The File (3 page)

A special law, passed by the parliament of united Germany in 1991, carefully regulates how the files can be used. Frau Schulz has read my file before I did because, in scrupulous bureaucratic implementation of that law, she is supposed to photocopy the pages on which the names of Stasi victims or innocent third parties appear, to black out those names on the copies and then to copy the pages again, just to make quite sure the name cannot be deciphered using a strong light. She is also meant to cover up any passage containing personal information about other people that is not directly related to the inquiry. But what is not relevant to understanding a secret police that worked precisely by collecting and exploiting the most intimate details of private life?

The effect of reading a file can be terrible. I think of the now famous case of Vera Wollenberger, a political activist from my friend Werner Krätschell’s parish in Pankow, who discovered from reading her file that her husband, Knud, had been informing on her ever since they met. They would go for a walk with the children on Sunday, and on Monday Knud would pour it all out to his Stasi case officer. She thought she had been married to Knud; she found she had been married to IM “Donald.”
(Vera refers to him in a memoir as “Knud-Donald.” They are now divorced.) Or the writer Hans Joachim Schädlich, who found that his elder brother had been informing on him. And they only discovered from the files. Had the files not been opened, they might still be brother and brother, man and wife—their love enduring, a fortress sure upon the rock of lies.

There are also lighter side effects. After the law came into force, students at the Humboldt University in East Berlin would boast to their girlfriends: “Of course I’ve applied to see my file. I dread to think what I’ll find there, but I simply have to know.” Luscious Sabine would be really impressed. Then came the dreadful letter from the Authority: so far as we can establish, you have no file. Humiliation. Sabine turned to someone else, who had.

When I tell people about my file, they say strange things like “How lucky!” or “What a privilege!” If they themselves had anything to do with Eastern Europe, they say, “Yes, I must apply to see my file,” or “It seems that mine was destroyed,” or “Gauck tells me mine is probably in Moscow.” No one ever says, “I’m sure they didn’t have one on me.” One could describe the syndrome in Freudian terms: file envy.

Actually, mine is very modest compared with many. What is my single binder, against the writer Jürgen Fuchs’s thirty? My 325 pages against the 40,000 devoted to the dissident singer Wolf Biermann? Yet small keys can open large doors. This is a way into much bigger rooms. Wherever there has been a secret police, not just in Germany, people often protest that their files are wholly unreliable, full of distortions and fabrications.
How better to test that claim than to see what they had on me? After all, I should know what I was really up to. And what did my officers and informers think they were doing? Can the files, and the men and women behind them, tell us anything more about communism, the Cold War and the sense or nonsense of spying? This systematic opening of secret-police records to every citizen who is in them and wants to know, is without precedent. There has been nothing like it, anywhere, ever. Was it right? What has it done to those involved? The experience may even teach us something about history and memory, about ourselves, about human nature. So if the form of this book seems self-indulgent, the purpose is not. I am but a window, a sample, a means to an end, the object in this experiment.

To do this, I must explore not just a file but a life: the life of the person I was then. This is not the same thing as “my life.” What we usually call “my life” is a constantly rewritten version of our own past. “My life” is the mental autobiography with which and by which we all live. What really happened is quite another matter.

Searching for a lost self, I am also searching for a lost time. And for answers to the question How did the one shape the other? Historical time and personal time, the public and private, great events and our own lives. Writing about the large areas of human experience ignored by conventional political history, the historian Keith Thomas quotes Samuel Johnson:

But looking back I see how much the experience of my own heart, at least, was caused by our modern “laws and kings”: by the different regimes of East and West, and the conflict between them. Perhaps, after all, Johnson was expressing not a universal but a purely local truth. Happy the country where that was ever true.

I
SET OFF FOR BERLIN ON MY TWENTY-THIRD BIRTHDAY
, July 12, 1978, driving my new, dark blue Alfa Romeo up the motorway from London to the Harwich ferry terminal. From the Hoek van Holland, I raced down the autobahn to the Helmstedt frontier crossing, at the “iron curtain” between West and East Germany, then nervously observed the speed limit on the designated transit route across East Germany to West Berlin. I lived in West Berlin for a year and a half, before driving through Checkpoint Charlie on January 7, 1980, to that room in East Berlin. My original purpose was to write an Oxford doctoral thesis about Berlin under Hitler.

