The House of One Thousand Eyes by Michelle Barker

It is 1983 and seventeen-year-old Lena Altmann lives in the Better Germany, in the borough of Lichtenberg,  East Berlin, with her Aunt Adelheid. Lena's parents died in a factory accident at the freight car factory in Magdegurg where they had lived, when she was fourteen. Before the accident Lena was a good student, earning recognition for Enthusiasm in Handicrafts. However, her life changed drastically after the accident: Lena had a mental breakdown and was sent to a hospital to recover. She never returned to school despite her dream of continuing her education and her desire to become a nurse or work with children. Instead, she now works as a night janitor at Stasi headquarters, a place Berliners refer to as the House of One Thousand Eyes.

As soon as anyone learns of Lena's job, the conversation always changes, as if "...she was a giant microphone, recording everything and then running back to headquarters with secret information about who was reading the wrong books or receiving packages from Western relatives."

On Sundays Lena visits her mother's brother, her Uncle Erich who lives in the neighborhood of Prenzlauer Berg. On her latest visit to Uncle Erich, who is a writer and who has been in trouble before, he asks Lena if she still has the keys to his apartment and makes the strange remark that his freezer may need defrosting. Lena has a copy of every single book her Uncle Erich has written including his well known, Castles Underground. While visiting him, his neighbour, Steffi arrives to warn Erich that he's not safe, and that the State Security Service (Stasi) are coming. Although Uncle Erich brushes off Steffi's concerns he  gives her his notebooks for safekeeping, warning that she too will have to be careful.

After her visit, Lena wonders if her uncle is in trouble. Later that night, she sneaks out of the house and travels to his apartment. Hiding in the shadows she witnesses a flower van outside his apartment and a man who is not Erich leaning out of the window. Another van arrives and all of Erich's possessions, his typewriter, books, suitcases and notebooks are removed from the apartment. A man in a Lada is stationed outside, watching the apartment. Lena believes he's waiting for Erich to return home so she heads to the pub he frequents to warn him, but he isn't there and no one has seen him.

Lena returns home, sleeping in and forgetting to get meat at the shop the next morning. After helping her neighbours, Peter and Danika, on the project to beautify their apartment courtyard, Lena heads to work. Lena's partner at the Stasi compound on Normannenstrasse is Jutta, an older woman who asks every Monday about Lena's visit to her Uncle Erich. Lena and Jutta each have their own floors to clean. Lena dreads cleaning her floor because of Bruno Drechsler, who forces her to commit sex acts every night she works and whom she calls Herr Dreck which means filth.  In the morning after work, Lena and Jutta go to House 1 where they are able to get Western foods that are brought in just for the Stasi staff.

Lena decides to visit Uncle Erich's apartment only to discover it is now occupied by a strange man named Friedrich who insists he has lived there for the past five years. At first Lena believes her uncle has run away. However, Lena's thinking begins to change as she makes several discoveries. The first is the discovery that someone has searched through her bedroom, removing her hidden pictures of Uncle Erich. Then Lena unexpectedly encounters Steffi, who believes that Lena reported her uncle. She tells Lena, "There is no Erich anymore." and advises her that she shouldn't go looking for him or asking about him. At home Lena discovers Erich's books, hidden under her mattress are also gone.  When she tells her aunt, Lena is told she doesn't have an uncle and that there were no books under her mattress. Her aunt tells her she must accept that he has gone.

Lena's efforts to prove to herself that her Uncle Erich did exist prove fruitless. At the library there are no copies of his books. However when she finds a picture of Marilyn Monroe that Uncle Erich let her cut from his magazine,  in her sweater pocket, Lena knows he did exist and her self-doubt vanishes. From this point on Lena is determined to learn what has happened to her beloved Uncle Erich. It is a journey that will lead her to take risks that are so dangerous she is re-committed to the asylum. But along the way, Lena discovers an inner strength that allows her to face her abuser, and help another person escape to West Germany.

Discussion

The House of One Thousand Eyes, its title a reference to the nickname given to the headquarters of the Stasi, paints a picture of life under the repressive communist government in East Berlin. The city of Berlin, capital of Germany was divided into two (initially four zones immediately after the war) after the fall of Germany during World War II. West Berlin which was controlled by the Allies eventually became part of the Federal Republic of Germany while East Berlin which had been under Soviet control became part of the German Democratic Republic or East Germany. This was in spite of the fact that the city of Berlin lay within East Germany. In 1961 the Berlin Wall, called the Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart by the leaders of communist East Germany, was constructed within hours, to stop the drain of young, educated Germans, especially professionals and skilled workers, to West Berlin and to the FRG.

