The File (20 page)

“No.” (And anyway, none of your business.) I sense from the crooked smile on his face how he misses that side of the job: the voyeurism, the intimate details, the games they could play with a woman’s life. I suppose today he must content himself with the peeping into private lives done by newspapers and television. A Western version of organized voyeurism, also justified, supposedly, by some higher goal: “state security” then, “the public interest” now.

He returns to his favorite theme: how hard they worked. He was at his desk by 7:15 in the morning, 7:30 at the latest. He had to report to General Kratsch at a quarter to eight. Then it was reading the files, discussing current cases with his colleagues: plans of action, coordination, observation reports, concluding reports, bringing on new informers, checking old ones. Lunch, for department heads and above, was in a special canteen on a slightly raised area in the center of the ministry compound. “Monarchs’ hill,” people called it. Office work continued into the late afternoon, and in the evenings there were those meetings with informers. A twelve-hour day, at least, and many weekends as well.

Did he meet socially with colleagues?

At Christmas or New Year’s they had an office party “in an object, you know.” For example, once they had a party in Wandlitz. “Then the table was nicely laid, there was plenty to eat and drink and there was dancing and a nice atmosphere.” Otherwise they had no time for socializing.

Now he has to work just as long hours, because you can’t live on the pension the former officers get. It is not the full entitlement on their actual salary but 70 percent
of a state pension calculated on the average East German wage. It’s so unjust, he says. It violates the basic principle of equality before the law…. At which his wife, who has been cleaning around the room, exclaims angrily, “There’s no point!” and slams the door so hard that the handle falls off. (From his personnel file, I learn that his wife and three daughters all worked for the Stasi.)

Yes—he goes on—the social security, that was one of the really good things about East Germany. And now there’s all this insecurity and crime and unemployment. What use is freedom if you don’t have the money to enjoy it? He sees all the difficulties now among his customers. They badly want his private insurance policies, because the state no longer provides security, but often they can’t afford the premiums.

From the world of state security to the world of private insurance, Alfred Fritz personifies a much larger transition. Yesterday, the officer in gray uniform, today the salesman in black jeans; but inside, it’s the same old Fritz.

M
AJOR
R
ISSE HAS MOVED TO
D
RESDEN
. I
OBTAIN HIS
address from the local Residents Registration Office. You can find almost anyone’s address, anywhere in Germany, just by asking.

He is not at home. Looking around for something to do while waiting, I see in the middle distance a temple-like building with a large inscription that says “German Hygiene Museum.” Inside, there are special shows on the Pill and AIDS, and a permanent exhibition entitled Digestion, with vast illuminated plastic innards looming above you: stomach, bile duct, upper colon, lower colon, rectum, each in a different color. I ask a white-haired lady behind the counter for directions to the “glass cow,” a transparent, life-size model, showing all the bones, internal organs, brains and nerves. She says, “Go through AIDS into Digestion, and the cow’s on your right.”

The most famous exhibit is not the glass cow but the glass person, a woman, standing with arms raised on a table that has buttons marked with the names of her different parts: liver, heart, kidneys, and so on. Press a button and the part lights up. The attendant tells me that this model is new. The old one was getting rather worn,
so after unification they made a brand-new person. “Doesn’t she look good? But inside she’s just the same.”

When I reach Klaus Risse on the telephone in the evening, he says he would like to talk. He’s interested in seeing the ministry’s work described more “objectively.” He has a strong Saxon accent and seems chatty, as the Saxons often are.

“Could we meet now?” I ask, late though it is. “I hoped to get back to Berlin this evening.” No, that’s impossible, he’s expecting his wife any minute. But we could meet for breakfast tomorrow. Eight o’clock, then, in the foyer of the hotel? Agreed. As I take a room for the night, I wonder if he will come after all. Won’t his wife try to dissuade him?

Meanwhile I study my photocopied pages from his personnel card and file. Born near Dresden in 1938, his father killed at the front in 1944: the missing father, again. An internal ministry questionnaire asks if he had ever traveled outside the GDR. His answer: “1954—1½ hrs. Westberlin, with a friend, looking at the shops.” In 1975 he moves from Dresden to department II/9 in Berlin. From 1978 to 1983 he is head of section A, responsible for the British. His hobby is fishing.

