The File (5 page)

When he had gone, I noted the contrast with Jay, the British public school and Oxford friend who had just visited me: “from the reserved, oblique, ironical, snobbish, inhibited, emotionally-tangled Englishman to the open, direct, earnest, left-wing, jargon-ridden, liberated, emotionally-tangled German.” A few days later the telephone rang. I picked up.

“Hello, is Heiner there?” asked the anonymous caller.

“No.”

“Well, are you gay?”—he used the German word
schwul
.

“No,” I said, and put the phone down. Seconds later, it rang again.

“Hello,” said the same voice. “Are you an Englishman?”

“Yes.”

“Well, what I meant was: do you sleep with men?”

“No!”

Heiner, I now discover from Bernd, had decided a couple of years earlier that he was homosexual and at that time was exploring the matter, programmatically. But I don’t think that he was necessarily making a pass at me. He may just have thought he was making me feel at home.

Bernd tells me that Heiner recently died of AIDS.

I
HAD MIXED FEELINGS ABOUT THE SIXTY-EIGHTERS
. They were interesting just because they were so unlike most people I had known. I could understand and sympathize with some of their political projects: for example, Friedrich’s campaign to expose the failure to do justice to the victims of Nazi injustice. However, they seemed to me often hysterical, self-obsessed and self-indulgent. I tired of their moaning about problems that struck me either as self-created or as minor compared with those in the East. Heiner told me that President Carter’s visit to West Berlin was just like a visit by Brezhnev to an East European satrap, yet he appeared totally indifferent to what was happening in the professedly socialist state of East Germany, just a few miles away, behind the Wall. For them, the Wall, which encircled West Berlin, seemed to be nothing but a huge mirror in which they could contemplate themselves and their own “relationships.” “The paper narcissi,” says my diary.

Yet if the sixty-eighters were exotic to me, this heavy-shoed, tweed-jacketed young Englishman must have been a strange apparition to them. Looking back, he now seems pretty odd to me. People may envy the possessor
of a file, but being carried off by your poisoned madeleine is not always a comfortable experience. In his novel
Ferdydurke
, the Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz imagines waking up one day to find himself sixteen again. He hears his “long-buried, squawky little rooster voice,” sees his “ungrown nose on an unformed face” and senses that his ill-mixed limbs are laughing at each other: the nose mocking the leg, the leg sneering at the ear. Time-travel with a file can be rather like that: a bad trip.

What the Stasi’s Lieutenant Küntzel called my “legends” were in truth less cover stories than different strands of an unformed life. Like the confused ambitious twenty-three-year-old students who now come to my rooms in Oxford to ask me for life advice, I wanted to do everything at once: to write a doctorate about Berlin in the Third Reich, and a book about East Germany, and an essay about the Bauhaus, and brilliant reports for
The Spectator
, and probably to be George Orwell, foreign secretary and war hero too. Cover stories that I told myself.

The diary reminds me of all the fumblings, the clumsiness, the pretentiousness and snobbery—and the insouciance with which I barged into other people’s lives. Embarrassment apart, there is the sheer difficulty of reconstructing how you really thought and felt. How much easier to do it to other people! At times this past self is such a stranger to me that where I have written “I” in these last pages I almost feel it should be “he.”

Personal memory is such a slippery customer. Nietzsche catches it brilliantly in one of his epigrams: “‘I did that,’ says my memory. ‘I can’t have done that,’ says my
pride and remains adamant. In the end—memory gives way.” The temptation is always to pick and choose your past, just as it is for nations: to remember Shakespeare and Churchill but forget Northern Ireland. But we must take it all or leave it all; and I must say “I.”

F
OR ALL THE DISTRACTIONS, MY DIARY STILL RECORDS
my spending long, weary hours working through Gestapo files, in the sinister-sounding Secret Prussian State Archive, and the records of the Nazis’ so-called People’s Court, in the Berlin Document Center. The People’s Court papers were piled on metal shelves, dusty, uncataloged, while the American director of the Document Center, then still an institution of the American military government, went off to play golf.

