The File (15 page)

He thought then that the Stasi was a small backroom outfit, “something like MI5.” Only since 1989 has he realized what a huge empire it was. He has followed the debate in the press and finds it “incredible” what some people did: spying on their friends, helping to “put them in the jug.”

His own “principle” was to talk to the Stasi about social
and political issues, but not about people. He would like, nonetheless, to know how far he “adhered to it.” This seems the right moment to show him a copy of what he wrote about me. He is flustered as he reads, avoids my gaze for some moments afterward. Says he’s “irritated” by it. “Contrite, to put it mildly.”

He had wondered lately if it was true what they told him, about his being found on the books of “a. Western intelligence service.” Why didn’t they say which service? He absolutely believed it at the time, but now he thinks the chances are “forty-sixty” that they invented it.

I tell him they did.

Then I ask about the episode in the Jade restaurant. Was it exciting? Did he see himself as James Bond?

No, he was terrified. He thought he would get shot! Afterward, he asked them never to send him on a mission like that again. Still, at least he could spend the deutsche marks on Western books and newspapers.

And the sketch maps of the British Council?

Embarrassment again. He thought that was just “a little test.”

He and the officers—there were several of them over the years—spoke much as we are speaking now. Why, then, did he make such copious handwritten notes? “Because I’ve a bad memory.” He would speak from the notes, then hand them over. The officers were a strange mixture of formality and informality. After some time, “Heinz Lenz” told him the ministry had concluded he was not a Western spy, and that, as a mark of trust, “we would like to suggest saying
Du.”
Call me Heinz, and keep talking.

As for the information he supplied on individual people,
he really thought these were innocent little fragments. What was important to him was the general political analysis, which he gave them at length. I point out that what was important to him was not to them. It was precisely those tiny fragments they were interested in. Afterward they put them together, like archaeologists reconstructing a Roman pot. Yes, he sees that now.

At the end of lunch he asks nervously, “Will you use my name?” He’d rather I didn’t.

I say I will not. I’ll leave it as “Smith.”

A few months later I deliver a public lecture in Berlin on what to do about the communist past. I discuss, in some detail, the opening of the Stasi files. Among the people who come up to me afterward I am surprised to see “Smith.” He gives me an envelope. Opening it back at my hotel, I find a letter saying that he has applied to see his file and that he would be glad to meet again “to consider individual points.”

Meanwhile he attaches a three-page typescript entitled “Some thoughts on the MfS.” This makes no mention at all of his own involvement but discusses the whole problem in general terms, as one interested scholar writing to another. For example: “The material in MfS files reflects the self-image of the MfS (manner of reporting, interpretation, terminology, etc.). Anyone conversant with text analysis and the problems of perception and objectives in creating texts will appreciate the care that is needed in interpreting material of this kind.”

The word “I” does not appear once in his text.

I
FIRST MET
F
RAU
R.
AT A SMALL EXHIBITION ABOUT
the antifascist resistance in Berlin. A white-haired lady in her sixties, she immediately stood out from those around her by her bearing and style, poised, well dressed, well spoken. In fact, she came from a wealthy and cultured German Jewish family. She had converted to communism as a teenage girl in the early 1930s and, soon after Hitler came to power, was expelled from school as a result. She left Germany, met a partner for life and followed him to Moscow. They married and had a son. Soon, like so many others, her husband was arrested in one of the Stalinist purges and spent more than ten years in Soviet camps. She herself had to serve in one of the so-called labor armies; for a time, her son was taken from her and put into an orphanage.

Many years later, in the mid-1950s, they managed to return to what was now the communist part of Germany. They had another child. Her husband never fully recovered from his years in the camps, but here she at least had a good job, like-minded friends and her precious children. But then, shortly before the frontier to West Germany was finally sealed by the building of the Wall, her
firstborn fled to the West with his wife and small child. She did not see them again for ten years.

With these personal tragedies all flowing directly from communist rule, you might think she would have become a violent anti-communist. But with a quiet, melancholy passion she declared herself still convinced of the ultimate lightness and greatness of the communist cause. Was this to make sense of her suffering? If the cause was just and great, then all had not been in vain. She had suffered today so that others might know a better tomorrow. But that was only my guess.

