The File (21 page)

I have seen him only once, as he is now, not as he was then, in uniform, inspiring fear. Perhaps then his face really was as ugly as it looks in the photograph on the personnel card. There may well be things that he did or was involved in, horrible things, that he has not told me, or has preferred to forget, or has simply forgotten. Had I really been a victim of the Stasi, let alone a direct victim of his actions, I might feel very differently. But unless I find other evidence, I think it so.

H
EINZ
-J
OACHIM
W
ENDT: BORN
A
UGUST
16, 1952,
IN
the village of Bad Kleinen. When he is still a baby, the family moves to the nearby Baltic port of Wismar, where both his parents work in the state fishery business. While attending the Gerhart Hauptmann elementary school he proves especially good at sports, so at thirteen he is sent to a boarding school in Rostock that specializes in developing young athletes. (This was part of the highly organized system of state support that contributed to East Germany’s winning so many Olympic medals.) At fifteen he has to transfer to the ordinary local day school “because of a serious sports injury,” as his handwritten curriculum vitae notes. In 1969 he becomes secretary of the Free German Youth group in his class.

In the spring of that year he is recruited by the Stasi as a “social collaborator for security.” He writes and signs a short declaration, presumably dictated to him, in which he promises to “support the Ministry for State Security so far as I am able” and confirms that he has been instructed “that I may not talk to anyone about my connection with the MfS.” He is sixteen.

When he has passed the age of consent, two years
later, they propose to turn him into an IM. The five-page proposal starts by reviewing his background and Stasi career to date: “He delivered written reports on problems and people and appeared punctually for the scheduled meetings.” For the recruitment interview the candidate should be told how “the enemy attempts to have a negative influence on youth with the aid of political-ideological diversion.” The officer should explain that the ministry tries to prevent this, but “as we cannot do this on our own and according to the constitution of the GDR every GDR citizen is co-responsible for the defense of our state we turn to him and need his support.” If, as they assume, he agrees, he will receive the code name “Dieter Fischer.” Recruitment will take place on February 23, 1971, at 1900 hours in the conspiratorial flat of “Chef.”

A handwritten pledge is in the file. It concludes: “I may not speak with anyone about the form of cooperation [i.e., with the ministry], also not with my closest relatives.”

His regular informer’s file contains a few reports on teachers and schoolmates, but a year and a half later this file is closed because, at the age of nineteen, Heinz-Joachim Wendt commits himself to serve for at least ten years as a professional soldier in the Ministry for State Security. This was an alternative to the usual military service. Now he writes out in neat longhand a four-page pledge to “conduct the struggle against the enemies of the German Democratic Republic and of the socialist world-camp with all firmness.” He swears to “behave according to the commandments of socialist ethics and morality” and to be always watchful for “the criminal
methods of the imperialist espionage- and agent-centers.” He agrees that neither he nor any of his close family should travel to, or have any contacts with, people from West Berlin, West Germany or other capitalist countries.

This is 1971. An assessment of November 1973 reads: “He is open and honest. In the past he was easily influenced. After several discussions he turned off this weakness of character.” Just turned it off, like an electric light inside the glass person at the German Hygiene Museum.

He goes on to make a fine career. In 1974 he moves to Berlin, to join the expanding department II/9. He’s a desk officer in section A, the British section. The ministry approves his marriage, although on certain conditions (which, however, clearly belong to the “protection-worthy interests” identified by the law on the Stasi files). In 1984 he becomes section head, as successor to Risse, and in 1986 he is promoted to deputy head of the whole department. At the same time, he takes a degree at the Juridical Higher School in Potsdam, the Stasi’s university. According to his diploma, his studies in Marxist-Leninist Philosophy, Scientific Communism, Criminal Tactics and Imperialist Media Policy are all “good,” but those in International Legal Relations only “satisfactory.”

His salary and rank rise accordingly: sergeant, sub-lieutenant, lieutenant, senior lieutenant, captain. An assessment in March 1989 is very favorable, although suggesting the need for “a more understanding approach to the constraints and limited room for maneuver of the higher leadership levels.” He heads the department
Party propaganda group, and his free time is spent on “political and literary reading and visiting sporting and cultural events.” In April he is proposed for promotion to major. This is formally confirmed by ministerial order on October 7, 1989, the fortieth anniversary of the state. A major at thirty-seven: time for celebration. But within a few weeks the whole state has collapsed. What a fall it must have been for him.

