851 George Orwell Was a Friend of Mine- Adam Johnson
This is the powerful story of Hans Backer, the warden of a Stasi Prison in occupied East Germany. The prison was closed in 1990 when the wall came down and his life changed forever, as did the entire culture. It’s been eighteen years since reunification but Hans hasn’t changed a bit. He lived his life and his career with military precision and he thrived in communist East Germany. But the world has changed around him and like it or not he is about to be challenged from the past.
“I do not need to recall the past…I am certain of what it was.”
Although he has lived nearby the whole time, he hasn’t been inside the prison since he finished destroying all the inmate records. He is unaware that the prison is now a museum to the atrocities of the Stasi cruelty and the torture that happened inside its walls. His old office has even been memorialized.
One day as he walks past, he overhears a tour guide talk about a famous writer interrogated and imprisoned under his charge. He confronts the guide with vehement rebuttals and apologist rhetoric. Not understanding the technology of the day, he doesn’t realize that he has been recorded via a cellphone. He will become a viral video by the next day.
The curator seeing his willingness to talk and shed light on the dark past (even though Hans doesn’t himself see it as a dark past) he invites Hans to give a tour of the prison and freely tell his side of history. The more he talks the worse he comes across and more entrenched he becomes in his own beliefs.
This is a simple man, who chooses to see the world in black and white. He refuses to acknowledge the evils of the past nor his significant role in it. He liked his work and now that his work is seen by the world as tyrannical, he falls back on the crutch of only being a cog in a larger machine. He repeats common refrains like:
“I only ran the prison…I was an administrator.”
This same stubbornness caused him to lose his wife and daughter. They have become ashamed of him as more and more truths about the past come to light. Imagine learning that the wonderful gift your father gave you as a child was stolen from a girl inmate at your father’s torture prison. His wife has taken to alcoholism and that is a sigh of weakness to Hans—not something to be supported or helped. He doesn’t understand how his daughter or his wife cant separate his career with his life:
“But it wasn’t us…I’m talking about family. You’re talking about work.”
This rigidity over what he sees as right and wrong, legal or illegal, even past and present is probably what made him a good prison warden to begin with—at least in communist East Berlin. Some things just can’t be forgiven, but when the perpetrators themselves refuse to admit culpability—phew, that must illicit rage beyond words.
This story is fantastic. Johnson deals with delicate topics by just diving in full force. I’m reminded of two others stories that in vastly different ways tells stories of survivors of prison torture from both sides. The first one is Stephen King's Apt Pupil. This deals with a former Nazi camp torturer living a life as someone else who decades later is confronted with his true identity. He faces his own indulgences from his evil past. That was, in a very King fashioned, over the top and sensational, although dealt with real evil.
The second is Nathan Englander’s Free Fruit for Young Widows that confronts evil from the other side. How human reaction to confronting absolute evil changes not only the actions of peaceful people but their complete understanding of the world. All three stories stress the importance of history and education of the past.
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