Writer Timothy Garton Ash was a student and journalist in Berlin in the 1970s and 1980s. Recently he returned to the city to find the file kept on him by East Germany’s secret police. In this extract from his forthcoming book The File, he tells of finding the buff-coloured binder detailing his activities – and someone who informed on him
`GUTEN tag,” says bustling Frau Schulz, “you have a very interesting file.” And there it is, a buff-coloured binder, some two inches thick, rubber-stamped on the front cover: OPK-Akte, MfS, XV2889/81. Underneath is written, in a neat, clerical hand: “Romeo.”
Romeo?
“Yes, that was your code name,” says Frau Schulz and giggles.
I sit down at a small plastic-wood table in Frau Schulz’s cramped room in the Federal Authority for the Records of the State Security Service of the former German Democratic Republic. As I open the binder, I find myself thinking of an odd moment in my East German life.
One night in 1980, when I was living as a student in East Berlin, I came back with a girlfriend to my room in a crumbling tenement house. This was a room with a view – a view into it. Were it not for the net curtains, people living across the street could look straight in. As we embraced on the narrow bed, Andrea suddenly pulled away, finished undressing, went over to the window and threw open the net curtains. She turned on the glaring main light and then came back to me. Had this been, say, Oxford, I might have been a little surprised. But this was Berlin, so I thought no more about it.
Until, that is, I learned about the file. Then I remembered this moment and started wondering whether Andrea had been working for the Stasi, and whether she had opened the curtains so we could be photographed from the other side of the street. Perhaps those photographs are lurking in this binder. What was it Frau Schulz had said? “You have a very interesting file.” Hastily turning the pages, I’m relieved to find that there are no such photographs here and that Andrea does not appear as an informer. But there are other things that touch me.
Here, for example, is an observation report describing a visit I apparently paid to East Berlin on 06.10.79 from 16.07 hours to 23.55 hours. The alias given me by the Stasi at this date was, less romantically, “246816”.
16.07 hours: “246816” was taken up for observation after leaving the Bahnhof Friedrichstrasse frontier crossing. The person to be observed went to the newspaper stand in the upper station concourse and bought a Freie Welt, a Neues Deutschland and a Berliner Zeitung. Then the object [that’s me] walked questingly around the station.
16.15 hours: In the upper station concourse, “246816” greeted a female person with handshake and kiss on the cheek. This female person receives the code-name “Beret”. “Beret” carried a dark brown shoulder-bag. Both left the station and went, conversing, to the Berliner Ensemble on Brechtplatz.
16.52 hours: “246816” and “Beret” entered the restaurant, Operncaf, Berlin-Mitte Unter den Linden. They took seats in the caf and drank coffee.
18.45 hours: They left the caf and went to Bebelplatz. In the time from 18.45 hours until 20.40 hours, they both watched with interest the torchlit procession to the thirtieth anniversary of the GDR. Thereafter, “246816” and “Beret” went along the street Unter den Linden [and] Friedrichstrasse to the street Am Schiffbauerdamm.
21.10 hours: They entered there the restaurant Ganymed. In the restaurant they were not under observation.
23.50 hours: Both left the gastronomic establishment and proceeded directly to the departure hall of the Bahnhof Friedrichstrasse frontier crossing, which they (23.55 hours) entered. “Beret” was passed on to Main Department VI for documentation. The surveillance was terminated.
Person-description of object “246816”
SEX: male. AGE: 20-25 years. HEIGHT: c. 1.75m. BUILD: slim. HAIR: dark blond, short. DRESS: green jacket, blue polo-neck pullover, brown cord trousers.
Person-description of connection “Beret”
SEX: female. AGE: 30-35 years. HEIGHT: 1.75m-1.78m. BUILD: slim. HAIR: medium blonde, curly. DRESS: dark blue cloth coat, red beret, blue jeans, black boots.
I sit there, at the plastic-wood table, marvelling at this minutely detailed reconstruction of a day in my life. I remember the slovenly gilt-and-red Ganymed, the plush Operncaf and the blue-shirted, pimpled youths in the 30th-anniversary march-past, their paraffin-soaked torches trailing sparks in the misty night air. I smell again that peculiar East Berlin smell, a compound of the smoke from domestic boilers burning compressed coal- dust briquettes, exhaust fumes from the two-stroke engines of the little Trabant cars, cheap East European cigarettes, damp boots and sweat.
