Short Narrative Essay On Stasi File

While the information in his Stasi file was interesting, I failed to glean any insight about his motives. I still wondered, why? It didn’t seem like I was ever going to get an answer. The big breakthrough was when I got to the section about his wife, who had been his assistant back in his circus days. On the surface, their marriage looked like a blissfully happy one, and although they hadn’t had any children, she supported him in all of his flights of fancy and was in many ways a muse for his art. They made each other Christmas ornaments every year. It was obvious from the file that he had been head-over-heels in love with her, love as brilliant and as clean as starlight.
She had been informing on him to the Stasi for decades.
I was struck dumb by this revelation. …show more content…
To anyone else, such an undertaking would have been impossible. But Konrad, as I was soon to find out, viewed impossibility as a challenge.
The walk was carefully planned out and coordinated years in advance. Day after day of Konrad carefully observing criss-crossing telephone wires, analyzing the repetitious movement of the border patrol, plotting his last great performance, his magnificent walk to freedom.
Day after day of throwing black market bread up to the men on guard duty, as it turns out. Bread was hard to come by in those days, especially to the men working long hours on the Wall. His constant presence at the Wall didn’t seem quite so strange because of his tossed gifts and job. He gained a not entirely undeserved reputation as an eccentric old man; he held cheerfully shouted conversations with the patrol, got to know them, asked about their children and their wives. Konrad became friends with them.
I suppose it could’ve been part of his master plan, but somehow I don’t think it was. That was just sort of man he was. To the men on the Wall, he was Onkel Konrad