Stasiland by Anna Funder Page B

with their demands. ‘Reveal the Stasi informers!’ ‘We are not Rowdies—We are the People!’ and the constant, constant call of ‘No Violence!’ From that night on the demonstrations grew, footage of them was smuggled to the west and Leipzig came to be known as ‘the City of Heroes’.
    There were now protests outside Stasi offices all over the country. But even in the smallest towns, the Stasi men in them continued their meticulous work, faithfully sending back to Berlin reports of the demands of the crowds outside: ‘Stasi to the factories!’ (heard at Zeulenroda), ‘We earn your money!’ (from Schmalkalden) and the prescient ‘Your days are numbered!’ (Bad Salzungen). In Leipzig the demonstrators had started to shout, ‘Occupy the Stasi Building Now!’ and ‘We’re staying here!’
    The Party belatedly tried to change its image. On 17 October Honecker was ousted by his deputy Egon Krenz, who, although younger, was just as disliked. Proceedings were started against Honecker on 8 November for abuse of office and corruption.
    On 9 November, thinking to deal with the crisis, the Politbüro met and decided to relax travel restrictions. People would be allowed to travel freely and be prohibited from leaving the country only in ‘special exceptional circumstances’. The session went into the night. At this stage the regime had taken to holding a regular press conference with the international media. That evening, Politbüro member Günter Schabowski needed to get to it. He hadn’t been at the session, but was hastily given a note of its decision to read out at the press conference.
    When he finished, there was no visible reaction among the journalists in the room; all pens were poised, the boom mikes floated in the air. Then a question came from the floor: ‘When will this new provision come into force?’ Schabowski has baggy eyes and a face like a bloodhound. Embarrassed, he looked at the paper. He turned it over but found no answer. ‘It will come into force…to my knowledge, immediately,’ he said.
    The decision was to have become operable the next day, after the border guards had been instructed on its implementation. But as soon as Schabowski had spoken it was too late. Within hours of his blunder 10,000 people were at the Bornholmer Bridge checkpoint on foot and in their Trabant cars, thronging the Wall. The light from the death strip showed up breath, exhaust. There was a symphony of horns. The guards stood at trigger point, but no orders came. Eventually, the supervisor decided to let the people through, on one condition. The guards were to place the exit stamp to the left of the passport photographs of ‘the most importunate’ (those at the front of the queue), so that they could later be identified, and refused re-entry.
    The people didn’t know and they didn’t care. They streamed through into West Berlin. When the first few came back with cans of western beer to show where they’d been, the guards tried to stop them coming home but it was too late, it was all over, and people from east and west were climbing, crying, and dancing on the Wall.

7
The Smell of Old Men
    Here, at the Normannenstrasse headquarters, there was panic. Stasi officers were instructed to destroy files, starting with the most incriminating—those naming westerners who spied for them, and those that concerned deaths. They shredded the files until the shredders collapsed. Among other shortages in the east, there was a shredder shortage, so they had to send agents out under cover to West Berlin to buy more. In Building 8 alone, members of the citizens’ movement found over one hundred burnt-out shredders. When the Stasi couldn’t get any more machines, they started destroying the files by hand, ripping up documents and putting them into sacks. But this was done in such an orderly fashion—whole drawers of documents put into the same bag—that now, in Nuremberg, it is possible for the puzzle women to piece them