What a gift to memory is a Stasi file. Far better than Proust’s madeleine.
The “Opk” on the front cover stands for Operative Personenkontrolle, “Operational Person Control”. According to the 1985 edition of the Dictionary of Political- Operational Work, an operational person control was to identify anyone who might have committed an offence according to the criminal code, or who might have a “hostile-negative attitude”, or who might be exploited for hostile purposes by the enemy. Each Opk file begins with an “opening report” and a “plan of action”.
My opening report dates from March, 1981. Prepared by one Lieutenant Wendt, it gives my personal details, notes that I have been studying in West Berlin since 1978, and lived from January to June 1980 – actually it was October – in East Berlin; and that I have repeatedly “made contact with operationally interesting persons”. Consequently, “there are grounds for suspecting that G. [for Garton Ash, otherwise “the object” or “Romeo”] has deliberately exploited his official functions as research student and/or journalist to pursue intelligence activities”.
Raw material follows later in the file: observation reports; summaries of intelligence from the files on my friend, Werner Krtschell, a Protestant priest; photocopies of articles I wrote about Poland for the West German news magazine Der Spiegel; copies of my own Polish notes and papers, photographed during a secret search of my luggage at Schnefeld airport; even copies of the references written by my Oxford tutors for the British Council.
There are 325 pages. For all their efforts, the one thing the secret police didn’t manage to work out was what I was really up to in their country, which was collecting material to write a book highly critical of it – and of them. They only realised when extracts from the finished book appeared in Der Spiegel. So much for their top-secret intelligence. The file ends with my being banned from East Germany until the end of December 1989; but by the end of 1989, their precious state had itself virtually ceased to exist.
The sources Lieutenant Wendt and the Stasi considered most important were the “unofficial collaborators”, the IMs. According to internal records, in 1988 – the last “normal” year of the GDR – the Ministry for State Security had more than 170 000 “unofficial collaborators”, of whom some 110 000 were regular informers. The ministry itself had more than 90 000 full- time employees. Setting the total figure against the adult population in the same year, this means that about one out of every 50 adult East Germans had a direct connection with the secret police. The Nazis had nothing like as many. In 1941, the full-time staff of the Gestapo was less than 15 000. In East Germany, the regime was never popular to start with, and the longer it went on, the more it came to rely on this huge network of informers. I appear to have had the attentions of five. Their evidence and operational potential are carefully weighed by Lieutenant Wendt. As I study their reports on me, and set out to identify, find and talk to them in person, I am drawn back not just into my own past life, but into these other lives that briefly crossed with mine.
I was not a victim of these informers, as many East Germans were of theirs. They did me no serious damage. Yet, knowing how the system worked, it is a fair guess that they did harm others. However, the fact that they happen to have informed on me gives me a special chance to test the accuracy of the files – and to enter into their own experience. Why did they do it? What was it like for them? How do they see it now?
My most assiduous informer is code-named “Michaela”. It does not take me long to identify her. She was at that time in charge of the Weimar art collections, an interesting, cultured woman married to the former head of East Germany’s leading political cabaret. He features here too, as does his first wife, Litzi. I can almost see Lieutenant Wendt pricking up his ears as he notes that Litzi, “known as Red Lizzy”, had previously been married to Kim Philby – Britain’s most famous Soviet spy. Putting aside the file for a moment, I recall a visit I paid while I was living in East Berlin to Litzi Philby, a woman whose life was a history of the 20th century.
We talked over afternoon tea and delicious Viennese macaroons in her small flat on the Karl-Marx-Allee. Her bookshelves contained Tennyson, Keats, and Ignazio Silone’s The School for Dictators. My notes record a small, attractive, energetic woman with a Viennese accent and frizzy hair, “very young for her age” – she was then 70 – and, as I rather oddly put it, “inquisitive to a fault”. “Soviet agent training?” I asked myself. Or simply, and in the end this is the hypothesis I preferred: “Viennese bourgeois habit.”