I was appalled at the number of prosecutions that began with a denunciation, not by paid Gestapo informers but by ordinary people: a barber, denounced by a customer; a chemist, denounced by his shop assistant; a housekeeper, denounced by her employers; even someone informing on his own brother and a wife accusing her husband. These are all real cases—taken from People’s Court judgments I photocopied at the time. Many of these trials led to a death sentence.

At the end of the day I would step out into the sunlit streets of leafy Grünewald, sickened by this seemingly endless record of human baseness and cruelty. Often I felt as if I had blood on my own hands. I would go for a
swim to wash the blood off. Then I would have a drink at a café and look at the old women gossiping at the next table. What did you do in the war, granny?

I did not confine myself to the archives. I also talked to the veterans and survivors. There was Albert Speer in Heidelberg, with his well-polished tale of the unpolitical technocrat. There were casual acquaintances, each with an extraordinary personal history: a motor mechanic, for example, whose parents died while he was still a baby on the desperate flight west before the advancing Red Army, so that he knew neither his birthplace nor his birthday—nor his real name, nor his parentage. All that he knew is that he came from somewhere in the Memelland, a once-German territory in what is now Lithuania. Then there were the grand old men of the German resistance to Hitler who met again every year, on the anniversary of the July 20, 1944, bomb plot, in the courtyard of the former Wehrmacht headquarters, where the leader of the plot, Count Stauffenberg, had stood before the firing squad.

Just before he died, Stauffenberg cried out in defiance
“Es lebe das heilige Deutschland?”
—Long live sacred Germany! Or was it
“Es lebe das geheime Deutschland?”—
Long live secret Germany!—a reference both to the resistance conspiracy and to the semimystical ideas of the poet Stefan George? Stauffenberg’s last words are still disputed. Amid the ghosts of secret Germany I was searching for the answer to a personal question. What is it that makes one person a resistance fighter and another the faithful servant of a dictatorship? This man a Stauffenberg, that a Speer. Today, after years of study, and after knowing personally many resisters and many servants of dictatorships, I am searching still.

Not just to a professional student of history but to any Englishman living in Germany at this time, and probably to most British newspaper readers, the past was still the most interesting thing about Germany—and “the past” meant essentially the twelve years of Nazism. The great achievements of postwar reconstruction, the civilized democracy and exemplary social market economy presided over by Chancellor Helmut Schmidt: all were greatly admired, but boring. Even the far-left terrorist threat and the strong reaction of the West German state were given their special edge because of the fear, bequeathed by Hitler, that Germany could again be dangerous.

James was almost as fascinated as I was by the Nazi past, and we worked on several stories together. With Friedrich, our sixty-eighter journalist friend, we observed the trials of the Majdanek concentration-camp guards in Düsseldorf. When an elderly Jewish woman testified that she had been forced as a prisoner to carry canisters of the poison Zyklon B to the gas chambers, a German defense lawyer leaped to his feet demanding her instant arrest—for aiding and abetting murder.

We also pursued the mysterious case of the then West German president’s youthful membership in the Nazi Party. A distinguished painter, Heinz Troekes, told us how the young Karl Carstens proudly used to wear his Party badge at the artillery school where he was an instructor and Troekes a pupil. But President Carstens continued to win popularity by his knickerbockered rambling around the German countryside, and the story faded away. I was on the case as both fledgling historian and apprentice journalist, James as a fully fledged journalist
but also as a poet. Out of this experience he wrote one poem, “A German Requiem,” which captures better than anything else I know the elusive, haunted quality of German memory:

One evening Friedrich rang to say that a neo-Nazi group called the Viking Youth would be out in force at the opening of a new pub called the Café Vaterland. He had seen some of them earlier at a discussion with schoolchildren about the American television series
Holocaust
, which was making a huge impact in Germany at this time. Their “ideologist” had said that they would again erect concentration camps in Germany.

