The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August

Chapter 33

Asked to think about East Germany in the 1950s, picturesque is not the word which leaps to mind. World War Two had not been kind; the Soviet tanks as they ploughed towards Berlin had not been kind. The years of uncertainty until the elections of 1948, when certainty became rather too certain indeed, had not been kind, and finally the dawn of the 1950s had brought with it a certain grey resignation. The flat landscape left no place to hide the harsh realities of an economy where intellectualism was bourgeois, labour was freedom, and brotherhood was obligatory. The people had been promised cars, so incredibly unreliable little bangers which leaped like startled hippos over every pothole, slamming the heads of the many people crowded into the tight back seats, were wheeled out with the pomp of cardboard coffins. The people had been promised food, so forests were torn down and wheat sown where no farmer would have dreamed of growing it, while industrial fertilisers stained the flat still waters of the northern lakes a scummy grey-brown.

Yet, for all this, one or two bastions of tradition survived, largely through government omission. The confiscation by the Soviets of much of Germany’s industrial equipment after the war had ranged from factory machinery down to the smallest farmyard truck, and in corners of the countryside there existed now a population of hardy widowed women who slogged through the fields, scythes in hand, their heads covered with bright scarves and their backs bent beneath the baskets that carried their crops. Blink, and you might imagine it was some idyllic rural scene. Look again, and you might see the hunger in the women’s eyes and the weight upon their shoulders as they stooped to toil.

I was travelling to meet Daniel van Thiel. By buying the company which distributed the anomalous radio, I had acquired information as to its origins, which were, to my surprise, eastern European, the key breakthrough attributed to van Thiel, a former communications engineer in the Wehrmacht who, at the tender age of nineteen, had been one of the few to escape the Kessel around Stalingrad, put on a flight in honour of his “exceptional skills”. His evacuation was one of the few acknowledgments the German high command had been willing to make that the army trapped on the Volga was doomed. Over ten years later, van Thiel had conveniently discovered his communist zeal, receiving further education not only in East Germany, but in Moscow too, returning from five years of study to reveal designs which my company marketed as “revolutionising communication!” and which I personally felt were still in need of fuller development. He was like an ancient architect given sudden knowledge of the wheel, who had used it to create a pyramid, failing to appreciate that it might be handy on a chariot too.

I was travelling as Sebastian Grunwald, a journalist working on an article entitled “Future Heroes of Our Socialist Revolution”. Van Thiel lived in one of the few towns which might almost be called picturesque in that the tide of industry which was yet to come had not yet reached its high-water mark and pulled down the grey stone cottages, little winding streets and stone-black chapel with its miraculously preserved deep-stained-glass window showing Christ upon the mountain. He lived with his sister, who had dressed in her finest, faded clothes for the occasion and who brought us home-made biscuits and Austrian coffee as we sat in van Thiel’s small sky-blue living room.

“The coffee was a present from Vienna,” he explained as I redundantly opened my notebook for the interview. “Life is good for us now. Everyone’s going mad for East German products.”

Talk to anyone in any sort of public capacity at the time and they would tell you that life was good. Cause and effect were tricky little numbers–the cause need have no direct relation to the effect as long as the effect was prosperity and happiness under the GDR’s regime.

I asked my questions, careful to surround what I actually wanted to know with as much fluff as I could.

How long had he been interested in radios?

Really, really, a father who was an amateur engineer…

…he’d listened to the radio during the bombings, an advance warning when the sirens failed…

…and how had his success affected him?

Proud, proud to be German, proud to be communist, of course.

Was his sister proud?

Was he looking for a wife?

What would he be doing next for his country?

Did he have any other interests or hobbies?

No, of course not, dedicated to his work, a good worker…

…and what of his time in Russia? It must have been incredibly informative.

“Incredible. Incredible!” he exclaimed. “So welcoming, so warm–I hadn’t expected it at all. ‘Comrade, there is no German and Russian; we are all communists!’” He mimicked a Russian accent while explaining this, an affectation which slightly threw me. My German is essentially native, but lack of practice takes its toll even on those of us who are mnemonics, and tuning both ear and voice to a regional accent takes time which leaves little room for comedy.

And the idea for the device? Where had that come from?

A mischievous look passed across Daniel’s face. “I worked with some great men,” he explained. “We were all united by finding a common cause.”

It was so much of a slogan, so much a cliché, that I had to smile, and he smiled right back, recognising the emptiness of his own words and enjoying their effect on me. Then he reached out, took the pencil from my hand, pushed my notebook on to the table and closed it. “The Russians,” he said, “have bad breath and can’t cook for shit. But their science–their science is why they won the war.”

You jest, surely you jest, I intoned. The number of people, the strength of their ideology, the industrial base…

“Bullshit! I met people there, men and women doing things… The Soviets, they’ve seen the future, that’s why they’re going to win, why they were always going to win. What I did… drop in the ocean.”

And the future? What was this future that the Russians had seen?

That would be telling. He laughed, and in another time and another place he might well have gone on to tap the side of his nose. Suffice to say, tomorrow was going to be here today.

Come on, I whispered, come on! Do a favour for a journalist hack who needs to make his bosses happy. Give me a name, just one name–someone you met in Russia, something that inspired you.

He thought about it a while, then grinned. “OK,” he said. “But you didn’t get this from me. The guy you need to look out for, the man who’s going to change everything… his name is Vitali Karpenko. If you ever go to Moscow, if you ever get to meet him, remember–he’s going to change the world.”

I smiled and laughed, dismissing the idea with a shrug, and picked my notebook back up to ask the rest of the empty questions I had prepared. When I left, van Thiel shook my hand and winked and said I was on to a good thing in my line of work. Germany would always need people who understood the big ideas. Four days later he was found hanging from the quaint wooden rafters of his traditional wooden house by an old bit of hemp rope. A note on the desk stated that he had betrayed his country by selling his ideas and his soul, and he could no longer live with the grief. The verdict was suicide, and the bruising around his ribs and hands dismissed as incidental injuries sustained post-mortem, when the police came to cut him down.

Two days after that, under the name Kostya Prekovsky, I boarded a cargo ship hauling coal to Leningrad, one set of travel documents in my pocket, another stowed in the false bottom of my bag, and an escape passport already deposited in an unused signal box just beyond Finland Station, ready should I need it. I was looking for Vitali Karpenko, the man who could change the future.