a bunch of old Prussian aristocrats. What about here? There must have been some resistance to the dictatorship?’
    ‘They aren’t a nation.’ Scheller was tetchy now.
    ‘I know, but it was a nation.’
    ‘Look,’ he said, ‘they are just Germans who had Communism for forty years and went backwards, and all they want now is the money to have big TV sets and holidays in Majorca like everyone else. It was an experiment and it failed.’
    ‘Well, what do you suggest I write to this guy?’ I could hear my voice getting higher. ‘Should I tell him that no-one here is interested in East Germans and their stories, because they don’t form part of our overseas image?’
    ‘For God’s sake!’ Scheller said. ‘You won’t find the great story of human courage you are looking for—it would have come out years ago, straight after 1989. They are just a bunch of downtrodden whingers, with a couple of mild-mannered civil rights activists among them, and only a couple at that. They just had the rotten luck to end up behind the Iron Curtain.’ He tilted his head. ‘What has gotten into you?’
    Uwe put his feet down. ‘Are you all right?’
    Uwe walked back to my desk with me, solicitous as a doctor with a patient who’s had bad news. That he did this made me realise I had gone over the top. He said, ‘He’s simply not interested.’
    ‘No-one is interested in these people.’
    ‘Look.’ Uwe touched my forearm gently, turning me towards him like a dance partner. His eyes were green and slanted up, his teeth short and neat, little pearls. ‘You’re probably right. No-one here is interested—they were backward and they were broke, and the whole Stasi thing…’ He trailed off. His breath was minty. ‘It’s sort of…embarrassing.’
    I replied to the Argentinian thanking him for his suggestion but telling him that ‘regrettably the station’s remit is only for current affairs and news, and we are therefore unable to investigate more personal, “point-of-view” stories.’
    A week ago he wrote back. He was angry, telling me that history is made of personal stories. He said that issues were being swept under the carpet in East Germany, and people along with them. It took twenty years after the war, he said, for the Nazi regime even to begin to be discussed in Germany, and that that