He tells me that they still meet in groups according to rank, or at birthdays and funerals. Herr Bohnsack got wind that a magazine, Die Linke, had managed to obtain a disk containing the names of the top-paid 20,000 Stasi employees and was about to publish it. He knew everyone would read it, find his name and address on the list and feel whatever they would feel – contempt, hatred, or self-righteousness.He knew there was only one thing for him to do. A drunken man was at the front bar and when he saw me he swivelled around slowly, pointed at me and screamed, ‘Stasi out!’ Everyone shut up and turned to have a look at me They all thought the same as he, or at least half of them. In fact I was relieved, really, that the people reacted so sensibly.”But the drinkers were not the only public.

I couldn’t move.I said to the publican: ‘What do they want from me? I can’t stand here before you all and undo it, take it all back.’ “Herr Bohnsack kept coming back. It took nearly three years until no one was aggressive any more “But there were no hangings or attempts or anything. If that story is right then it seems to me that insurers are being over-restrictive.” Other stories include the case of a council that chopped down its horse chestnut trees so parents couldn’t sue if their children hurt themselves while collecting conkers.”Some of these may be apocryphal but it shows how far things are going,” said Lord Phillips.A House of Lords ruling last year should have served as a “salutary” warning to people who tried to sue even when they were made aware of the risk they were taking, he said.”That was in a way a reaction to this type of nanny state approach,” said Lord Phillips. The first time I came in here afterwards, I think it was the 15th. Sometimes I’d come straight from work in a tie and a stylish overcoat with a briefcase and there’d be a rumble through the pub of ‘doesn’t he look fine’.” They would have a sniff as much as to say something’s not quite right here.’ He pinches his nose between forefinger and thumb.The Wall fell on the 9th of November 1989. It was grotesque really,” Herr Bohnsack chuckles, “his aria to accompany my burning pyre.”Herr Bohnsack looks around him “Here,” he says, “I was always a regular I had my spot at the bar I have lived around the corner for 38 years.

Before 1989 I was always just ‘G?r – hello, how’s it going’.P eople didn’t know what I did, but of course they had their suspicions. He used to lean over the fence and slur abuse at me: ‘Old Shiny Bum’ and ‘SED’ and all kinds of insults.”He was there again, drunk as usual, while I was burning it all up. And as the smoke passed over his house he began singing the anthem of the citizens’ rights movement, Wir sind das Volk He knew exactly what I was doing. “You are utterly without need?” I glimpse beneath the genial drinker a man who was the match of anyone, East or West.The smoke attracted attention. Bohnsack’s neighbour in the country, he says, was a hopeless soak “But of course even he had a suspicion about where I worked We call it the Stallgeruch (the smell of the sty). I say I’m fine for the moment.Herr Bohnsack smiles gently at me “You, no?” he says.

There were metres and metres of them, agents’ key files, films, reports – and I drove to our garden 100km away from Berlin.”The family had an old baker’s oven on its holiday plot. And then, “totally privately and personally, without any permission and without any command”, he says, “I destroyed everything, all day long.” There was so much paper to burn the oven nearly collapsed A cloud of black smoke hung over him. Herr Bohnsack stood there for three days, feeding the files into the fire.Herr Bohnsack orders another beer, another Korn and a coffee. “There is no order!”"But,” Herr Bohnsack says, “I just drove my car into the yard and got the files out of the cabinets. He explains that by the time the demonstrators really got going in Berlin – and it was later there than in Leipzig and elsewhere – Mielke had already stood down. And he had been there so long the generals simply did not know how to give any orders on their own They could not seize control.