The File (11 page)

Early in my time in East Berlin I went to visit this woman whose life was a history of the twentieth century. We talked over afternoon tea and Viennese macaroons in her small flat on the Karl-Marx-Allee. Her bookshelves contained Tennyson, Keats,
The Oxford Book of English Verse
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 seventy—and, as I rather oddly put
it, “inquisitive to a fault.” Soviet agent training? I asked myself. Caution because of bad experience with foreigners posing as … ? Or simply, and in the end this is the hypothesis I prefer, Viennese bourgeois habit. It was probably a mixture of all three. After her exciting youth, she had spent the last twenty years until her retirement dubbing foreign films for the state film distributor. She now enjoyed an excellent state pension as a “fighter against fascism.”

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, quick, warm friendships, seemingly uncomplicated solidarity 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 1930s. 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 critized the general mistrust, the fearfulness and timidity of the leadership, the lack of freedom of expression and freedom of movement, and the privileges—even her own. However, she still believed in something she called socialism. “What’s the alternative? I see none.”

Back to the file and “Michaela” reports that on January 5, 1980, she received from me a copy of an exhibition catalog entitled
Between Resistance and Conformity: Art in Germany 1933–1945
. She confirms that the handwriting on the attached greeting card is the same as that on the piece of paper on which I had written down my name during my last visit. “In order to implement further measures to strengthen the contact as well as
Blickfeldmassnahmen
[a special Stasi term meaning keeping someone in view] I will send a letter of thanks to the address given below:

Underneath is typed “Michaela.” The report is not signed by hand, but a note at the bottom seems to refer to an IM file.

Five months later a minute “produced from verbal information given by IMV ‘Michaela’” reports that her husband had told her how, on the weekend of April 26–27, I had tried to visit them again. Dr. Georg 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 free-lance scholar of German literature,” and I had 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
. Afterward I had supper with the great man. I felt there was something particularly appropriate about talking to Steiner here in Weimar, in the shadow of Buchenwald—surely the quintessential example of that profoundly disturbing proximity of high culture and barbarism about which Steiner had written so eloquently. But my notes record little conversation on that subject: “No, what he wanted to do was to
gossip
—and did so, relentlessly, unceasingly,
cascading
for over an hour over supper in the [Hotel] Elephant. Have you heard the latest about the Regius Professor? etc. ‘My, how you must miss it all!’” My notes express a disappointment that today I find just a little unfair, for, after all, the sage had been talking very seriously about great matters all day.

Nonetheless, it was not Shakespeare and George Steiner but Goethe and Eberhard Haufe who made that weekend memorable.

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. First, his own house, with the wonderfully preserved library and his standing desk: Hebbel called it the only battlefield of which Germany could be proud. Then Schloss Kochberg, where Goethe worshipped Charlotte von Stein, before bedding the more comfortable Christiane. On to Schiller’s house, the tomb of the two poet-princes and the wonderful parks: On The Ilm and Tiefurt and that of Schloss Belvedere—the residence, two hundred years after the duchess Anna-Amalia, of IM “Michaela.”

The eloquence of the place was matched by the company of Eberhard Haufe and his family, with whom, as my diary records, I walked in the parks and visited Schloss Kochberg. Eberhard Haufe was a small, fragile man, with a precise and somewhat old-fashioned manner of speaking. Since his dismissal from the University of Leipzig in the late 1950s, for political reasons, 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 that 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; he was one of them. He stood in a continuum, and a conversation, that
stretched back two centuries. A conversation that was and still is at heart about the true meaning of one central but elusive concept of German writers and thinkers from Herder to Thomas Mann:
Humanität
(literally “humanity,” but with a very large H).

