Inside the mind of a betrayer
He sat unshaven at one of the bar’s outside tables, in sunlight, nursing a beer and a cigarette. Sometimes he trembled. It certainly looked as if this wasn’t the day’s first drink, nor its last. This was Sascha Anderson, perhaps the most extraordinary exhibit in the gallery of extraordinary characters portrayed in the BBC’s feature-length documentary, The Secret Life of the Berlin Wall . In East Berlin, when the GDR still reigned, he was a poet, a radical, a firebrand – among the most influential figures in the city’s subversive underground. He was also an informer for the secret police, the Stasi. “Were you a good spy?” he was asked. He laughed shyly. He sighed and swallowed. He looked everywhere but at his interviewer or the camera. For a quarter of a minute he said nothing. And then: “In the place that I was, I was the top informer. I have the feeling that I wasn’t just an ordinary spy.” Now a confessional moment – he looks straight at the interviewer. “Of course, I told them everyt...