Standing in the Shadows

By John Hatfield

East Berlin, 1983. One dissident rock band. One plan to defect to the west. One traitor.
Udo Dirkmeyer, the charismatic and feckless Mick Jagger of East Germany, is having a tough time of it. It’s hard enough being an outlaw rock star in the world’s harshest police state. But his relationship with Gerda, the band’s beautiful lead singer, is going nowhere and his oldest friend, Thomas, has become a paranoid, alcoholic wreck. Worse still, his arch-rivals, the state-sponsored Poodles, are doing really well while Udo has been banned from every major venue in the entire country.

Smiling in the face of the constant surveillance and persecution from the notorious Stasi is proving exhausting. But then Udo discovers that one of his bandmates is an informer, intent on destroying him. It’s enough to tip even the eternally optimistic Udo over the edge. Just as his life is on the verge of falling apart, his band gets a once-in-a-lifetime chance to escape to the West. Suddenly, his dreams of making it big in the free world have a chance of coming true. Udo is determined to escape and make it work but the secret police and his treacherous bandmate will not let him go that easily.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Jul 25, 2019
• ISBN: 9781838599201

John Hatfield

Glasgow author John Hatfield was an award-winning journalist, columnist and editor with national newspaper and magazine groups (including the Financial Times and Scotsman) before setting up his own successful media consultancy. He is also a professional speechwriter, public speaker and screenwriter of two independent films.

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Copyright © 2019 John Hatfield

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

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To Pauline

Contents

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

Twenty-Five

Twenty-Six

Twenty-Seven

Twenty-Eight

Twenty-Nine

Thirty

Thirty-One

Thirty-Two

Thirty-Three

Thirty-Four

Thirty-Five

Thirty-Six

Thirty-Seven

Thirty-Eight

Acknowledgements

One

Looking back, I reckon I can pinpoint the exact moment when I knew that our little band was doomed. On a dismal November afternoon in 1983, the paranoia and tension that had been simmering for months finally exploded, shattering the last remnants of any trust and solidarity. It happened as we were all bouncing and bumping our way down some desolate Brandenburg country road. The six of us on our way to yet another futile gig, precisely four kilometres north east of the middle of nowhere.

It wasn’t meant to be like this, of course. When I had formed the Udo Dirkmeyer Group twenty years earlier – as a gauche, gangly teenager – it was with the humble ambition of being a massive international success and getting out of East Berlin, preferably in a westerly direction. Now, approaching forty, and still a truculent overgrown adolescent in the all-seeing eyes of the State, I was further than ever from realising that dream. To be honest, though, a lot of that had been my own fault.

In the course of those two decades the band, modestly and imaginatively named after my good self, had seen more personnel changes than Joe Stalin’s back office at the height of the Terror. However the current class of ’83 weren’t a bad bunch, if you ignored their massive personal shortcomings.

Jurgen was driving, squinting through his long fringe and a grimy windscreen that was more opaque than transparent. He was intent on making our crappy little Barkas van handle as if it were one of the new Audi Quattros that everyone on the other side was getting so excited about. That was Jurgen’s attitude all over; I might have to sit in a cheap East German copy, but I can still behave like a getaway driver for the Chicago Mafia. He read too many books, that boy.

Big Dieter, our gentle giant of a drummer, was wedged beside Jurgen in the front passenger seat, his long legs jammed against the dashboard. He was allegedly navigating but he could have been using a medieval map of Asia Minor for all the success we were having in finding our destination. Meanwhile the rest of us were crammed into the back with the instruments and amps, feeling every pothole in the road. Even in the cramped confines of the van, the girls, Jutta and Gerda, had managed to sit as far apart as possible. At least the infernal din of the Barkas’ engine meant that there were no awkward silences or, indeed, silences of any kind at all.

Thomas, our rhythm guitarist and the only other remaining member from the original group, was sprawled across the bench seat at the back. He had been drinking his homemade schnapps neat from a flask since our departure from Prenzlauer Berg, the capital’s bohemian ghetto, and was now at the stage where his blood group was white spirit positive. He may have been a former physicist but he knew nothing about chemistry – the stuff was disgusting.

Thomas sober was increasingly depressed, but Thomas drunk was another story altogether. He would pick a fight with his reflection or any convenient inanimate object. So, really, he was more to blame than me for the big argument.

