Read Online Stasiland by Anna Funder - Free Book Online Page A

I acclimatise to the thinning of the atmosphere. I wear dust-free tracks on the linoleum from kitchen to desk, from bathroom to bed.
    All I feel today in fact, as I pass where the bookshelf used to be in the hall, is the sudden predominance of linoleum in my life. Altogether I can count five kinds of linoleum in this once grand apartment, and they are all, each one of them, brown. Degrees of brown: dark in the hallway, fleck in my bedroom, a brown in the other bedroom that may have once been another colour before succumbing to house rule, brown-beige in the kitchen and, my favourite, imitation parquetry-in-lino in the living room.
    In the kitchen I make coffee in the thermos. What surprises me about living here is that, no matter how much is taken out, this linoleum palace continues to contain all the necessities for life, at the same time as it refuses to admit a single thing, either accidentally or arranged, of beauty or joy. In this, I think, it is much like East Germany itself.
    I take my cup to the living-room window. In the park there is snow on the ground and the trees, light on light. My breath mixes with coffee steam on the glass. I wipe it away. In the distance lies the city, the television tower at Alexanderplatz like an oversized Christmas bauble, blinking blue.
    I can’t see it but I know that just near there, on the site of the old Palace of the Prussian Emperors pulled down by the Communists, is the parliament building of the GDR, the Palast der Republik. It is brown and plastic-looking, full of asbestos, and all shut up. It is not clear whether the fence around it is to protect it from people who would like to express what they thought of the regime, or to protect the people from the Palast, for health reasons. The structure is one long rectangular metal frame, made up of smaller rectangles of brown-tinted mirror glass. When you look at it you can’t see in. Instead the outside world and everything in it is reflected in a bent and brown way. In there, dreams were turned into words, decisions made, announcements applauded, backs slapped. In there could be a whole other world, time could warp and you could disappear.
    Like so many things here, no-one can decide whether to make the Palast der Republik into a memorial warning from the past, or to get rid of it altogether and go into the future unburdened of everything, except the risk of doing it all again. Nearby, Hitler’s bunker has been uncovered in building works. No-one could decide about that either—a memorial could become a shrine for neo-Nazis, but to erase it altogether might signal forgetting or denial. In the end, the bunker was reburied just as it was. The mayor said, perhaps in another fifty years people would be able to decide what to do. To remember or forget—which is healthier? To demolish it or to fence it off? To dig it up, or leave it lie in the ground?
    Between the Palast der Republik and my apartment lies the neigh-bourhood of Mitte, the old centre of Berlin, with its grey buildings and white sky and naked trees. Streets near here are being renamed: from Marx-Engels-Platz to Schlossplatz, from Leninallee to Landsberger Allee, from Wilhelm-Pieck-Strasse to Torstrasse, in a massive act of ideological redecoration. Most of the buildings though, are not yet renovated. They have largely lost their plaster and are scraped back to patches of brick; they look like tattered faces after plastic surgery. They are as they were before the Wall fell, except for the sprouting of domestic-size satellite dishes from the window-frames; a sudden white fungus, tuned to outer space. The trams are western now—they were among the first things to cross over here after the Wall came down. They are a flash of sighing yellow suspended from strings, shifting through this greyscape.
    A tram stops right outside my apartment. It obeys a set of lights here under the window, though on the other side of the street there are none to match. I see the driver has the