The File (10 page)

“Well now, if you want to hang him …” What a responsibility! With just eleven words in a file—“an IM of the HVA I—adviser of G. at the HUB”—I can, if I choose, ruin a man’s career, perhaps even his life. For IM is the kiss of death. What earthly right have I to play judge and hangman? And for what? The actual content of the two-page document headed “copy of an IM report,” passed to department II/9 by the HVA in July 1980, is wholly inoffensive. It ascribes to Dr. Demps the view that I work purposefully and thoroughly, with a bourgeois-liberal attitude—although “no commitment to the working class”—and concludes with the suggestion (wishful thinking, but perhaps encouraged by me) that he might come to Oxford as examiner of my thesis. It has done me no harm.

Only the clear identification of Demps as an informer makes the thing serious. If this is true, there is an argument of historical justice for at least reporting it to the university, from which other scholars have been purged for being informers. When I say “purged” I should be more exact. They have not been banned from working altogether, just dismissed from this particularly sensitive position as university teachers; and by no means all those identified as informers have been sacked. According to the university’s first West German rector one in every six professors and one in ten university employees had worked for or in some way cooperated with the secret police under the old regime. Of these, many have left voluntarily and some seventy have been dismissed.
But the university “commission of honor” has also found in many other cases that the offense was not serious enough to merit dismissal. Clearly someone should not, in fairness, escape this rigorous but discriminating judgment just because of the historical accident that a particular set of files has disappeared.

None of which makes me any happier as I telephone Professor Demps, one day in June 1995, to arrange my appointment. I have had no contact with him since 1981. He is clearly surprised by my call and the news that I have “something I want to discuss” with him, but agrees to meet. We fix a rendezvous in a café on the Wilhelmstrasse, about which he has just published a rather well-received book. His exceptional knowledge of Berlin’s local history has also earned him a place on a prestigious commission to propose changes to East Berlin street names: Marx-Engels-Platz to be Schlossplatz, part of Karl-Liebknecht-Strasse to be Schinkelallee, part of Karl-Marx-Allee to be Hegelallee, and so on.

Eleven sharp, and there he sits outside the café, a large man with a pasty complexion and rheumy eyes, wearing gray trousers and a red pullover with epaulettes. A slightly tense greeting. Tea and coffee ordered. Then I come to the point. I have read my Stasi file and it would appear that they had him down as an informer of the HVA.

“Au weia!”
says Laurenz Demps.

I explain what the file says and show him copies of the relevant pages. His hand shakes slightly as he takes the copies. When he lights a cigarette he spills the ash down the front of his sweater: “You see how agitated I am.”

But no, he says, he was not an informer, he had nothing
to do with the Stasi. “Oddly enough, they never approached me.” However, he does remember talking about me to the head of the university’s International Department. “What was the man’s name? You remember, we had lunch together once in the Operncafé?”

As soon as he says this, I see it all. I have been puzzled by the fact that the “copy of an IM report” from the foreign intelligence service does not give the informer a code name, but in mid-text identifies my adviser with his full name: “Com[rade]. Dr. Laurenz [name blacked out]” as it appears on this copy. However, I reasoned, if Lieutenant Wendt of Stasi counterintelligence read this to mean that Demps was an informer for the foreign intelligence service, who am I to doubt it? Wendt must have known what he was doing. Perhaps foreign intelligence worked by slightly different rules from the rest of the ministry.

Now I see that it was that man from the university’s International Department who was the informer—and someone in his position would obviously have had contacts of interest to Wolf’s spies. What the foreign intelligence service has passed on is a copy of
his
report, hence the identification of Dr. Demps by his real name. It is Lieutenant Wendt who has been sloppy in his work, eliding the informer and the informer’s source.

As Demps pores over the report, he points out that while much of the information obviously came from him, there are also things he did not know—such as my contact with a Mr. Wildash at the British embassy. “Look at this sentence,” he says, and we both bend our heads over the document. Two historians discuss the interpretation of a primary source.

