The File (12 page)

But what of “Michaela”? Well, says Frau Haufe, theirs was never a close friendship. The friendship was really with Dr. Georg, who had one day appeared with his daughter in tow saying, “You have been recommended to us as a pediatrician.” But now she thinks the Stasi probably sent him. He was interesting, clever, witty. They had last seen him when he came to congratulate Dr. Haufe on his fiftieth birthday in 1981. Meat was then scarce, but there was a butcher who made nice little platters of cold meats and he had brought one of those.

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, which was very unusual in those days, 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. This was closely involved with the notorious Stasi colonel Alexander Schalck-Golodkowski, entrusted with obtaining as much hard currency as possible for the heavily indebted communist state, by hook or by crook. The Haufes have had no further contact with her, but perhaps she will be in the Berlin phone book….

AS I RACE UP THE BATTERED AUTOBAHN TO BERLIN,
just as I used to all those years ago, I think back over this conversation: how a file opens the door to a vast sunken labyrinth of the forgotten past, but how, too, the very act of opening the door itself changes the buried artifacts, like an archaeologist letting in fresh air to a sealed Egyptian tomb.

For these are not simply past experiences rediscovered in their original state. Even without the fresh light from a new document or another’s recollection—the opened door—our memories decay or sharpen, mellow or sour, with the passage of time and the change of circumstances. Thus Frau Haufe, for example, surely had a somewhat different memory of “Michaela” in 1985, when the GDR still existed, than she did ten years later, on the eve of my visit. But with the fresh light the memory changes irrevocably. A door opens, but another closes. There is no way back now to your own earlier memory of that person, that event. It is like a revelation made, years later, to a loved one. Or like a bad divorce, where today’s bitterness transforms all the shared past, completely, miserably, seemingly forever. Except that
this bitter memory, too, will fade and change with the further passage of time.

So what we have is nothing less than an infinity of memories of any moment, event or person: memories that change slowly always, with every passing second, but now and then dramatically, after some jolt or revelation. Like one of those digital photographs whose every color, tint or detail can be changed on a computer screen, except that here we’re not in control and can’t revert at will to an earlier image. They say “The past is a foreign country,” but actually the past is another universe.

Is it then ultimately true that
“Imagination
and
Memory
are but one thing”? (The words are Thomas Hobbes’s, in a passage that James Fenton chose for the epigraph of his German Requiem.) The Polish-American-Jewish writer Jerzy Kosinski used to let it be understood that, as a Jewish boy in Poland during the war, he was separated from his family, thrown into a slurry pit by the peasants in the village where he was hiding and perhaps even struck dumb at the age of nine, like the character in his novel
The Painted Bird
. The novel was promoted, praised and sold as a Holocaust testament. But researchers went to the village and found the surviving peasants there remembered it quite differently: the young Kosinski was never thrown into the slurry pit, and anyway he had been hiding together with his family. Now either all the peasants’ memories were wrong, or Kosinski’s memory had merged with imagination, and he really believed these things had happened to him, or he had deliberately embroidered his memories. His friends defended him fiercely. Erica Jong, for example, said,
“What difference does it make whether he experienced [these things] or not?”

Yet there is a real dividing line between the memory, however faded or enriched, of something that actually happened, and imagining something that never happened. There are historical facts. Either the young Kosinski went splash into the slurry pit or he did not. Either “Michaela” signed a written undertaking to be a Stasi informer or she did not.

Like the materials used in a collage, these pieces of evidence have different textures: here a fragment of hard metal, there a scrap of faded newspaper, there again a wisp of cotton wool. Reporters, investigators and historians will compose widely varying collages from the same box of scraps, and further change the picture with the oil paints or watercolors of their own imagination. But there are special truth tests to which their pictures, unlike the poet’s or novelist’s, must always submit. These tests apply to every line I write. That is what makes it so difficult.

C
HECKING INTO A HOTEL
, I
REACH 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—in effect to “doorstep” her, like a tabloid journalist from the
Sun
or
Bild-Zeitung
—or to risk failure by being a gentleman and phoning beforehand. I dial the number. “Ah, Herr Esch, you visited us in Weimar, didn’t you, and I’ve since read your book….” I explain that I am very 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 certainly have many questions,” she says, and “really I’m looking forward to it.”

A gray 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, gray eyes behind metallic spectacles. Trousers and high heels. A hand-me-down Marlene. Tasteful interior decor, neo-Biedermeier furniture.

“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.

Then 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
. But surely my visit was an entirely private one? Yes, but Litzi and Georg were convinced that I was working for British intelligence, so this was at least a semiofficial matter,
halbdienstlich
. How she clings to the sheet anchor of
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. She is shaken by the detail and by the information on her husband.

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 cooperated. One was obliged to. And 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. The Stasi intervened
to get things done. And, you see, there was this law case about two Dürer pictures from the Weimar collection that American soldiers had stolen at the end of the war. And she thought, if we win the lawsuit, then perhaps I’ll be sent to America to collect them! Well, they won, but the Ministry of Culture sent someone else to America. She complained to the Stasi about that.

Anyway, Dr. Georg died in 1984, after his daughter by his first marriage, to Litzi Philby, had emigrated. On his deathbed he said he still believed in socialism. Then Litzi emigrated to Vienna, to be nearer to their daughter, “Michaela”’s stepdaughter, who had recently been allowed out. Yes, Litzi had worked for the KGB; but by the end she was disillusioned and resolutely apolitical. Then “Michaela”’s own daughter, her child by Dr. Georg, had emigrated. She herself moved to Berlin, took early retirement—with a good pension as the widow of a “fighter against fascism”—and, in 1987, resigned from the Party. In a friend’s file there had been mention of contacts with “the Jew [Dr. Georg’s real name].” That was shocking, although of course one knew there was this latent anti-Semitism around. “But I haven’t applied to see my own file, I don’t want to do that.” She seems halfway to seeing herself as an object of Stasi surveillance, almost as a dissident.

But then 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 Küntzel’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 turns and 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 gynecologist, 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, joining first the Social Democrats and then the Socialist Unity Party formed from the forced merger of the Social Democrats with the communists. She was fifteen 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. The Soviet crushing of the Prague Spring was an important moment of disillusionment. But even in the 1970s 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 in 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 …” Then there was the hope of using the Stasi as a player in the bureaucratic game.
For her own purposes too: through Dürer to America! Also, Georg and Litzi thought I really was a spy and, after all, there was a war on, wasn’t there? A Cold War between her system and mine.

And fear?

“Yes, of course, underneath one was shit-scared of them.” So one tried to disarm any suspicion, to show how cooperative one was, by chatting away, giving all sorts of harmless detail. “And this is what comes out….”

As she looks at the photocopied 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, wrestles with what she has done.

“But this wasn’t responsible for your being banned, was it?” she asks.

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 you wanted to see my reaction? 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…. But perhaps there is some protection….

“We repressed so much….
Why
didn’t I apply to see my file? Because I didn’t want to know what was in it … and about my husband…. Who knows what else there is…. 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. Or: “I’m sorry to have done this to you”? 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. Childhood friends of Litzi’s. “Have you written down your telephone number? Perhaps next time I’ll ring you up!”

As we shake hands at the front door she does not say, “Sorry.” She says, “How did you get here, by car?”

No, by subway.

“Oh, it’s a very good connection isn’t it?” Struggling for self-respect and normality, as if nothing had happened. Nothing really.