Timothy Phillips (1)

”There is an old Soviet joke about Kremlin propaganda,” he said: “’They lied to use about communism. But everything they said about capitalism was true.’”

The party was strange beyond all imagining. People were dizzy with the success of the film and also with the momentous events going on all around them. After downing a few drinks a group decided to join the throngs walking up to and through the Bornholmer crossing. One was Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, a trangender woman who had played a barmaid in the film. Sometime in the early hours, Dirk recalls Charlotte returning with a West Berlin bottle of beer and a newspaper, like the dove that brought the olive leaf to Noah at the end of the flood. “You realised in that moment,” Dirk says, “that this socialist part of Germany was going to end. You knew it. It was clear. It was over.”

I learned that by the time the regime fell in the early 1990s, the Sigurimi had files on one million of the country’s 2.8 million citizens, the majority of the adult population – a rate that even exceeded East Germany’s Stasi. Much of the material was collated here [at the former HQ of the Sigurimi]. In a third room a laboratory is preserved where every item of overseas correspondence was tested as it entered Albania, in case it included chemical or biological weapons. An insane apparatus of suspicion, decoupled from any real assessment of risk, blanketed the country for all Hoxha’s time in charge.

The bunkers are an outworking of this too. One of the new facts to become quite well known about communist Albania is that it was the country with the most bunkers per head of the population. There were as many as 750,000 in the end, more than one for every four inhabitants. These were another Hoxha insurance policy, conceived in the late 1960s and pursued rapidly for the next fifteen years.