Now complete denial of the accusation is, I am told, the most usual first reaction of an IM. The denial sometimes continues long after the informer is confronted with incontrovertible evidence—denial, then, in a psychological as much as a criminological sense. But Laurenz Demps’s reaction seems to me that of an innocent man and his explanation is immediately convincing. On my return to Oxford I find that I still have my notes from that lunch in the Operncafé on (it appears) March 27, 1980. In these notes I describe the head of the International Relations department as a “Smart Alec/Flash Harry. Brown jacket. Loud tie. Sancho Panza mustache.” I note the somewhat forced mateyness of the two Party members, the demonstrative way they use the comradely
Du
to each other but the more formal
Sie
to me. Flash Harry had studied “scientific communism” in Leipzig. “You know there is a joke that does the rounds here,” he tells me confidentially, over another liqueur. “We say ‘dictatorship of the proletariat.’ Now I can see the proletariat, but where is the dictatorship?” And so on. I’m glad to hear from Laurenz Demps that this nauseating man has long since left the university. I wonder what he’s doing now?

But how did Demps himself see me at the time?

He points to the Stasi report: “Much as it says here!” It was fairly interesting to have an English student, but, you know it is, advising students always takes precious time away from your own research. And then he asks how I saw him.

As a convinced communist, I say, and as someone with an almost romantic view of the prewar Communist Party of Germany.

Yes, that’s true, he replies, although adding that there were many things that one didn’t say to a foreigner. According to my notes from 1980, what he did say to me at that lunch was: “We don’t expect you to join the Communist Party of Great Britain…. All we want is that you should take us seriously and tell people in the UK that we are serious people.” But then he added a personal aside: “Will you spit on Churchill’s grave for me?”

Probably it was little jokes like that which contributed to my lack of interest in looking up my old adviser, after it again became possible for me to enter East Germany. But I have nothing but sympathy—and some admiration—for the way he copes with the shock I have just given him.

“I thought of all sorts of things when you telephoned,” he says, “but never this.” In fact, he had recently been sent pages from a friend’s file in which he himself appeared as a suspect because he took a leading part in a private discussion group. Picking up my comment about romanticism, he muses, “Yes, but romanticism can be dangerous.”

Then it’s time for him to give some American students a guided tour of the Wilhelmstrasse. “After this,” he says, “I’m going to drink a large schnaps.” He is still visibly shaken, like a man who has stood for a moment under the gallows. Had he been a prominent public figure, and I an unscrupulous journalist, he could well have been “hanged.” I can just see the report in
Der Spiegel—
how often in recent years have we read them—with the little inset black-and-white photograph of a page from the file, and the damning line circled in red: “an IM of
the HVA I—adviser of the G. at the HUB.” Damning, but wrong.

For myself, I am just very, very relieved. I can hardly wait to get back to the hotel, to telephone Winkler and Wolle and explain the Stasi’s mistake.

As I am writing this book, Stefan Wolle faxes me a newspaper clipping about a newly founded Berlin-Brandenburg Prussian Association. Of the founding members, the report mentions only one name: “Humboldt University historian Laurenz Demps.”

A telephone number is given, and when I ring up, the Prussian Association sends me an information pack. From this I learn that the association is to cultivate the “true values and virtues of Prussia” and to “lay the foundation-stone for a spiritual renewal of our fatherland” since Germany threatens to degenerate into a “multicultural assortment of intolerant individualists.” The association’s statute makes special mention of the “philosophical writings of Frederick the Great.” Its keynote speaker commends the spirit of the king and his soldiers at the Battle of Leuthen in 1757. “True Prussiandom,” he says, is associated with patriotism, selflessness, tolerance, modesty, loyalty and a sense of duty, but also with “secondary virtues such as punctuality, love of order and cleanliness.”

M
Y MOST ASSIDUOUS INFORMER IS
“M
ICHAELA,” THE
lady in Weimar. On February 9 the Erfurt office reports to counterintelligence department II/13 (journalists) that I have again been in touch with their IMV “Michaela.” Erfurt also encloses the transcript of a taped conversation with her husband, previously described as “Georg” but now “Michael.” In this transcript, Dr. Georg recalls his experiences at Reuters in London, starting in 1943. As joint managing editor of the European desk, Dr. Georg reports, he had great problems editing features written by such “sworn Soviet-enemies” as “Richard Löwenthal … now professor of politics at the Free University in Berlin,” Alfred Geiringer and the Swiss Jon Kimsche.