I can’t really remember how this particular shouting match got started but it probably followed the familiar pattern. Some random aspect of life in our little socialist paradise would be mentioned and that would light my fuse. I had no control over it. Soon the air would be thick with industrial-strength sarcasm and weapons-grade vitriol, all aimed at the old men who ran our wee country as if the entire population were their slightly-retarded grandchildren.

Anyway, I was happily ranting away, giving the band the benefit of the deranged ramblings of my diseased mind – the thoughts of chairman Udo as Gerda called them – when I hit on the topic of informers.

Now, in a country like ours, this is a pretty vexed subject. You have to be careful with whom you discuss these things because one slip of the tongue can get you a trip down to Normannenstrasse, which is where the Stasi hang out. I’d been subjected to my fair share of harassment and psychological persecution over the years – it’s part of the job description for any self-respecting dissident rock star – but recently the interference into my personal life seemed to have been ramped up a couple of notches.

What with 1984 looming, I had decided a few weeks earlier that it would be a great idea to hold a special party to celebrate this auspicious but ominous date. Not least because we had pretty much been living a version of 1984 here for the best part of 30 years. In fact, ever since they put down the East Berlin uprising. I told the band about this brainwave – in confidence – and they were all up for it, being the right bunch of feckless, bohemian ne’er-do-wells that they were.

But that’s when the fun started. Suddenly I found that none of our usual venues – the Cosmonaut Café for example – were available. All were, suspiciously, fully booked. Undaunted, I decided to hold the party at my flat in Belforterstrasse but, what do you know? A certain Herr Geissler from the housing authorities just happened to turn up to inform me that the building was not sound and that occupants would have to vacate the premises over the holidays while they did a structural survey for safety reasons. For the previous decade they’d been happy enough for the whole place to collapse on me but now they were concerned. Hmmm.

It went on. Next, I got a visit from my cousin Jens. Now Jens is a nice guy but he is also a card-carrying member of the Socialist Unity Party (that’s the Commies to you) and the sort of person who irons a crease in his stonewashed jeans.

Jens tends to time his visits to coincide with spikes in my allegedly anti-social behaviour. (Remember that in our GDR, as the newsreaders so chummily call it, crossing the road on the red man is a form of treason). So when Jens and his regulation-length hair popped round with half of a homemade apple strudel to see cousin Udo, and then invited me pointedly to a New Year’s get-together at my Auntie Eva’s, I knew there was foul play afoot.

This had all been playing on my mind as we trundled through the Brandenburg landscape in a failing light with the temperature plunging rapidly towards zero. So, since the glow from Jutta’s roll-up wasn’t doing the trick, I warmed myself with a bit of heartfelt rhetoric. Yelling gently above the racket from the engine, I slipped in the observation that there might be an informer in the band, an Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter (informal co-worker) as I later found out the Stasi liked to call them in their wacky, knockabout style.

Well, that went down about as well as a fart gag in a Honecker speech. Suddenly Thomas was yelling Stop the bus, stop the bus, yanking the back door open and half-jumping, half-falling out onto the tarmac, which was as rutted as the barren fields on either side. Luckily the Barkas has a top speed equivalent to a brisk walk and Jurgen managed to pull up, appropriately, next to a derelict old bus shelter that looked as if it had last seen passengers at some time during the Weimar Republic.

Thomas stood there in the middle of the road, flask of schnapps in his left hand, right hand pointing accusingly at me as I climbed down from the van.

I am not a fucking informer, alright.

Well, I hadn’t actually accused him personally of being one, so I felt it only fair to point this out.

I didn’t say you were, I replied. As devastating one-liners go it wasn’t quite Bertold Brecht but it was, nevertheless, swift. I should have left it there but, of course, I didn’t. I’m Udo Dirkmeyer, of the eponymous group, and winding people up at inappropriate moments is a house speciality.

That’s your guilty conscious talking, Thomas. Pisshead. To be honest that last remark may have been accurate but I suppose it was a bit gratuitous. Anyway, it certainly did not help restore the calm and order so beloved of our state security service.

Me, guilty! Thomas paused and swigged from his flask for full dramatic effect. This was like a scene from Goethe, or was it Schiller? Says the bastard who nicks his best mate’s girlfriend.