On the personnel-card photograph he looks pretty ugly, but the man who waits in the foyer the next morning has a pleasant, open face and clear eyes. He is neatly dressed in white shirt and tie, brown jacket and step-in shoes. His opening line is much like that of his former colleagues: “I wanted to work for a better world.” But soon he leaves that well-trodden path. The system went wrong, he says, because it was bound to go wrong, because
of human nature. People can’t be transformed, turned into something other than they are. Communism failed to allow for what he calls “the inner
Schweinehund.”
It could only have worked if people had been angels. His judgment is simple but not shallow: that was communism’s basic flaw.

Of course, he did not know this back in 1945, when they started to rebuild from nothing. His father had been killed on active service. One of his brothers was horribly run over by a tractor, dragging antitank defenses through the village in the last days of the war. His mother, a farm laborer, saw her son’s head crushed under the wheels. The family was bombed out, all their possessions were destroyed. From April to October he went barefoot: “We were the poorest of the poor.” But his mother kept them going; first his mother and then the state. He did well at primary school and the state gave him the maximum scholarship to go on to a boarding school. The state helped, but it was his mother who scraped and saved to buy his clothes and books, to see him through. His voice chokes with emotion at the memory.

At eighteen he had to choose. He loved nature and wanted to study fishery at the university. Fishing was already his passion. But they—“they”—had other plans for him. They said, Do something for the state that has done so much for you. So he joined the ministry, working first in his local town, Pirna, then in Dresden, then in Berlin, but always on “line two”—counterintelligence.

Looking back now, he detects in himself a process of steady political disillusionment. He had a close friend on one of the collective farms who told him how it really was down there, in the real world. He was maddened by absurd
stories in the press about the production targets of the Five-Year Plan always being outdone. He saw the contradictions between theory and practice and the hypocrisy of rulers who—he quotes Heine—“in private drank wine and in public preached water.” And there were things that came up in his work. He pauses, shakes his head: “For example, there’s something I’ve never told anyone before….”

At one of their training courses, when he was still in Dresden, the instructor read out a letter written by a woman to her husband, or perhaps he was just her boyfriend, he doesn’t remember. It was such a wonderful letter, so wise, so deep, so full of inner warmth and love. His voice again chokes with emotion: “I’ve never forgotten it.”

But why was the letter being read out to the Stasi officers?

“Oh, because the man was an informer, an IM.” The woman obviously suspected something, but the Stasi case officer had worked out a line with him and he had managed to keep her trust.

“That’s how you should work” was the instructor’s message. But Klaus Risse received, in his heart, a very different message.

He did his job. But the doubts kept growing—or so he sees it now, with the ordering power of hindsight. There were the long hours, too, and the absurd restrictions. You couldn’t marry without the ministry’s approval. If your wife’s father or even uncle had been in the SS, you would have to choose between her and the job. You couldn’t buy a house without permission. You
couldn’t travel abroad without permission. Why, you weren’t even allowed to grow a beard! I think of General Kratsch, clean shaven in the photograph on his personnel card but bearded now.

He wanted to get out, he says, “but I didn’t have the courage.” He had no other profession. He was afraid of the consequences. However, in 1989 he had already applied to come back to Dresden as what was called an “officer on special mission,” one of the growing number of such officers deployed by the Stasi in ordinary civilian jobs. Were it not for the Turn—like most people in East Germany he says “the Turn,”
die Wende
, to describe the end of the GDR—he would today be working as an “officer on special mission” in this very hotel.

Instead, he looked after security at the State Bank in Dresden for a year, was fired when the West German Deutsche Bank took over, and now sells ventilation systems for restaurants. “The Western firms came looking for us,” he says. “They knew we were able, hardworking people.” But it’s a tough new world, where money determines everything and people “walk over corpses.” There are many losers, here in the East. “Some people have already jumped out of the window in my apartment block.” This Western system isn’t the answer either. But he doesn’t know what is.