The Café Vaterland was on the ground floor of a nondescript modern block on the Tauentzienstrasse. The walls were decked with military bric-a-brac and a crude oil painting showed Hitler sitting on the lavatory. When we arrived, the place was already half filled with teenagers in leather jackets and boots. They ate bread smeared with dripping and greeted each other with a Peter Sellers version of the Nazi salute, stopping with a bent right arm, halfway up. The rest of the pub was packed with journalists, observing these Viking Youths. At about midnight, since nothing seemed to be happening, we left and walked around the corner to where my car was parked in a dark street. Suddenly there were several black-jacketed figures running toward us. They carried beer bottles broken off at the base to give a jagged cutting edge.

At this point, my memory goes into slow motion. I see the thugs coming out of the darkness into the light of a streetlamp. I see myself walking slowly—idiotically—around the car, to open the driver’s door. James is on the pavement, vaguely brandishing a collapsible umbrella. Friedrich is running away diagonally across the street, toward a brightly lit multistory parking garage on the other side. I don’t remember at all the sensation of the bottle hitting me on the side of the head. Perhaps I lost consciousness for a few seconds, since the next thing I see is both James and Friedrich bending over me, as I begin to pick myself up off the dirty tarmac. I think I first realized what had happened from the horrified expressions on their faces, looming above me, garishly illuminated by the streetlamp. Then, to complete this B-movie sequence, I put my fingers to my neck, bring the hand down again and look at the blood.

One of the thugs had got me with a broken-off bottle just behind the ear. Dazed and bleeding, I was driven by a passing motorist to the nearest emergency department and sewn up by a very unsympathetic elderly nurse, while James and Friedrich loudly insisted on immediate access to a telephone. She said, “Your friends there are worse than the Nazis.” Next day a journalist from one of the tabloids got annoyed with me because I had washed my bloodstained shirt, which he wanted to photograph. “Where’s the bloody shirt?” he demanded.

The East German communist party daily,
Neues Deutschland
, covered the story under the headline
PLAYGROUND FOR
F
ASCISTS IN
W
ESTBERLIN
. In line with the Marxist theory that fascism grows from capitalism, it reported
that “with the support of the beer company Dortmund Union-Schultheiss” the owners of the pub had

In fact both the West Berlin authorities and the British military government took a close interest in the case. I was interviewed at length by the local security service. I was given a minute medical examination by one Dr. Spengler, at a morgue. The Viking Youths were identified and arrested. We gave evidence at their trial in the forbidding court building of Moabit—Berlin’s Old Bailey—and they were convicted.

James did not, however, share my special interest in East Germany, although my diary records one earnest conversation in which he appears to have said that the possibility of development within socialist societies was the most important political question for leftists like himself. What has happened to the Left since 1989 suggests that this was ultimately true. At the time, though, it was a very hard truth for Western leftists to accept, especially for those who in 1968 had been confronted on the streets of West Berlin by horrible old women waving
their umbrellas and screeching, “Go over there!”—meaning, to the East.

The sixty-eighters coped with this awkwardness in several awkward ways. Some now bent over backwards—or was it forwards?—to see all the good and progressive elements in East Germany: social security, full employment, equal opportunities for women, kindergarten for all. As scholars or journalists they wrote idealized accounts of East Germany that added up to a comprehensive misunderstanding of their own country. Theirs was a revolt against the crude Cold War anti-communism of their parents—less pro-communism than anti-anti-communism. It was also a hope against hope that the whole millennial project of socialism was not being discredited by the “socialism” being practiced in the East.

A few, like Bernd, became out-and-out defenders of the Eastern system, Wall and all. A few went further still. All the Stasi foreign intelligence officers I have now talked to, including Markus Wolf himself, tell me that the sixty-eighters provided a rich field for the recruitment of agents. Numerically, of course, these agents were an insignificantly tiny part of that generation, but so were the terrorists. However, most of this political generation took none of these paths. Instead, they simply looked away. From West Germany, they looked and traveled west, south, north but never east. Even in West Berlin they somehow managed this, although the East was all around them.