She talked affectionately and admiringly about Kim. “He was very brilliant,” she said – the last two words spoken in English – and had a genius for languages. However, he was, she added, “somewhat reserved”. She was sure the Vienna workers’ rising in 1934 and its brutal suppression had been a formative experience, turning him into a fully committed communist. In fact, she herself seems to have played a decisive role. It was through her that the young man from chilly old England was plunged into a new world of high political excitement and probably a fair dash of sexual liberation as well. It may also have been she who introduced him, in the midst of all this, to Soviet intelligence.
I felt I could hardly ask her about the sex. Instead, I asked her whether she and Philby would have chosen the path they did if they had known what was really happening in the Soviet Union in the Thirties. There was a long pause and then she said, very seriously: “I really can’t answer that. It must seem incredible to you that we didn’t know about it all . “
What did she think of East Germany now? “Well, let’s say it is not what we hoped for or believed in.”
She criticised the general mistrust, the fearfulness and timidity of the leadership, the lack of freedom of expression and freedom of movement. However, she still believed in something she called socialism. “What’s the alternative? I see none.”
Back to the file. “Michaela” reports that her husband had told her how, on the weekend of April 26-27 1980, I had tried to visit them. Her husband had declined to see me, saying he was too ill. However, he had found out some details of my Weimar visit by asking the doctor who was looking after him at the time. The doctor happened to be married to Eberhard Haufe, “a freelance scholar of German literature”, and I had actually stayed with them.
I remember that weekend. These were the “Shakespeare Days” in Weimar, and the main event was a lecture by George Steiner. It was a characteristic bravura performance, from Lear to Twelfth Night by way of Oedipus and Don Giovanni. Afterwards, I had supper with the great man. Nonetheless, it was not Shakespeare and George Steiner but Goethe and Eberhard Haufe who made that weekend memorable:
Wer den Dichter will verstehen Muss in Dichters Lande gehen.
“To understand the poet you must visit his country,” Goethe wrote, and no place in Europe is more eloquent of the writers who lived there than Weimar.
The eloquence of the place was matched by the company of Eberhard Haufe, with whom I walked in the parks and visited Schloss Kochberg. Eberhard Haufe was a small, fragile man, with a precise, somewhat old- fashioned manner of speaking. Since his dismissal, for political reasons, from the University of Leipzig in the late Fifties, he had lived as a textual editor and critic, working on editions of the German classics and his special passion, Johannes Bobrowski, the poet of the European East.
As we walked, we had the kind of intense conversation about books, ideas and politics which I would often have with intellectuals and churchmen in Europe behind the Iron Curtain, but less often with their counterparts in the West. Here, there was the added charm of being in Weimar with a scholar of the German classics and I felt, as we walked through the Tiefurt park, that the white-haired, delicate figure beside me was not just an expert on the intellectuals of classical Weimar – Goethe, Schiller – he was one of them.
As a leaving present, he gave me a small volume he had edited. I have it before me as I write. Entitled The Untimely Truth, it contains short prose pieces by an early 19th-century German writer, Carl Gustav Jochmann, a passionate advocate of the political importance of free speech. On the flyleaf I find written in a neat hand: “Where the truth must be fought, there it has already won, CG Jochmann. Believing in the truth of this and similar sentences, cordially dedicated to Timothy Garton Ash by Eberhard Haufe, Weimar, 27.iv.80.”
A delightful and rather moving visit then. But that is not how it appears in the Stasi report from “Michaela”. Here, I appear as a rude and unwelcome guest: “In the evening, G. ignored discreet indications that the family H. regarded the conversation as concluded and he managed to ensure that the hospitality of the family culminated in the offer of a place to stay the night.” There follows her assessment of Dr and Mrs Haufe: “Both persons are marked by a bourgeois lifestyle . ”
However, she does emphasise that they are not hostile to “our social system”. Finally, she stresses the need to protect the source (that is, her) because “only our two families know of the Englishman’s visit”. In sending a copy of this report to Berlin, Lieutenant-Colonel Maresch, head of counter-intelligence in the Erfurt office, notes that the Haufes are now being investigated by his unit.