Meanwhile, his wife nearly lost her job when his name appeared on a list of Stasi officers published in the press. Even close friends had started doubting him after the sensational revelations about the Stasi in the media, stories about torture chambers, where people were made to stand up to their necks in water and so on.
There were bad things, he admits it, but they were in department XX, not in his department.

So everyone I talk to has someone else to blame. Those who worked for the state say, “It was not us, it was the Party.” Those who worked for the Party say, “It was not us, it was the Stasi.” Come to the Stasi, and those who worked for foreign intelligence say, “It was not us, it was the others.” Talk to them, and they say, “It was not our department, it was XX.” Talk to Herr Zeiseweis from department XX and he says, “But it wasn’t me.”

When the communists seized power in Central Europe, they talked of using “salami tactics” to cut away the democratic opposition, slice by slice. Here, after communism, we have the salami tactics of denial.

Risse helps to explain some of the details in my case. The article from the Criminal Code at the beginning of the file was, he says, a formality. However, if it came to a prosecution, then the ministry lawyers were scrupulous to a fault. They insisted on proof that would hold up in court. The ideological assessment in the opening report—“bourgeois liberal”—was important. It meant that I was somewhere in between: not “progressive” but also not “reactionary.” These were the key categories.

How did they consult the KGB, as indicated in the plan of action? Well, a memo was sent down to Karlshorst, where “the friends” sat. So they, too, called them “the friends”? Yes, it was quite usual to write on a file “Consult with the friends” or just “Consult with the friend.” But the friends weren’t actually very friendly. “They treated us as small fry”—at best, as very junior
partners; at worst, as representatives of an occupied country.

And the working group on Solidarity in Poland? Yes, he remembers that, he was even meant to go to Poland himself, which he wasn’t at all happy about. But he doesn’t think the group was very effective.

As for the early observation reports, before I had even moved to East Berlin: the ministry had a whole troop at the Friedrichstrasse frontier crossing, ready to pick up and follow anyone who looked at all suspect or interesting.

The whole department, II/9, had perhaps twenty to thirty officers. His own British section, section A, had five men. Each year they ran only some five to ten Operational Person Controls (OPK) and at most two or three of the top-level Operational Cases (OV). So the ratio of watchers to watched was one to three, perhaps even one to two. How on earth did they fill five twelve-hour days a week following so few people? What did they
do
all day?

“A good question,” says Risse—and one he finds difficult to answer. There were a lot of meetings, of course. The work on the OPK and OV files was minutely detailed, as I have seen for myself. The business of running informers, and winning new ones, was very time-consuming.

I ask him, as I have asked the others, whether they caught any agents. No, not in his time. “Fritz, Alfred”—he refers to him like an index card—may have told me about that one lady diplomat they nearly turned.

Didn’t he have any scruples about blackmail based on
details of a woman’s private life picked up by hidden microphones?

Yes, he did have scruples, but “every secret service does it”—he uses exactly the same phrase as Fritz.

Coming back to the claimed idealism of his postwar generation, I ask if it was different among his younger colleagues. What about Lieutenant Wendt, for example?

“Ah, Wendt, Henning,” he exclaims, smiling. Wendt, Henning, was hardworking, careful, spoke well, a good desk officer. But he was not good at recruiting new agents because he was overcautious and “contact-shy.”

I say that I have some experience of this, since Wendt is proving most reluctant to meet me.

“Ah yes, that’s him all right! But perhaps his wife doesn’t want him to. You know, my wife didn’t want me to. When she came back last night she said, ‘You’re crazy to talk to him. You shouldn’t go….’”

Was she right? I think not. For I take away from this conversation the impression of an intelligent, fundamentally decent man who came, all too understandably from that childhood, to serve his country in an evil place. A man who did not have the courage to get out but who has truly learned from his mistakes. As I walk back to my hotel room to write up my notes, after saying good-bye and wishing him well, there forms in my mind a startling sentence: “Klaus Risse is a good man.” Not just a man with a carefully separated sphere of private decency, like the concentration-camp officer who murdered people during the day, then went home to listen to Bach and
play with his children. Not just a better-quality Zeiseweis. I mean a man with a real goodness of heart and a conscience that is not switched off at the office door.