Closed off from the West, life in East Berlin became increasingly intolerable: the people in the city were expected to follow all the communist party rules and they were often spied on by their fellow citizens. Cameras and hidden microphones were also used spy on people. Anyone copying Western trends in fashion, music or culture was deemed subversive.  The Stasi kept file cards on millions of East Germans. Despite the barbed wire, guards, concrete walls and soldiers guarding the Berlin Wall, many still tried to escape to the West.

The communist world of East Berlin provides the setting for the story told in  The House of One Thousand Eyes. Lena Altmann is recovering from a mental breakdown after the death of her parents in an industrial accident.  Now living with her aunt who has connections in the communist party, Lena is employed as a cleaner at the Stasi headquarters. Lena doesn't much like her aunt but she does love her aunt's brother, her Uncle Erich who is a writer and who has worked in the mines and who shares her love of Western culture and "yeah, yeah, yeah music". When Uncle Erich disappears, Lena believes he has been taken away and she becomes determined to learn his fate.

His disappearance seems to awaken Lena from the stupor she has experienced since the death of her parents. To protect herself and to help her cope with her loss, Lena had built a wall in her mind, but this wall was making it difficult for her to recognize reality. When she had been in the hospital she had to built this wall, by co-operating with the doctors as Uncle Erich had secretly advised her, so she would be discharged. Lena had put a part of herself to sleep, "And that part had slept so well it had forgotten to wake up -- until last week." 

Although Lena has been told by her aunt that she is "simple", her actions show that she is anything but. Just as her Uncle Erich incorporated "another story underneath, humming like a machine" into his surface story when he wrote, Lena, in her bedroom, hides the pictures she really wants beneath pictures deemed acceptable by the communist government. So Uncle Erich's picture hides beneath that of Erich Honecker, the General Secretary and Comrade General Erich Mielke, head of the Stasi.

Lena's awakening leads her to quickly realize that she has been tricked into being an informer on her Uncle Erich -  a thought that sickens her. The discovery of the bug in the table in the ashtray room, the fact that Lena had been hired to work at the Stasi headquarters despite having a subversive relative, the questions by Jutta about Erich and the fact that she had been allowed to continue visiting her uncle, are all proof of this. This emboldens her to use this knowledge to her advantage. She remembers her uncle's strange remark about his freezer needing defrosting and boldly enters his apartment at great risk to retrieve whatever is hidden there.

One risk leads to another, a phone call from the Stasi office to a West German agent leads to more horrific abuse by Herr Dreck. Lena meets with Herr Gunter Schulmann and agrees to try to uncover what her Uncle had discovered and why the factory her parents were working in was making ammunition in secret.  Lena's courage transforms her into a person of action, willingly to take big risks to uncover the truth about her life in East Berlin and to help a friend escape. However, in the end, the Stasi machine with its death grip on life in the city proves too much and Lena finds herself entangled.

Barker manages to portray many of the evils of socialism in her novel in particular the lack of freedom of speech and of association. These freedoms are so restricted that Lena is even afraid of her own thoughts, building a wall to keep out those inner "subversive" thoughts. Readers can see how living in such a totalitarian environment might make someone afraid of their thoughts, given how the state punishes those who are "subversive". As Lena becomes more aware of her surroundings, she begins to re-evaluate people who appear to be normal, like the blind man in the train station, who she now doubts is truly blind. She finds herself questioning everything she sees and hears. 

The author captures the extensive propaganda that East German citizens were subjected to by the state as well. This is especially evident in the conversation between Gunter Schulmann and Lena when they meet for the first time. For example, Lena believes her country is a peaceful one, only to learn from Herr Schulmann that they are building weapons.

Although there have been several historical fiction novels about the Berlin Wall and life in East Berlin for young adults, The House of One Thousand Eyes manages to accurately portray life in East Berlin. However, this novel does contain several brief descriptions of sexual abuse and oral sex that will be disturbing to young teens. It is uncertain as to why the author included the issue of sexual abuse in a novel that has many, many other themes to explore. Perhaps this kind of abuse was a common tool used by the Stasi although research shows that it was more the mind games they played on their own citizens that was most successful. At any rate, for this reason, this book is not recommended for young teens.

Book Details:

The House of One Thousand Eyes by Michelle Barker
Toronto: Annick Press   2018
340 pp.