And so the Stasi file, this cardboard time machine, transports me back not just fifteen but a full fifty years, to Britain at war. In fact, the three names he mentions could stand for those of many Central European exiles in London at that time: men and women who owed their freedom to Britain’s solitary stand against Hitler and who subsequently gave much to Britain—and Europe—in return. Turn the page, and I might be reading about Arthur
Koestler, or André Deutsch, or Sebastian Haffner, or George Mikes, or about another young Central European exile, then working as a news commentator on European affairs for the BBC’s Empire and North American service, but now known to all the world as George, the Lord Weidenfeld, of Chelsea.

The communist Dr. Georg had discussed his difficulties in censoring the “sworn Soviet-enemies” with Comrade Hans [name blacked out], who was in a similar position on
Time
magazine. His problem with editing those anti-Soviet commentaries “so that the most poisonous parts were removed” got worse toward the end of the war, he says, and he decided to contact the relevant section of the War Office in order to seek a position in postwar Germany. This he did “with the agreement of our comrades—the leadership of the London group had in the meantime passed to Feliks Albin (Kurt Hager).” (Kurt Hager would subsequently become one of the longest-serving members of the East German Politburo and the Party’s chief ideologist.) The War Office, in its wisdom, then entrusted this German communist with the job of building up “the first [postwar Western] German news agency DENA in Hamburg.” The British officials’ grasp of geography seems to have been as shaky as their political judgment, for Dr. Georg also managed to persuade them that to go from London to Hamburg he needed to pass through Berlin.

So on May 13, 1946, he received his handwritten official permission to travel to Berlin. “It had been agreed with the comrades in London that I should report to the C[entral] C[ommittee]…. The comrades on the spot should decide whether I should take up the Hamburg job
or remain in Berlin.” After long discussions, they decided that he should stay in Berlin to build up the East German news agency, “but then I ended up with the Soviet news agency in Weissensee.”

He wrote to the head of the embryonic Hamburg operation, explaining that he could not take up the job for political reasons, since he disagreed with British policy toward Germany. Dr. Georg also recalls, with almost audible amusement, that as nothing had been heard from him for nearly two and half weeks, British newspapers had run reports of his mysterious disappearance and speculated that he had been kidnapped by the Russians. “Since my return to the then S[oviet] O[ccupation] Z[one],” the transcript concludes, “I have had no close contact with any of the acquaintances connected with my London activities.”

Two touches must be added to this self-portrait of Dr. Georg at war. The first concerns his then boss at Reuters, Christopher Chancellor. The transcript in my file records only that Dr. Georg had learned that Chancellor was critical of his decision to leave Reuters, finding it “arrogant.” While I was writing this book, I met Christopher Chancellor’s son, Alexander Chancellor, my own former editor at
The Spectator
, at a party given by the editor of
The Times
for the editor of
The New Yorker
. Amid this clamor of editors, I asked him if he had ever heard his father speak of one Georg (true name), and explained the circumstances. For a moment, the bitter taste of Central Europe’s tortuous history intruded between sips of champagne on a beautiful summer’s evening in a North London garden. Alexander punched the name into his computer notebook and said he would consult
his elder brother. A couple of weeks later we met again and he told me the result of his inquiries. His brother did not know the particular name. However, he did remember that around that time their father had come home very worried and angry about revelations of Soviet spies at Reuters.

The other touch concerns Dr. Georg’s then girl-friend: Litzi Philby. Kim Philby had parted from the Jewish communist Litzi in 1936, at a time when he was posing as a sympathizer with fascism and supporting the Francoist side in the Spanish Civil War. Litzi, meanwhile, was living in Paris, and it seems that it was through her that Philby kept in touch with Soviet intelligence. In 1939 she moved to London and managed to bring her parents out of Vienna—just in time. In London she got together with Dr. Georg. Some mystery surrounds the circumstances in which she finally divorced Philby and left England, but by 1947 she had joined Dr. Georg in East Berlin, and married him there, using her maiden name. Nine years later they, in turn, were divorced. Dr. Georg went on, after another marriage, to make his life with “Michaela,” and moved with her to Weimar. Litzi stayed in Berlin.