In conversation she indulged no pathos. Instead, she was full of curiosity, anecdote and sharp judgments, delivered in a quick, businesslike, nasal voice. We got on famously. My diary records an enjoyable supper at her quiet flat, with its parquet floors and overflowing wooden bookshelves. Then there was a chance meeting at the East German premiere of Rolf Hochhuth’s play
Lawyers
, which dealt with the scandal of a former Nazi military judge who, after sending people to their deaths, often for trivial offenses, had gone on to hold high office in West Germany.

On April 15, 1980, I find, we went to see
The Peasants
, a play by East Germany’s leading post-Brechtian dramatist, Heiner Müller, and then returned to her flat for what my diary calls a “heart-to-heart.” The diary records her saying to me: “Ah, if you were my son. How well your parents must have brought you up.” I wondered then what my parents would have made of this tribute from a German-Jewish communist. I sympathized with her, admired her, thought of her as a friend.

So I am really saddened when Frau Schulz hands me pages from a file identifying my friend as an informer for an operational group of Main Department XX, which was responsible, among other things, for penetrating and overseeing cultural life, the universities, the churches and what they called “political underground activity.” The first report brings another surprise. It says the playwright Rolf Hochhuth, whom I had met and talked to about his work, had told her that he regarded me as a British spy. “The further deployment of the IM,” it concludes, “is to some extent possible.”

“As per instructions,” begins the next report, dated April 28, 1980, “the contact of an IM of HA XX/OG to the English citizen Gardon-Ash, Timothi, was developed.” There follows information on our visit to the Heiner Müller play and our subsequent conversation about my work on the resistance to Nazism. “To the comment of the IM that such work was overdue in Britain, and to the arguments that the GDR had historically overcome this past—by contrast with the FRG [i.e., West Germany]—Gardon-Ash reacted negatively. He denied the existence of fascist tendencies in the FRG and emphasized that he has many good friends there.”

“Gardon-Ash seemed to be most impressed by Weimar. He would shortly be going there again, to take part in the Shakespeare conference.”

“The IM once again alluded to the comment made by Rolf Hochmuth
[sic]
, who had described Gardon-Ash as a British spy, to which G. replied that Hochmuth, like so many others, reads too many unserious newspapers, according to which every second Englishman abroad must be a spy He did not get embarrassed.”

A third report gives an account, from the same file, of another meeting I had with survivors of the communist resistance to Nazism in Berlin. Whether this is actually a report from Frau R. or from another member of the group is not entirely clear. Asked why I was working on this subject, I apparently replied that Oxford and Cambridge traditionally assign such topics. “A hint by the source [i.e., the Stasi’s informer] that in the twenties and thirties many friends of communism came from these universities (Kim Philby) was met by Gorton-Ash with wordless irony.”

Fifteen years on, I again sit on the same sofa, in the same flat, but with rather different feelings. Frau R. is very old now, but still
soignée
and sharp. When I tell her why I have come to see her again, she says, “So what should I do? Jump out of the window?” She flatly denies knowing that the Stasi had her down as an informer and simply refuses to look at the photocopies I have brought with me from the file.

Then she reminds me of her great sufferings under the communism in which she so long believed. “No, Tim,” she says, “it’s all not so simple.” And as she talks—with pathos now—of the horrors of the camps, of her dead husband, of her faraway son, we both understand that she is placing the weight of her suffering into the scales of my judgment. The weight is heavy. Within minutes I am telling her that I have no right to sit here as her judge. Her secret will be safe with me. She should, please, live her last years in peace and contentment.

But as I leave I can see, in her eyes, that this will haunt her. Not, I think, because of the mere fact of collaboration—she
was, after all, a communist in a communist state—but because working with the secret police, being down in the files as an informer, is low and mean. All this is such a far, far cry from the high ideals of that brave and proud Jewish girl who set out, a whole lifetime ago, to fight for a better world. And, of course, there will still be the lingering fear of exposure, if not through me then perhaps through someone else.