Unlike the East German guidebooks to Weimar, Dr. Haufe had no illusion that
Humanität
was in any way embodied by the regime of the German Democratic Republic—though it put Goethe on its 20-mark notes. This regime was, for him, the negation of
Humanität
. He told me about the Stasi’s opening letters and bugging telephone conversations, and about his own long struggles with the censors, who objected even to a book he had edited under the title
German Letters from Italy
. The GDR was endeavoring to implement Kurt Hager’s ideological ruling that there was no longer a German nation but rather a separate “socialist nation” and “capitalist nation”—hence the campaign to remove the adjective “German” wherever possible, even from Dr. Haufe’s innocuous book title.

As a farewell present, he gave me a small volume he had edited. I have it before me as I write. Entitled
The Untimely Truth
, it contains aphorisms, short prose pieces and an essay, “On Publicity,” by a long-neglected early-nineteenth-century German writer, Carl Gustav Jochmann. Coming from Riga, and inspired by his experience of living in England during the unsettled years 1812 to 1814, Jochmann makes a passionate case for the political importance of free speech. In an editorial postscript dated 1975, Haufe negotiates these subversive views past the East German censor with a fine double edge: “Just because [Jochmann] spoke from the darkness of an underdeveloped,
constricted bourgeois world, he spoke also and still with the innocent voice of intellectual integrity and yearning. Public opinion was not yet recognizable as ‘false consciousness,’ as a mask for the purely bourgeois class interest, as it was a half generation later for the young Marx.” His readers, with long experience of reading between the lines, got the message immediately, and the first edition sold out in no time.

On the flyleaf of my copy I find written in a tiny, neat hand: “Where the truth must be fought, there it has already won, C. G. 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…. I would judge that they get their information from FRG [i.e., West German] mass media.” However, she does emphasize that they are not hostile to “our social system.” Finally, she stresses the need to protect the source (that is, herself) 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 counterintelligence 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 recognize 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 and failed to explain convincingly whether I was really interested in Jewish resistance to Nazism or in Kim Philby. (The answer was: both.) 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 Küntzel notes further 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 unversity. So here is a case where “Michaela”’s harmless prattle endangered someone who was vulnerable and could not simply move on, as I could. Yet the danger came, ultimately, from me.

Another month passes, and this time “Michaela” reports the text of a postcard I had sent her, giving my telephone numbers in East and West Berlin. Measures to be taken include asking the ministry in Berlin to check the telephone numbers. When department II/9 replies saying the IM must have misread the numbers, the Erfurt office sends back a photocopy of the actual postcard, observing haughtily: “The information given by our IM is thereby confirmed.” Signed pp. Lieutenant Colonel Maresch. This absurd bureaucratic rigmarole takes two months, from June to August, during which I had, in fact,
virtually finished collecting the material for my book and left for Italy to start writing.

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 it and what she has to say for herself. 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 sometime later, from Königswinter on the Rhine, Dr. Haufe says they will be delighted to see me. I rent a car and drive to Weimar. The Haufes greet me in the Cranachstrasse with all the warmth I remember from fifteen 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 twenty-fifth. 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 of the Cranachstrasse, right next to the Goethe and Schiller cemetery; the Stasi at the other. The Stasi was housed in
a handsome villa designed by Henry van der Velde, like the nearby Nietzsche Archive. The Haufes’ current files had apparently been destroyed before the building was occupied by local people—the Haufes among them—on December 5, 1989. But the Gauck Authority had found an earlier file on his expulsion from Leipzig University in 1957–58, the end of his academic career.

He had been denounced by, among others, one Dr. Warmbier, a lecturer in Marxism-Leninism. Finding the address in the Leipzig phone book—there are not many Warmbiers in the Leipzig phone book—Dr. Haufe sent him copies of the relevant pages. Dr. Warmbier wrote back, apologized, but enclosed copies of pages from his own file showing how he had himself been sacked from the university in 1974 for his increasingly critical views and had then actually been sentenced to two years in prison for “anti-state agitation.” Now Dr. Warmbier had applied for rehabilitation and, says Eberhard Haufe, “I would not like to be the person who has to judge that case.”