My brother just Twitted me from Triest, he’s watching tonight “The lives of others”, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s incredible movie on RAI1.
We saw the film at the cinema when it came out and then I bought a DVD in the Original Version. In German of course it’s more impressive. Since then I’ve collected and listened to the RADIO2 and RADIO3 STASI programmes over the past months (See Wall section) and more importantly, I’ve read Anna Funder’s book, Stasiland.
I was wondering tonight, what the STASI would have been like, if Twitter had existed back then. A STASI Twitter, where Erich & Erich would be the sole administrators, being able to see all sorts of tweets from unofizielle Mitarbeiters...”Frau Schumann now out with her grey shopping bag – Herr Peters entering the ironmongers’ – Official: Erika Schmidt has an affair with her professor” and so on…
An interesting video by Deutsche Welle about the wall, the GDR, our relationship with history and the perception we have of it…and the fact that nobody is entitled to have the monopoly of memory.
Two posts ago, we were the 1980s, the Cold War and the Iron Curtain were there and I was in love with both John Taylor and Simon Le Bon of Duran Duran. Geez…I could not make up my mind! In Cold War attire, Le Bon had a bon enfant sovietique spy attitude.
So it seems quite appropriate, after last week’s full immersion on STASI’s Eric Mielke, to get to know more about Markus Wolf.
Stasiland, an incredible book by Anna Funder. The italian translation is very good, pity only for the title “C’era una volta la DDR”, which sounds a bit silly, actually.
Funder starts in a casual way to ask people how things were during the DDR years, and she ends up conducting a very intriguing reportage.
Beyond stereotypes and beyond Ostalgie, “between Kafka and Monty Python” Funder contacts victims of the regime and former Stasi officers, Mitarbeiters and talking heads. She visits the places were citizens were detained and subject to police interrogations. She smells the stale air of these rooms, where the odour of terrified people, dossiers, senile power and outright paranoia still lingers.
For 10 years the letters that my DDR penpals and I were writing each other were intercepted, opened with special W-shaped steam devices, read, copied and filed.
My friend Michael went up to the Archive and got the letters, just after the fall of the Wall. Just like those people you see in the film “The lives of others”. Just like the protagonists of Anna Funder’s reportage.
We were teenagers and loved Duran Duran. We were discovering Madonna. I worshipped Radio Caroline, we met over Radio Free Europe.
My friends in Brandenburg and Saxony were longing for freedom. They travelled a lot across the Socialist countries. We had freedom in Triest, but I had never travelled. Freedom meant different things for us.
I wonder if I can go there, and feel the blow, of seeing my letters in a file, imagine them through the eyes of a Stasi zealous Mitarbeiter, filed and numbered, in a box. I have the sinister impression that somewhere, someone knew a lot about me.
I’m reading Anna Funder’s Stasiland and it’s very enlightening. My DDR penpals never bothered to describe this TV program, der schwarze Kanal, probably because like millions of other DDR citizens, they switched off the TV-set on Mondays and wrote letters instead.
Well, now that I discovered the content of this program I must say it’s a familiar feeling. I realize that I have at least 3 schwarze Kanal on my non-flat, beer-bellied TV set: Canale 5, Rete4 and Italia1.
The real McCoy schwarze Kanal is the illegal Rete4 network, in particular the Telegiornale of Emilio Fede, the novel Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler. Here Fede in a schwarze Kanal top performance, producing his brand of murky innuendo on Roberto Saviano.
Of course Fede is kein Stasi bureaucrat, quite to the contrary he embodies the quintessential italian style. Nice suits, hyperrealistic tan, slimy rictus, oily and obsequious. The PM’s running dog.
Rete4, but also Canale5 and Italia1 offer on top their schwarze Kanal their share of female buttocks nervously-shaken in silly sexed-up dances, very different from the DDR’s chastened and sanitized Lipsi dance.
We also have U-boot schwarze Kanal inside RAI1 and RAI2: the telegiornale. And the newspapers! But the rationale of the schwarze Kanal Made in Italy is the same of the DDR. Trying to keep the information outside, and when they can’t, shout at it.
Basically RAI 3 plays the ARD role. Everything said by RAI3’s Milena Gabbanelli, RAI2’s Michele Santoro, Sergio Ruotolo and Marco Travaglio, is attacked by the schwarze Kanal. Or even the strips of Vauro, who was censored last week.
The Stasi created the first pioneering derivatives of the news programs with the schwarze Kanal. Italy created a real subprime flourishing derivative market of information sewers.
A friend told me yesterday he only watches the news on Al Jazeera. Sign of the times.
The funny thing is, The Guardian online edition now has italian politics articles in italian…will Il Giornale o Il Foglio start to write in french against Le Monde, in english against The Economist?
Goodnight from the Divided City…(yes, on top of everything we’ve got also Popetown, something that the DDR tried to copy, but couldn’t match!)
Well, do you remember it? Are you old enough to have lived this joy in real time? I proudly am old enough! ;D And it is one of my most beautiful memories. Even if I was not in Berlin
video by CA1965 retrieved on youtube
At that time I was at University.. Blogs, e-mails did not exist, but just like now I would spend my evenings writing to my penpals in the DDR, in Czechoslowakia, in Poland, in West Germany, in Norway… I lived the Fall of the Berlin Wall in the words of my friends from Neu Brandenburg, Leipzig, Neuruppin, Karl-Marx-Stadt, Chemnitz…
video by Hellpastell retrieved on youtube
It is a pity I could see the images just on TV and not stay there in the cold Berlin nights in the middle of all that energy, but since my DDR friends had shared their thoughts and problems with me for the past 10 years, I was so happy, as though as I had lived there. From my window I could see the Yugoslavian border, so I knew a thing or two about curtains, be them made of iron or slightly more permeable geopolitical material.
We were aware that all our letters used to be inspected, fotocopied and filed by STASI. Boy, the apparatchiks were quick…it took 3 days for a letter to go from Brandenburg to Triest. With all the snooping in between. The polish apparatchiks were less efficient but definitely more transparent, under Mr Jaruzelskij’s term they would open, staple and stamp the envelope with a framboise OCENZUROWANO logo, but that would bring to one month the delivery time from Czestochowa to Triest.
When I saw the final scenes of The Lives of Others (the steam scenes) I almost cried. So that’s the way they used to do it…they had special steam machines, er…obviously they weren’t steaming the letters in the kitchen.
After the Velvet Revolution, the Berlin Wall fell down…a few days later my mother asked me, Why don’t you enrol in a russian course at ITALIA-CCCP? And so, apparently anti-clockwise on the dial of history, I started studying russian. I clearly had the feeling that the world behind our back, behind squeezed Triest and Gorizia, suddenly expanded!
Two years later black clouds of madness and war crowded our horizon. But 9.11.1989 was a wonderful day and it did change our lives.
My brother just Twitted me from Triest, he’s watching tonight “The lives of others”, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s incredible movie on RAI1.
and I was in love with both John Taylor and Simon Le Bon of Duran Duran. Geez…I could not make up my mind! In Cold War attire, Le Bon had a bon enfant sovietique spy attitude.