Oops, we had now escalated the confrontation to nuclear level. The others had now all joined us on the potholed road and were standing around like onlookers at a pub fight that has spilled into the carpark. I caught Gerda’s eye briefly as Thomas hurled his insult and she looked away embarrassed. The scene may have lacked the glamour of a sword duel at a Prussian military school but I had to defend my honour.

Christ, not this again. I was comforting her because her boyfriend – you – is a career drunk. Now get back in the van.

Thomas was swaying like a man who has inadvertently backed up to the edge of a cliff and is trying to keep himself from going over. Udo, you are a dirty, sneaky shit…I have to inform you.

He found this informer reference extremely funny and started cackling away as cackling drunks tend to do. I glanced over at Jutta as she stood by the bus shelter, smoking her roll-up and obviously enjoying the little pantomime. It’s no accident that the Germans invented the word schadenfreude. It was also no accident that Jutta was relishing the threepenny soap opera in front of her. If there had been a cartoon bubble above her head it would have read Serves you right, Udo.

But I couldn’t leave it at that – bested in repartee by a man whose synapses were almost permanently pickled in alcohol these days. I needed a comeback.

There is an informer, I said, trying to glance meaningfully at all of them in turn as I did so. As Dieter was standing behind me this proved a bit awkward. And I can prove it.

I managed to get Dieter into my field of vision by some heroic eyeball swivelling that could well lead to severe astigmatism in later life. I’d made my point and I was telling the truth. I knew exactly how I was going to bait the trap.

Luckily Jurgen intervened to get the show back off the road. Come on, guys. This can wait. He took the bottle from Thomas, who was now staggering about like he had gone 15 rounds with Joe Frazier, and smashed it on the tarmac. Come on, he said, putting an arm round Thomas’ shoulder and leading him back to the van. He’s not worth it.

Oh, cheers, Jurgen. Thanks, man. Mind you, I suppose I knew where he was coming from. However, good old Dieter was there in my corner. He gave me a big bear hug, appropriately for a guy who looks like a big teddy bear, and dispensed some fine Dieter wisdom. Don’t worry, Udo. It’s the drink talking. It’ll be fine.

As I made to climb back into the coal cellar-on-wheels that was the Barkas, I tried to lighten the mood. The girls were standing on the roadside as the gloom deepened, using the tumbledown bus shelter to shield themselves from the biting cold of the wind. Unsurprisingly, Jutta was standing inside while Gerda remained on the outside. Both looked as if they were trying to out-cool each other in the intensity of their smoking.

Are you coming or do you want to hitch-hike? I shouted. There should be a tractor along in the next couple of weeks.

Yeah, coming, said Gerda, turning up the collar of her tattered old leather coat. She looked me straight in the eye and her face softened into an impish smile. Wouldn’t want to miss all the fun and camaraderie. She winked and I had to suppress a smile.

All the fun and camaraderie, I heard a mocking echo as Jutta mimicked Gerda from within the shelter. I had my back to her and she probably reckoned she was out of earshot.

God, that woman. Her exasperation carried on the cold late-afternoon wind. God, this bloody band.

Two

A little over 15 minutes later Jurgen crashed the gears on the van for the final time and we ground to a juddering halt at the back of a dilapidated-looking social club. Built of cinder block and concrete it had all the cosy charm of an abbatoir. Even fans of the Bauhaus would have found it stark.

I clambered out of the van onto the muddy car park and took in the splendour that was the Lindau Reichsbahn railway workers’ social club. Yes, folks, Reichsbahn – as in Third Reich. Good communists tend to have their sense of humour surgically removed at birth but even they would have to admit the delicious irony of their railways still bearing the name given to them by the Nazis. For legal reasons after the partition of Germany, the Soviet zone was obliged to maintain the existing railway as a going concern.

Just another little quirk that made living in the east such a hoot and a genuine laugh-a-year place to be.

Inside the van Thomas had mercifully fallen into unconsciousness though his stentorous snoring was drowned out by a bootleg tape of Irish group, U2. The authorities were bound to hate them just for their name which sounded like it had been chosen in honour of either a Nazi U-boat or the infamous US spy plane. The fact that their second album had been called October, a mystical month for all good commies, didn’t seem to count in their favour. But while U2 were starting to play stadiums in the west, we were stuck playing these dumps. I should confess at this stage that this was largely down to my having got us banned in all cities and major towns in the GDR. But more of that later.

Still, I tried to keep my spirits up. Another opening, another show, I sang cheerfully as I went round to the back of the van to get my guitar. Cole Porter was popular in the east, largely because he wasn’t banned. Make of that what you will.