For this period, from July 1978 to January 1980, the chronology I recently compiled for my history of Germany and the divided continent lists major political events from “Summit of world’s leading industrial countries (G7) in Bonn” to “President Carter announces sanctions against Soviet Union, interrupts ratification of SALT II treaty, and threatens boycott of Moscow Olympics.” In between it notes the election of Karol Wojtyla as Pope John Paul II and his first papal visit to Poland, the first direct elections to the European Parliament,
Nato’s “twin-track” decision (to deploy new nuclear missiles in Europe if the Soviet Union would not negotiate a reduction in theirs) and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. We see now that this was the buildup to the last great confrontation of the Cold War: Reagan versus Brezhnev, American Cruise missiles against Soviet SS20s, the Polish revolution in the East and the peace movement in the West.

My own diary has a quite different chronology. Instead of the G7 summit, I note a long conversation with the poet James Fenton about German literature, Macaulay, and the (remote) possibility of journalism’s being an art form. Instead of the crucial January 1979 Guadeloupe summit, which led to the Nato twin-track decision, I have lunch with Jay Reddaway, a friend from undergraduate days, at the Café Moskau in East Berlin and then an evening in West Berlin that apparently proceeds via drinks at Bilitis to dinner at Foofie’s (can this be real?) and then more drink at Ax Bax. The pope in Poland does feature, but the first direct elections to the European Parliament find me having breakfast at the Café Einstein, visiting an art gallery and failing to complete an article for
The Spectator
.

Where the historical chronology dourly records “Gromyko in Bonn,” I am in Franconia, drinking too much smoked beer and visiting the scene of Hitler’s Nuremberg rally. In my diary, Nato’s momentous twin-track decision is completely ignored. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan finds me on the night train to visit Albert Speer at his gingerbread house in Heidelberg. While Jimmy Carter is threatening sanctions against the Soviet Union, I am occupied with preparations for a
party. So much for living “in the heat of the Cold War”—to use the deliberately mixed metaphor of my friend Mark Wood, the Reuters correspondent in East Berlin.

For this year and a half, the Stasi’s intelligence is fragmentary. There is the observation report on my East Berlin evening with “Beret.” In a summary report from department XX/4 (churches) they have correctly identified “Beret,” as well as listing two other West Berlin contacts, Ingrid [surname blacked out by Frau Schulz] and Heinrich [surname blacked out], together with my West Berlin telephone number. They also record that I was born in a place called Winbredow (that is, Wimbledon), describe my Oxford college as “St. ansowts” (St. Antony’s) and give a date wrong by three months for a journey to Poland. They indicate that I am working, together with the English citizen Morris [surname blacked out], on the conflict between the churches and the regime in Nazi Germany. However, “it has been established that G. has extensive knowledge of cultural monuments and places, cultural
[sic]
and cultural personalities of the GDR and especially of the Bauhaus problematic. In June 1979 G. first identified himself as a so-called freelance contributor to the English weekly ‘Spekta,’ which wished to write a report on the antifascist resistance struggle.” The man from Spekta.

This information derives mainly from department XX/4’s own inquiry into the Reverend Beech-tree and from a four-page report by Lieutenant Küntzel, of the Erfurt office, on a meeting with Contact Person “Georg” and IMV “Michaela.” The V after the IM indicates that “Michaela” belonged to the Stasi’s highest class of informer,
those deployed in direct contact with the enemy. Lieutenant Küntzel reports that on June 30, 1979, Dr. Georg [surname blacked out], living in Schloss [name blacked out] in Weimar, was visited by an unknown person with an English or American accent who introduced himself as Tim Gartow-Ash, a freelance contributor to the English weekly “Spacktator.”

This blacking out is, as you can see, often ineffectual, for there cannot have been many Dr. Georg [somebodies] living in a
Schloss
in Weimar. On the other hand, the law on the Stasi files grants the right to anonymity only to innocent third parties or victims, not to collaborators. A glance at my diary establishes the identity of Dr. Georg, as well as the fact that the Stasi has again got the date wrong.