Wendt is the most elusive of all. First, the Insider Committee tells me he is dead. Then the Gauck Authority comes up with the wrong Wendt. When they find the right file, and therefore his first name, I look in the Berlin telephone book: there are two pages of Wendts, none of them Heinz-Joachim. Directory inquiries cannot help. I drive out to the old address given on his personnel card. This is in Hohenschönhausen, an outlying district of East Berlin that was heavily populated by the Stasi. I find a nondescript apartment block that used to be a Stasi house but is now a hostel for asylum seekers.

On further inquiry, the Insider Committee thinks he may have moved back to his family in Wismar. Driving to the Baltic fishing port, pausing only to admire its redbrick Gothic church and market square, I find his parents in a new flat. As soon as I ask for him through the intercom, his mother sounds alarmed and defensive. In the time it takes me to climb the stairs to their flat, she has telephoned her son. A red-cheeked, angry fishwife confronts me at the door with the news that Heinz-Joachim does not want to talk to me. “He’s not interested.” Through the half-open door, I glimpse a distraught old man. As I drive back to Berlin I imagine the distress of
parents whose son’s life has gone wrong: a distress I have just reawakened.

I then write to his parents, apologize for the intrusion, and enclose a letter to Wendt explaining why I would like to hear his side of the story. He replies, from his parents’ address, with a courteous, carefully worded letter.

“Of course I can remember you and some of your publications,” he writes, and “I have for some time thought that you would one day address this subject.” However, he cannot help me in my work. His reasons are of a “purely private nature,” not political or professional. He thinks that even without a conversation I should be able to assess the facts in the file “reasonably objectively.” “The distance of time brings different ways of seeing. At least in my case, since I see various things with other eyes today than I did fifteen years ago or in the so-called
Wendezeit
[the “time of the Turn,” that is, 1989–90].” He asks me to respect the seriousness of his motives and to refrain from “further contact-attempts”—a sudden lapse into Stasi-speak. He wishes me “much success” with the project.

Meanwhile I have inquired at the Residents Registration Offices in both Wismar and Berlin, and finally been given a computer printout with an address in Berlin. Writing to him again at that address, I ask whether he could at least explain in a few sentences what he means by “see[ing] various things with other eyes today.” I repeat what I said in my first letter, that as things stand I will have to write about his work only on the basis of the files, and “for the historian that is always very unsatisfactory, since the files only tell us a part of the
truth. For a really fair description one also needs the viewpoint of the historical actor.” I add: “Also in the spirit of fairness, I would like to ask you directly: would the use of your name have possible professional or personal consequences for you or your family, which in the present situation I cannot assess?’ (It sounds less awkward in German.)

In fact, I discuss with East German friends whether I should give all the Stasi officers the benefit of anonymity. On the whole, they think not. Certainly it would be absurd in the case of General Kratsch, one of the top men in the ministry. Kaulfuss, Fritz and Risse were senior officers—all colonels by the end—and are now either retired or near the end of their working lives. Their children are grown up. They did not request anonymity when we talked. But Wendt, now in his mid-forties, still has half a working life ahead of him. If a colleague or superior were to read the German edition of this book, he or his wife might have difficulties at work, as Risse’s wife did after his name was published in the newspaper. Above all, perhaps Wendt has young children, who might be teased or taunted as a result. I simply don’t know. The atmosphere now prevailing in East Germany is less hysterical and better informed about the Stasi than in the early 1990s, but I must give him the chance.

Three weeks later, after I have sent him another letter to check that he received mine, he replies: “So as not to appear impolite I hereby confirm receipt of your letters of September 10 and 26.” But he reaffirms that “for whatever reasons, I will not help you. I hope that you do not feel personally offended on this account. As the conversations with my former colleagues show, this probably
does not happen to you often.” He hopes that I will accept his answer as final “and will refrain from further contact-attempts.” He concludes: “As things look at present, I cannot see the necessity for special personal, familial or professional caution [about being named]. Please proceed with the completion of your research work as you consider right and appropriate.” I reply saying that I regret but must respect his decision, and will send him a copy of the book.