I now almost wish I had never confronted her. By what right, for what good purpose, did I deny an old lady, who had suffered so much, the grace of selective forgetting?

F
ROM THE AUTUMN OF 1980 THE FILE IS FULL OF
Poland. An internal memo notes that I again plan to travel there. How did they know? There is a detailed report on my conversation about “the counterrevolutionary organization KSS ‘KOR’” with an editor of an “anti-Soviet emigré journal” in Bonn. Did they tap my phone or his? On the same sheet, there is information from another source that “because of the situation in Poland, two signals intelligence regiments of unidentified U.S. units have been stationed on the signals espionage object Devil’s Mountain in West Berlin.” Then there are copies of my reports from Poland for
Der Spiegel
. Altogether, it seems to have been these articles and my links with “antisocialist forces” in Poland that finally led to their concerted investigation.

By then I was again based in West Berlin. On October 7, 1980, as the Engels Guards marched off at the end of that military parade, with carnations in their rifle barrels, I drove back through Checkpoint Charlie, taking my last notes and possessions from the small room in Prenzlauer Berg to the large flat in Wilmersdorf. I was based in the Uhlandstrasse for another year and there I
wrote my book about East Germany, for a West German publisher and audience. Extracts from the book were serialized in
Der Spiegel
, to coincide with its publication in the autumn of 1981. Throughout that year, however, my great obsession was really Poland, as the Solidarity revolution rolled from one crisis to the next.

The Stasi, too, were obsessed by Solidarity. While I was with the strikers in the Gdansk shipyard, Comrade Colonel-General Markus Wolf was in Warsaw talking anxiously to his colleagues in the Polish services. They assured him the Polish Party would never recognize an independent trade union. Wolf flew back to East Berlin, rang the foreign minister to give him this reassuring inside information, and the minister said, “Have you listened to the news … ?” In early October Erich Mielke told his senior officers in the Ministry for State Security that what was happening in Poland was a matter of life or death for the East German state. At ground level, my informers’ files—from “Schuldt” to Frau R.—all contain specific inquiries about popular reactions to Solidarity. The whole vast apparatus of the ministry was mobilized to find out whether the East Germans might catch the “Polish disease.”

Poland itself now became an “operational area” for the East German Security Service, a status previously reserved for countries outside the Soviet bloc. They had “operational groups” in all the major Polish cities and a special “working group” in Berlin. It was this group that was to arrange for informers to be attached to me on my trips to Poland. There is no evidence here that this actually happened, but I have already discovered that there is material in my informers’ files that is not in my own. If
the Poles one day decide to open their secret-police files, as the Germans have, I may yet find something there.

What this file does contain is photocopies of papers taken secretly from my luggage at the East German airport of Berlin-Schönefeld, while I was boarding a flight for Warsaw. These include samizdat journals, biographical notes on leading figures in Polish politics, maps, visiting cards, even the covers of books I had with me—and then handwritten pages from my own notebook.

On one of these pages I have noted down, from memory, different formulations of the dissident’s first commandment, which I call the principle of As If. I recall a poem by a contemporary Polish poet, Ryszard Krynicki, dedicated to one of the bravest and most charismatic of Polish dissidents, Adam Michnik:

To this I add comments by the great Russian dissident Andrei Sakharov and by a German friend, Gabriel Berger, who had been imprisoned in East Germany for political reasons: “Sakharov: Behave as if you lived in a free country! Berger: as if the Stasi did not exist.” Found again, in a Stasi file.

Now I take down the original notebook from my shelf in Oxford and read on…. At dawn on a snow-filled January morning I board the special bus that scuttles through the Wall to Schönefeld Airport. “Black ice on the frontier.” Then: “Customs officer at airport. My papers
gone through page by page. An envelope containing DM 2,000. His question, with a probing glance: ‘Is it
yours?’
“Meanwhile, as I see now, they were secretly copying those papers. Next entry: “Middle-aged man on the Interflug jet. Woolly waistcoat and the kind of face that goes with carpet slippers.”