A month later, “Michaela” reports on a further visit I paid to them. Here, I apparently failed to recognise Dr Georg’s daughter from his first marriage, whom I had met while visiting his first wife, the former Mrs Philby. “Michaela” says that I then became very embarrassed. She had also learned from Mrs Haufe that I had again visited them and gone for a walk in the Goethe cemetery with their son Christoph, who was studying in Jena.
At the bottom of the page, Lieutenant Kntzel notes measures to be taken. These include instructing “Michaela” to develop the contact with me and further investigation of Christoph Haufe in Jena. For him, a student from an already suspect family, this could have had serious consequences. In that system, a few more black marks from the Stasi could add up to dismissal from the university.
Fifteen years on, I now send copies of these documents to the Haufes, explaining that I hope to write about this file, that I would like to visit them again in Weimar and to ask “Michaela” – if she is still there – why she did what she did. Of course, I appreciate that they may be quite unsympathetic to the whole undertaking. But the friendly dedication in my copy of Jochmann’s The Untimely Truth leads me to hope that my visit in 1980 was not as unwelcome as it appears from the Stasi file. When I telephone later from Knigswinter, Dr Haufe says they will be delighted to see me. I hire a car and drive to Weimar. The Haufes greet me with all the warmth I remember from 15 years before. They assure me that my visit then had not been unwelcome.
“We were trying to remember,” says the energetic Frau Haufe. “It was actually Christoph’s birthday on the 25th. We had laid the table, with candles. Then you stood before the door. I took you into this room, I remember, I sat you down next to that table over there and brought you some food.” The Proustian effect again. “You were somewhat reserved, but certainly not pushy as she describes you.”
We talk for a while about the whole business of the files and dealing with the communist legacy. They remind me that the local State Security headquarters were at the far end of this same street. So Weimar was again home to the two extremes: Dr Haufe at this end, right next to the Goethe and Schiller cemetery, the Stasi at the other.
And what of “Michaela”? Well, says Frau Haufe, theirs was never a close friendship. The friendship was really with Dr Georg; he was interesting, clever, witty. She, by contrast, was vulgar and selfish. And, says Frau Haufe, in high dudgeon and broad Thuringian, she has the cheek to tell the Stasi that we have a bourgeois lifestyle! “Here I was, getting up at six in the morning to clean the flat before going off to work, and there she was, lah-dih-dahing around in her schloss, employing a cleaning lady, yet she tells them we have a bourgeois lifestyle.”
As a senior state employee, “Michaela” was certainly obliged to cooperate with the Stasi, but she did not have to be an IM. Why did she do it? Probably for her career. She went on, after her husband’s death, to work in the state art-dealing business in Berlin. The Haufes have had no further contact with her, but perhaps her number will be listed .
Checking into a hotel in Berlin a few hours later, I reach straight for the phone book. There is one entry with “Michaela’s” real name. For a moment, I wonder whether I should simply appear at her front door – doorstep her – or risk failure by being a gentleman and phoning beforehand. I dial the number. “Ah, Herr Esch, you visited in Weimar didn’t you, and I’ve since read your book .”
I explain that I am briefly in Berlin and have a particular reason for wanting to see her. We fix a time in the afternoon for me to call. “You’ll have many questions,” she says and, “really I’m looking forward to it.”
A grey tower block of characteristic socialist-modernist design, well-located and smart by East German standards. Privileged. A tall, rather loud woman greets me. “Hello, how are you?” Large features, bright lipstick, grey eyes behind metallic spectacles. Trousers and high heels. A reach-me-down Marlene.
“Well,” she says brightly, when we are settled with coffee and cakes, “what are you up to these days?”
“Frau [real name],” I say, “do you have an inkling of why I have sought you out today?”
A pause, just slightly too long, then: “No, not really.” That “really” again.
I tell her.
“Yes,” she says immediately, “one was obliged to in my position.” About once a month, they would come to see her. Her secretary would say: “Boss, you have a visitor again.” They introduced themselves as coming from the local council, but gave only a first name: “Heinz” or “Dieter” or “Michael”. The conversation was purely in her official capacity, dienstlich, nur dienstlich. She talks in a rather matter- of-fact, outwardly self-confident way, but then asks, nervously: “What did they report?” Not “I”, but “they”.
