Stasiland Read Free Page B

process is repeating itself now. ‘Will it be 2010 or 2020 before what happened there is remembered?’ he wrote. And, ‘Why are some things easier to remember the more time has passed since they occurred?’
    The woman opposite me wakes up as the train pulls into Leipzig. Because there is something intimate about watching another person sleep, she now acknowledges my existence. ‘ Wiedersehen ,’ she says as she leaves the compartment.
    Miriam Weber stands at the end of the platform, a small still woman in the stream of alighting passengers. She holds a single rose in front of her body so I will know who she is. We shake hands, not looking too closely at first, talking about trains, trips, rain. It feels like a blind date, because we have described ourselves to each other. I know she has not told her story to a stranger before.
    We drive through Leipzig. The city has been transformed into a building site, a work in progress with some new goal. Cranes are picking over holes open as wounds. People ignore them, weaving head-down along footpaths and alleyways. On one of the concrete towers a large Mercedes emblem rotates, waltzing to the new tune here.
    Miriam’s apartment is in the roof of her building. There are five flights of stairs, broad sweeping stairs with a graceful dark balustrade. I try not to puff too loudly. I try not to think about my damaged head. I try to remember when elevators were invented. When we reach it, the apartment is one big light space under the eaves, full of plants and lamps, with views over all of Leipzig. From here you could see anyone coming.
    We sit in large cane chairs. Miriam, when I look at her straight, is a woman in her mid-forties with a cute short haircut, the bits on the crown sticking out like a cartoon boy, and small round glasses. She wears a long black sweater and pants, and curls her legs under her. She has a surprisingly big nicotine-stained voice. She is so slight that the voice comes from nowhere and everywhere at once: it is not immediately evident that it is hers; it fills the room, and it wraps us up.
    ‘I became, officially, an Enemy of the State at sixteen. At six- teen .’ Miriam looks at me through her glasses, and her eyes are wide and blue. In her voice is a combination of pride in how she became such a fiend, and disbelief that this country created enemies of its own children. ‘You know, at sixteen you have this sort of itch.’
    In 1968 the old University Church in Leipzig was demolished suddenly, without any public consultation. Two hundred and fifty kilometres away the Prague Spring was in full swing, and the Russians had not yet brought the tanks into the streets to crush the demonstrators for democracy. The demolition of the church in Leipzig provided a focus for the expression of a widespread malaise the Leipzigers had caught from their Czech cousins. Twenty-three years after the end of World War II, the next generation was asking questions about the way their parents had implemented Communist ideals.
    The Leipzig demonstrations were interpreted by the East German regime as a sign of the times, a cinder likely to ignite. The police doused people with fire hoses and made many arrests. Miriam and her friend Ursula thought this was not right. ‘At sixteen you have an idea of justice, and we just thought it was wrong. We weren’t seriously against the state—we hadn’t given it that much thought. We just thought it wasn’t fair to rough people up and bring in horses and so on.’
    The two of them decided to do something about it. At a stationer’s they bought a child’s stamp set with ink, small rubber letters and a rail to put them in.
    ‘You could buy that sort of thing?’ I ask. I know that roneo printers, typewriters and later photocopiers were strictly (if not particularly effectively) controlled by licence in the GDR.
    ‘Not after what we did,’ she smiles. ‘The Stasi had them taken off the shelves.’
    Miriam and Ursula made leaflets