I do regret it, not just because he was the officer directly on my case and presumably—if the ratio of officers to those they watched was as Risse remembers—spent many working hours in 1981–82 observing me through his then eyes. I regret it particularly because he was of a different generation from the others. Their careers were all directly shaped by the war: theirs were postwar lives. Wendt, by contrast, was my contemporary, just three years older than me. Like me, he grew up entirely in the divided Europe of the Cold War. Unlike me, he knew nothing but the country and system into which he was born. In its dry, bureaucratic way his file is quite eloquent about how he came to do what he did, but in person he could tell so much more. Perhaps after reading this book he will change his mind? Or perhaps not.

T
HE
S
TASI NOT ONLY BANNED ME UNTIL THE END OF
1989; they also put my personal details into the System of Unified Registration of Data on the Enemy, known by its Russian initials as SOUD. Originally proposed by Yuri Andropov when he was head of the KGB, this was an elaborate system, based in Moscow, for exchanging information between the secret police of all the Soviet bloc countries. There were no less than fifteen categories of Enemy, starting with secret agents, but including people belonging to “subversive organizations” and “centers of political-ideological diversion,” “provocateurs,” “banned and undesirable persons,” “hostile diplomats,” “hostile correspondents,” terrorists and smugglers. I was placed in Category 5: “Persons who execute commissions for subversive activity against the states of the socialist community on behalf of hostile intelligence services, centers of political-ideological diversion, Zionist, hostile émigré, clerical and other organizations.” My “center of political-ideological diversion” was identified as the BBC.

According to a study made by the Gauck Authority, the Stasi was the largest single contributor to the System
and, within the Stasi, Main Department II was the chief supplier of names. Under “terrorists” they listed 132 members of the Red Army Faction and then another nine to whom East Germany had itself granted asylum: the enemy as guest. They also entered ninety-seven members of the Viking Youth, the neo-Nazi group that attacked me in West Berlin. The Gauck Authority’s experts point out that the SOUD data are almost certainly still at the disposal of the Russian intelligence service—a mildly disconcerting thought. However, they also conclude that at the time the System was largely ineffective, especially since most of the Soviet bloc services kept their best sources to themselves.

Being put into the System certainly did not prevent me from traveling to other countries in the bloc Russia and Hungary, for example, I visited officially as a journalist. The Polish authorities at last lifted their ban in the spring of 1983, allowing me to follow the pope’s second pilgrimage to his native land and watch the great actor exhort his people to “persevere in hope.” “Though the totalitarian communist system remains in outward form,” I wrote, “in reality it is still being dismantled from within.” Thereafter, each visa had to be wrung out of the Polish embassy, but I went back as often as I could.

To Czechoslovakia I traveled as a “tourist.” Before flying to Prague, I carefully concealed the names and addresses of the people I was going to visit, writing them, in abbreviated form, in minuscule pencil letters on the back of a Eurocheck. I never telephoned dissident friends, just appeared on the doorstep, after checking that I was not being followed. I crept through the woods to evade the police outside Václav Havel’s country farm-house.
Then I wrote as “A Special Correspondent” or, once, as “Mark Brandenburg.”

I also carried money, books and messages to the embattled dissidents in several countries. These came from their exiled friends and comrades in the West and from small charities in which I was active: the Jagiellonian Trust for Poland or our innocuously named Central and East European Publishing Project, which supported samizdat publishers and underground journals across Central and Eastern Europe. Again, I was not alone in this. Although it remained very much a minority activity right up until 1989, people at almost every point on the political spectrum were involved, from neoconservatives like Roger Scruton (the moving spirit of the Jagiellonian Trust) through lifelong liberals like Ralf Dahrendorf (the chairman of our Central and East European Publishing Project) to neo-Trotskyites like Oliver Macdonald (of the journal
Labour Focus on Eastern Europe)
. As in war, we were united by the common cause.