I give her photocopies of the reports and she starts reading. I ask how the interview normally proceeded. Did “Dieter” or “Heinz” have a notebook?
Yes, yes, they had an open notebook and they carefully wrote everything down. And, really, one co-operated. One tried to tell as many harmless details as possible. And then, one thought they might help with one’s work. And sometimes they did help: with difficulties over planning permission, things like that.
Anyway . Dr Georg died in 1984. She moved to Berlin, and took early retirement – with a good pension as the widow of a “fighter against fascism”. She goes back to reading the photocopies. The banal, grotesque detail she had supplied about me, about the Haufes and their “bourgeois lifestyle”, about young Christoph Haufe. Lieutenant Kntzel’s list of measures to be taken: investigation of the family and of the student Christoph, instructing the IM for a further contact. Suddenly, she puts the papers down and says: “I can’t read any more. I feel sick, I want to puke.” She walks to the door, and when she comes back, she is crying. Her voice is strangled as she says: “This can’t be excused.” Still, she tries to explain.
Her grandfather was a Prussian officer, but her grandmother was Jewish. So according to the Nazi classification in the Nuremberg Laws, her father was a so-called Mischling. However, because he was a gifted gynaecologist, the SS employed him, despite his mixed blood, in one of their own maternity hospitals in Thuringia. After the war, her father had come back to be a senior doctor in Brandenburg; she was 15 in 1945, and for her this was a time of elation and true belief in a new beginning. She was sure they were building a better Germany. Of course, she says, the style of the new regime was awfully petit bourgeois and philistine for someone from her background, but still. Her hopes faded only slowly. Even in the Seventies, she still believed that socialism was the better system. Anyway, it was there, it was the only thing she had known all her adult life.
In 1975, she got this good job at Weimar. But with it came “Dieter” and “Heinz”. As she talks, emotionally, disjointedly, she reveals rather vividly the mixture of motives that made her collaborate. Some residual belief in the system. The sense that it was an official duty: “In that position one was obliged to .”
And fear?
“Yes, of course, underneath one was shit- scared of them.”
As she looks at the reports of IM “Michaela” she nearly breaks down again, the eyes behind the metallic spectacles filling with tears. “Really, one should write to the Haufes.” She struggles to regain her composure, wrestling with what she has done.
“But this wasn’t responsible for your being banned, was it?”
“No, that followed the publication of my book in West Germany.”
“Ah, that was just like them. It was always the West’s opinion that really mattered to them. That should have made me think. And now you want to write something? And now I’ve reacted like this and that’s good for you, isn’t it?”
She laughs bitterly, then asks: “Will you name names?”
I explain that I do not want to hurt anyone and will not use her real name. However, because of the Weimar and Philby connections it will be very difficult to tell the story without her being identifiable, to family and acquaintances at least.
She is buffeted by conflicting thoughts and emotions. One moment she says: “Really it’s good that you’ve shown me this.” The next: “Ah well, perhaps I can sue you and I’ll win a lot of money . no, no, sorry, that was only a joke . We repressed so much . why didn’t I apply to see my file? Because I didn’t want to know what was in it . I think this was the only time I reported so extensively on private matters. I thought it was dienstlich but . well, I hope if you do write you’ll try to explain the subjective as well as the objective conditions. How it was then. But probably that’s impossible. Even I can’t really remember now . “
The conversation dies in the twilight. What can I say at parting? “It was a pleasure to see you again”? Hardly. I say: “The copies are for you. Please write to me if you have anything you want to add. Here is my address.”
And she replies: “Ah, Oxford!” She had spent a lovely day there recently. She goes to England every year, to visit old friends. “Have you written down your telephone number? Perhaps next time I”ll ring!”
As we shake hands at the front door, she does not say “Sorry”. She says: “How did you get here, by car?” No, by underground. “Oh, it’s a very good connection isn’t it?” Struggling for self-respect and normality, as if nothing had happened. Nothing really.
When I sit down in my hotel room half an hour later and take out a pen, I find that my own hand is trembling.
c Timothy Garton Ash 1997. The File will be released by HarperCollins next month at a price of R165