Another shithole in the middle of nowhere, added Jurgen, taking slight liberties with the original lyrics, if I’m not mistaken. Unfortunately, he was right. Again, unlike U2, we had no roadies so we started lugging our kit out of the van and towards the back door of the club where we were greeted – I use the word in its broadest sense – by a small, intense man with thinning hair, pince-nez and a suit so sober it was positively Jesuit. He was, he informed us, Herr Klinger, caretaker and manager of the club, and he looked like he was preparing to attend his own funeral. He showed us to the stage, which was easily large enough to accommodate us all if we worked three shifts, and vanished.

I headed off to the toilets, located by the simple expedient of following the overpowering smell of urine and disinfectant. You can tell a lot about a club by the toilet cubicles and I don’t mean about the personal hygiene of the members. In a totalitarian regime where every typewriter is monitored and every conversation is a risk, graffiti is very important as a means of free speech. Toilet cubicles are where you find it. Or not, depending on the character of the place. Lindau did not disappoint. In the first cubicle I came across this classic in felt pen. How do you double the value of a Trabant? Fill it with petrol.

Looked like we might get away with a little bit of gentle rabble-rousing then. Not just because of the jokes in the toilet but because they had not been immediately cleaned off by a zealous custodian of socialist values. Thus reassured, I wandered back down the gloomy corridor, painted in that distinct shade of socialist pale green, through towards the main hall where I could hear Jurgen and Jutta in conversation at the back of the stage. I paused in the corridor to listen. Not because I’m an informer but because every band has its own dynamic and it’s just interesting to be nosey sometimes. Plus, I had an actual informer to uncover and any clues as to motive were welcome.

You didn’t need an informer to tell you that Jurgen fancied Jutta something rotten. It was as easy to see as the Berlin TV tower. This was understandable as she was gorgeous with a heart-shaped face and tumbling auburn hair. Jutta and I had once been close in a physical sense but things had got, well, complicated.

Jurgen was doing his best to chat Jutta up, a situation that turns every man into a fifteen year old regardless of his physical age.

"Good thing about being in Udo’s band. It only takes two minutes to set up. You know, this amp actually makes my guitar quieter."

Jutta was sitting on the upturned bass drum, checking her make-up just in case any talent scouts from AMIGA, our one and only state record label, happened to walk in. I know. You should have seen the PA system Joan Jett had that time. I mean, wow. She is so lucky. Up there every night, thousands of fans, full sound and light rig.

She let out a soft whistle and looked wistfully into the middle distance. For Jutta, seeing American rocker Joan Jett in East Berlin during her official tour of the GDR in ’82 had been an epiphany. Almost overnight, and to the chagrin of her parents, she had abandoned her place as first violin in a prestigious orchestra and mezzo-soprano in some respected choir (don’t ask me the names) and decided to go rock and roll. To her credit this took guts as, until then, she had been quite the model young socialist. However having a father who was one of the GDR’s most respected classical musicians insulated her from the full fall-out of what was called ‘non-conformist tendencies’.

Jutta had joined our band 18 months earlier. She had just walked up to me after a gig in Berlin and announced that we needed a keyboard player to fill out our sound. Not waiting for a reply, she then told me that she was that keyboard player and that she would be attending rehearsals starting immediately. Maybe it’s because being told what to do is such a way of life in our little republic but none of the guys objected when I put it to them, despite the fact that none of them had heard her play. Even Dieter, whose formidable wife Brigitte felt the same way about women in bands as Admiral Von Tirpitz had felt about women aboard ships, was happy to go along. Of course, her looks had nothing to do with it.

She could certainly play keyboards and the band’s sound benefited accordingly. There’s nothing like huge washes of organ (no chance of a synthesiser in the GDR despite what Kraftwerk were doing on the other side of the Wall) to cover up the mistakes of a guitar band.

Things had ticked along nicely for a few months but then Jutta had started making hints about taking on more of the lead singing duties. Her hints were subtle at first; gentle suggestions like I want to be lead singer, Udo. Now I know a voice like mine is considered more suited to a football terrace than a stage performance – I’ve still got the cutting which likened it to a hoarse bear being strangled – but it was a distinctive part of our sound. I told Jutta that Bob Dylan didn’t have a great voice either to which she replied, somewhat cuttingly, that he was at least a genius.