Dr. Georg was one of those older Jewish communists who were among the most interesting people to talk to in East Germany, indeed throughout communist-ruled Europe. I probably knew at the time I visited him that he had been the editor of an East Berlin daily paper and head of an officially tolerated satirical cabaret, and perhaps I also knew that he had spent the Nazi period in England, where he worked for Reuters. It was only later I learned that he had met in England and subsequently married Alice “Litzi” Kohlman, the warm and energetic Austro-Hungarian-Jewish woman who had been Kim Philby’s first wife and, by some accounts, instrumental in leading the young Englishman on to work as a Soviet spy. Only from this Stasi report do I discover that Dr. Georg had himself worked for Soviet intelligence during his time at Reuters.

Now aware of that background, I am hardly surprised
that he was suspicious of the story with which I came to him. According to Lieutenant Küntzel, Dr. Georg rapidly established that I did not actually know the person—Sanda [surname blacked out]—who I claimed had suggested that I should visit him. When I asked how he came to speak such good English he told me that he had spent many years in England, where he worked for Reuters: “At this G. pretended to be interested and asked if one [name blacked out] had at that time been director of ‘Reuter.’ When this question was answered affirmatively, G. broke out in expressions of delight: ‘Imagine, what a coincidence, Chancellor’s son is now my superior
(Vorgesetzter).’
The whole outburst was well feigned, but [Dr. Georg] could detect that G. knew about his work for ‘Reuter.’ Having become suspicious and being strengthened in the feeling that the attempt to make contact with him had another character than that claimed, [Dr. Georg] became reticent towards G., without, however, appearing impolite.”

This passage illustrates in miniature how small distortions creep into the Stasi records. For example, I would certainly never have referred to the genial Alexander Chancellor, then editor of
The Spectator
, as my
Vorgesetzter
, a word with clear implications of hierarchical command. This must be Dr. Georg’s word or—more likely—Lieutenant Küntzel’s, for the lieutenant lived in a world where everyone had a
Vorgesetzter
. Yet there it is: attributed to me as part of a direct quotation. Now suppose for a moment that the content of this passage were altogether more serious and compromising; suppose that the interpretation of the whole passage hinged—as it sometimes can—on the one word; suppose I had subsequently
become a prominent East German politician; and suppose that I woke up one morning to find the passage quoted against me as a headline in a West German tabloid: quote unquote. Calls for resignation follow. Who would believe me when I protested: “No, I didn’t say that! Well, not
exactly
. And anyway, they’ve got the date wrong. And the title of
The Spectator
. And the spelling of my name …”

Yet despite the small distortions and inaccuracies, this account basically rings true. Whether or not I actually knew beforehand about Dr. Georg’s connection with Reuters—of which Alexander Chancellor’s father, Christoper Chancellor, had been general manager—I can just hear myself overplaying my delight at this rather unremarkable coincidence, in the hope of keeping a rather sticky conversation going and getting Dr. Georg to talk more freely.

“At this time the wife (IMV ‘Michaela’) of [Dr. Georg], who had been in the kitchen, entered the living room,” the report continues. “She was introduced by her husband with the words: ‘My wife, director of the Weimar Art Galleries.’ The IMV thought the visit was to her husband … so she was all the more surprised that G. immediately brought the subject around to the exhibition on the Bauhaus organized by the Art Galleries. He explained that he had seen the exhibition and was fascinated by it. However he could not understand why the Art Galleries had not issued a catalog. The way the question was posed suggested that he would have liked to have heard from the IMV that this was impossible for reasons of cultural policy. The IMV did not go into that, but explained it by the paper shortage….

“Angered by the rudeness of G., who now only let [Dr. Georg] be a silent listener to the conversation, no longer mentioning the original subject, [Dr. Georg] took his leave of G. on the pretense of having to run an errand in town. At this point the conversation had lasted some forty minutes. Now G. explained to the IMV that he was working on an article about the development of the artistic and cultural life of the GDR and was therefore interested in the IMV’s comments. He posed such questions as: