The File Read online

  ACCLAIM FOR TIMOTHY GARTON ASH’s

  The File

  “Impeccable…. Garton Ash’s compassion for all those who live under totalitarian rule and are driven into moral contortions is admirable.”

  —The New York Review of Books

  “As this century of murderous utopias draws to a close, we still understand remarkably little about what makes totalitarianism tick…. From Alexander Solzhenitsyn to Primo Levi, it is the literary chroniclers who have done the job most persuasively. Timothy Garton Ash is one such chronicler.”

  —The Wall Street Journal

  “[Garton Ash’s] accounts of tracking down the enemies who betrayed him are riveting, but the names themselves dissolve into a deeply moving portrait of a state built on compromise and human weakness.”

  —The New Yorker

  “Garton Ash can combine a journalist’s feel for the breaking story, for its drama and flow, with a historian’s sense of perspective. Genuinely provocative … The File is always engaging.”

  —Boston Globe

  “Riveting … a moving book of simple, but uncommon virtues: erudition, clarity, honesty and humanity. An excellent piece of writing. This book will remind you of the beauty of freedom—and of the value of courage and decency in what is all-too-often an unfree world.”

  —Boston Globe

  “A kind of meditation on Garton Ash’s personal experience with the Stasi, the dreaded secret police organ of the East German regime. No population was as closely watched for signs of dissidence, although Hoover’s FBI came fairly close at times. The book is fascinating in its unearthing of some terribly human monster whose eye always recorded the fall of every sparrow.”

  —Arthur Miller

  “The File reads almost like a spy thriller. Its prose is fluid, its pace fast, and its tone an appealing combination of the light and the serious.”

  —Houston Chronicle

  “Crisp and compelling … a thought-provoking glimpse of the Stasi’s all-too-human ambitions and weaknesses.”

  —Baltimore Sun

  “In this painstaking, powerful unmasking of evil, the wretched face of tyranny is revealed.”

  —Philadelphia Inquirer

  “Original, subtle and intriguing…. It’s easy to pass judgment from the safety of a democracy; can you or I be so sure that in a totalitarian state we would resist the shabby evil of reporting upon others if our job, the admittance of our children to school or university—that is to say, our everyday kind of survival—depended on it?”

  —Nadine Gordimer

  “This book combines two genres: it is a political thriller, reminiscent of Graham Greene and John le Carré, and a treatise on memory, forgetting, and forgiving in the great tradition of Proust.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Acknowledgments

  Permissions Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Books by Timothy Garton Ash

  Copyright

  For

  D., T. AND A.

  A Note on Names

  THE FOLLOWING NAMES IN THE TEXT ARE PSEUDOnyms: Andrea, Claudia, Flash Harry, Frau Duncker and Frau R. Three informers are identified only by their Stasi aliases: “Michaela,” “Schuldt” and “Smith.” If anyone might be tempted to expose the real people behind these names—which in several cases would not be difficult—I would ask for restraint from doing so, for reasons that should become clear.

  “GUTEN TAG,” SAYS BUSTLING FRAU SCHULZ, “YOU HAVE a very interesting file.” And there it is, a buff-colored binder, some two inches thick, rubber-stamped on the front cover: OPK-Akte, Mfs, XV 2889/81. Underneath is written, in a neat, clerical hand: “Romeo.”

  Romeo?

  “Yes, that was your code name,” says Frau Schulz, and giggles.

  I SIT DOWN AT A SMALL PLASTIC-WOOD TABLE IN FRAU Schulz’s cramped room in the Federal Authority for the Records of the State Security Service of the former German Democratic Republic: the ministry of the files. As I open the binder, I find myself thinking of an odd moment in my East German life.

  One night in 1980, when I was living as a student in East Berlin, I came back with a girlfriend to my room in a crumbling Wilhelmine tenement house in the borough of Prenzlauer Berg. This was a room with a view: a view into it. Large French windows gave directly onto a balcony, and, were it not for the net curtains, people living across the street could look straight in.

  As we embraced on the narrow bed, Andrea suddenly pulled away, finished undressing, went over to the window and threw open the net curtains. She turned on the glaring main light and then came back to me. Had this been, say, Oxford, I might have been a little surprised about the bright light and the open curtains. But this was Berlin, so I thought no more about it.

  Until, that is, I learned about the Stasi file. Then I remembered this moment and started wondering whether Andrea had been working for the Stasi and whether she had opened the curtains so we could be photographed from the other side of the street.

  Perhaps those photographs are now lurking in this binder, which Frau Schulz has already inspected. What was it she said? “You have a very interesting file.”

  HASTILY TURNING THE PAGES, I’M RELIEVED TO FIND that there are no such photographs here and that Andrea does not appear as an informer. But there are other things that touch me.

  Here, for example, is an observation report describing a visit I apparently paid to East Berlin on 06.10.79 from 16.07 hours to 23.55 hours. The alias given me by the Stasi at this date was, less romantically, “246816.”

  16.07 hours

  “246816” was taken up for observation after leaving the Bahnhof Friedrichstrasse frontier crossing. The person to be observed went to the newspaper stand in the upper station concourse and bought a Freie Welt, a Neues Deutschland and a Berliner Zeitung. Then the object [that’s me] walked questingly around the station.

  16.15 hours

  in the upper station concourse “246816” greeted a female person with handshake and kiss on the cheek. This female person received the code name “Beret.” “Beret” carried a dark brown shoulder bag. Both left the station and went, conversing, to the Berliner Ensemble on Brechtplatz.

  16.25 hours

  both entered the restaurant

  Ganymed

  Berlin-Mitte

  Am Schiffbauerdamm

  After ca. 2 minutes the persons to be observed left the restaurant and went via Friedrichstrasse and Unter den Linden to the Operncafé.

  16.52 hours

  “246816” and “Beret” entered the restaurant

  Operncafé

  Berlin-Mitte

  Unter den Linden

  They took seats in the café and drank coffee.

  18.45 hours

  They left the café and went to Bebelplatz. In the time from

  18.45 hours

  until

  20.40 hours

  They both watched with interest the torchlit procession to honor the 30th anniversary of the GDR. Thereafter “246816” and “Beret” went along the street Unter den Linden [and] Friedrichstrasse to the street Am Schiffbauerdamm.

  21.10 hours

  they entered there the restaurant Ganymed. In the restaurant they were not under observation.


  23.50 hours

  both left the gastronomic establishment and proceeded directly to the departure hall of the Bahnhof Friedrichstrasse frontier crossing, which they

  23.55 hours

  entered. “Beret” was passed on to Main Department VI for documentation. The surveillance was terminated.

  Person-description of object “246816”

  Sex: male

  Age: 20–25 years

  Height: ca. 1.75m

  Build: slim

  Hair: dark blond

  short

  Dress: green jacket

  blue polo-neck pullover

  brown cord trousers

  Person-description of connection “Beret”

  Sex: female

  Age: 30–35 years

  Height: 1.75m-1.78m

  Build: slim

  Hair: medium blond

  curly

  Dress: dark blue cloth coat

  red beret

  blue jeans

  black boots

  Accessories: dark brown handbag

  I sit there, at the plastic-wood table, marveling at this minutely detailed reconstruction of a day in my life and at the style that recalls a school exercise: never a sentence without a verb, the pretentious variation of “gastronomic establishment.” I remember the slovenly gilt-and-red Ganymed, the plush Operncafé, and the blue-shirted, pimpled youths in the thirtieth-anniversary march-past, their paraffin-soaked torches trailing sparks in the misty night air. I smell again that peculiar East Berlin smell, a compound of the smoke from old boilers burning compressed coal-dust briquettes, exhaust fumes from the two-stroke engines of the little Trabant cars, cheap East European cigarettes, damp boots and sweat. But one thing I simply can’t remember: who was she, my Little Red Riding-Hood? Or not so little: 1.75–1.78 meters, that’s nearly my height. Slim, medium blond, curly hair, 30–35, black boots? I sit there, under Frau Schulz’s inquisitive eye, sensing an awful disloyalty to my own past.

  Only when I get home, right home, to Oxford, do I find out who she was—by reading my own diary from that time. In fact, I discover the whole record of a short, intense, unhappy romance: of days and nights, of telephone calls and letters. Why, here at the back of the diary are two of her letters, carefully kept in their envelopes, with a postmark that says “Post—so you keep in touch.” Folded inside one of the letters is a black-and-white photograph that she sent me when it was all over, to remember her by. Tousled hair, high cheekbones, a rather tense smile. How could I have forgotten?

  My diary for that day in October 1979 has Claudia “cheeky in red beret and blue uniform raincoat.” “Over Friedrichstrasse,” it says, “searched down to the soles of my shoes (Duckers. Officer very impressed).” Now I remember how, at the underground checkpoint beneath the Friedrichstrasse railway station, a gray-uniformed officer took me into a curtained cubicle, made me empty the contents of my pockets onto a small table, examined each item minutely and even questioned me about individual entries in my pocket diary. He then ordered me to take off my heavy brown leather shoes, from Ducker & Son of Turl Street. Peering inside and then weighing them in his hand he said, “Very good shoes.”

  “Arm-in-arm, cheek-to-cheek w. [Claudia] to Operncafé,” the diary goes on. “Becoming yet more intimate … The torchlit procession. The cold, cold east wind. Our warmth. The maze—encircled. Slipping through the columns, evading the policemen. Finally to ‘Ganymed.’ Tolerable dinner. C. re. her ‘Jobben.’ Her political activity. We cross back via Friedrichstr. To Diener’s … C0300 at Uhlandstr. Daniel, desperate and pale-faced before the flat door—locked out!”

  Daniel Johnson, son of the writer Paul Johnson, is today an established figure on the London Times. He was then a fiercely intellectual Cambridge postgraduate, working on a doctorate about the history of German pessimism—of which he was always delighted to discover another specimen. We shared a spacious late-nineteenth-century flat in the borough of Wilmersdorf, Uhlandstrasse 127. Daniel had forgotten his keys.

  The “maze” and “columns” were, I presume, those of the regimented torchbearing marchers of the Free German Youth, the gloriously misnamed communist youth organization. As for “her political activity”: Claudia belonged to the instantly recognizable generation of 1968. That evening she told me how they used to chant at the riot police a jingle that neatly captures the ’68 mixture of political and sexual protest. In free translation it goes: “Out here they are pigs/In bed they are figs.”

  I last caught a glimpse of her, sometime later, in the graveyard of the Berlin-Dahlem village church, at the funeral of the student leader Rudi Dutschke. She was still wearing her red beret. Or have I just imagined that final detail?

  The Stasi’s observation report, my diary entry: two versions of one day in a life. The “object” described with the cold outward eye of the secret policeman, and my own subjective, allusive, emotional self-description. But what a gift to memory is a Stasi file. Far better than a madeleine.

  I

  THE “OPK” ON THE FRONT COVER STANDS FOR Operative Personenkontrolle, Operational Person Control. According to the 1985 edition of the Dictionary of Political-Operational Work, prepared by the Juridical Higher School of the Ministry for State Security, an Operational Person Control was to identify anyone who might have committed an offense according to the Criminal Code or who might have a “hostile-negative attitude” or who might be exploited for hostile purposes by the enemy. The central purpose of an OPK, the dictionary explains, is to answer the question “Who’s who?” Each file begins with an “opening report” and a “plan of action.”

  My opening report dates from March 1981. Prepared by one Lieutenant Wendt, it gives my personal details, notes that I have been studying in West Berlin since 1978 and lived from January to June 1980—actually it was October—in “the capital of the GDR.” (The authorities of the German Democratic Republic always insisted on using this formula for East Berlin.) I travel frequently from West Berlin to East Germany and Poland. I have repeatedly “made contact with operationally interesting persons.” Consequently “there are grounds for suspecting that G. [for Garton Ash] has deliberately exploited his official functions as research student and/or journalist to pursue intelligence activities.”

  Lieutenant Wendt then reviews the information that counterintelligence department II/9 has pulled together for this purpose from all the other departments of the ministry. Raw material follows later in the file: observation reports; summaries of intelligence from the files on my friend Werner Krätschell, a Protestant priest, and on the British embassy; photocopies of articles I wrote about Poland for the West German news magazine Der Spiegel; copies of my own Polish notes and papers, photographed during a secret search of my luggage at Schönefeld airport, from where I was flying to Warsaw; even copies of the references written by my Oxford tutors for the British Council. In all, there are 325 pages.

  Wendt’s report pays special attention to information supplied by the Stasi’s own informers, known as Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter—literally “unofficial collaborators”—or IM for short. They were subdivided into several categories: security, special, operative, conspirative, even the informer for running other informers. Since 1989, the initials IM have entered the German language. SS is the synonym in every European language for the loud, violent, outright bestiality of Nazism. IM has become, in German, the synonym for the routine, bureaucratic forms of infiltration, intimidation and collaboration that characterized the German communist dictatorship; the quieter corruption of mature totalitarianism. In the early 1990s it was a regular occurrence for a prominent East German politician, academic, journalist or priest to be identified through the Stasi files as an IM, and to disappear from public life as a result. IM is the black spot.

  But first they have to be identified. For the secret police assigned aliases to their informers as well as to those they pursued. In fact, most informers did it themselves, for one of the rituals of initiation as a regular IM was to choose
your own secret name. It emerged after unification that one Lutz Bertram, a well-known, blind East German disc jockey, had informed for the Stasi as IM “Romeo.” If he and I had met, I suppose Romeo could have informed on Romeo.

  My opening report summarizes the information gathered by IM “Smith,” IM “Schuldt,” and especially by IM “Michaela” and her husband, KP (Contact Person) “Georg,” previously married to Alice, “known as ‘Red Lizzy.’” Lieutenant Wendt notes that “Red Lizzy” had herself earlier been married to Kim Philby, Britain’s most famous Soviet spy.

  He finds that “G. works purposefully and with scholarly thoroughness” but displays “a bourgeois-liberal attitude and no commitment to the working-class.” “Outwardly G. Makes a pretty casual impression and overall seems ‘a typical British intellectual.’ (The strange compliment is from IM “Smith.”) However, I have sought contact with people who could be of interest for intelligence purposes and given contradictory accounts of what I am doing. On my journeys to Poland I almost certainly “maintain connections with antisocialist forces.” So they need to find out more, with a view to possible prosecution under Article 97 of the Criminal Code. Article 97 says that anyone who collects or passes on “information or objects that are to be kept secret” to a foreign power, or a secret service, or other unspecified “foreign organizations” is to be punished with a jail sentence of “not less than five years.” “In especially serious cases a lifelong jail sentence or a death sentence may be passed.”

  The “plan of action” that follows has four parts. First, there is the deployment of IMs, starting with “Smith”: “Taking account of the subjective and objective possibilities of the IM, conditions for the resumption of the lost contact with Garton Ash are to be created.” A written proposal is to be produced by April 15, 1981. Responsible: Lieutenant Wendt. “Schuldt” and “Michaela” are also to be reactivated: written proposal from Lieutenant Wendt by May 1. Furthermore, “an IM of the HVA I—adviser of G. at the H[umboldt] U[niversity] B[erlin]—” is to be brought in to “the operational treatment.”