But as time went on her campaign to be anointed lead vocalist began to grate a bit. It was the main topic of conversation at rehearsals when she would turn up suggesting cover versions that she had been rehearsing.

Now, don’t get me wrong, Jutta had a pleasant voice. But it was too pure for the kind of gritty, hard-edged band that we aspired to be back then. I gave her the odd song to sing as a sop but this just seemed to inflame her rather than assuage her. She wanted to be the GDR’s Joan Jett or Chrissie Hynde or even Nena and nothing was going to stop her. We had our own home-grown female rock singers, of course, like Petra Zieger or Tamara Danz of Silly, and Jutta thought she could be bigger than any of them. It began to become obvious that she saw the Udo Dirkmeyer Group as a temporary working title for the Jutta Schneider Group.

What’s more, the utterly smitten Jurgen was all for it and there they were, sitting in the main hall of the Lindau Reichsbahn railway workers’ social club, bitching about me as usual. I have to admit it made them both prime suspects for the role of informer in the band. What better way to take over than to get the founder hauled off to Hohenschönhausen, the Stasi prison complex, for an extended holiday.

The simmering tension in the band had been brought to the boil in the last few weeks with the arrival of Gerda on the scene. Thomas and I had met Gerda in a bar back in the summer. She had been collecting for Swords into Ploughshares, the GDR’s anti-war (i.e. anti-Nato) charity organisation that protested against nuclear proliferation. This was a bit like piranha fish campaigning for water safety but the people in it had a faint whiff of anti-establishment about them. We offered to make an enormously generous donation if she would have a drink with us.

I clearly remember meeting Gerda because it was love at first sight. Or lust at first sight anyway. She was exactly my type: blonde, high cheekbones, full lips, big blue eyes. She looked like a poster girl for those guys who used to run our country and whose names we don’t mention anymore. And she had a passion and self-belief that I found utterly irresistible. I was smitten with her the way Jurgen was infatuated with Jutta. What made it all the harder to bear was that she spent most of her time talking to Thomas, who was just the right side of roaring drunk to be good company, and treated my best carefully-prepared, off-the-cuff witticisms with the sort of pained tolerance usually reserved for noisy toddlers. I had gone off to the toilet at one point and returned to find Thomas with both arms around her. The pang of envy I felt was excruciating.

I had to be with this woman. There were no two ways about it. It became an instant article of faith, the Udo creed. This was quite appropriate really as she turned out to be a devout Christian.

We’d had a couple of glasses of Berliner Pilsner (well, Thomas and I did: Gerda had fruit juice) and she announced she had to go to a meeting at her church. Thomas offered to walk her there, which was big of him considering the difficulty he was having in just standing by this point, and she accepted with a bewitching smile. All this made me want to scream at her to smile at me and ignore him but instead, in my desperation, I blurted out the first thing that came into my head.

Would you like to be in a rock band?

She looked at me as if I had just offered to wash her hair with rancid, homemade yoghurt. What kind of weirdo went around offering jobs to complete strangers with absolutely no idea of their talent or interest? Weirdos like me.

She gave what I have since come to recognise as her Mona Lisa smile and pointed out that she wasn’t very musical and couldn’t play an instrument.

That’s alright, you can sing, I heard myself say. I heard another small voice inside my head say that Jutta would kill me.

Gerda gave me a further quizzical look, one that seemed to inquire whether I was a drug addict or a primitive throwback, then shrugged and said, Okay, maybe. She then took Thomas’ arm, more for his benefit than hers, and left the building.

And so, it came to pass that, within a few weeks and after several more drinks at our regular table at the Cosmonaut Café, Gerda joined the band on backing vocals. Well, more like joint lead vocals, actually.

Jutta greeted her arrival with all the sisterly indulgence she would normally reserve for a leper. Not only was Gerda very churchy, which Jutta did not approve of, coming from a devoutly atheistic communist family, but she was stealing some of Jutta’s fan club. (Though not Gunther, the unofficial president of our very unofficial fan club, who idolised me but absolutely worshipped Jutta).

Part of this I gleaned from my natural empathy and intuition. But about 95 per cent of it I gathered because Jutta sounded off at me regularly. She had a rhetorical fluency during these diatribes that shamed the ponderous sermons of most of our Politburo hacks.

In fact, she was warming up to her pet subject now, here in