The File Page 12
Many years later, in the mid-1950s, they managed to return to what was now the communist part of Germany. They had another child. Her husband never fully recovered from his years in the camps, but here she at least had a good job, like-minded friends and her precious children. But then, shortly before the frontier to West Germany was finally sealed by the building of the Wall, her firstborn fled to the West with his wife and small child. She did not see them again for ten years.
With these personal tragedies all flowing directly from communist rule, you might think she would have become a violent anti-communist. But with a quiet, melancholy passion she declared herself still convinced of the ultimate lightness and greatness of the communist cause. Was this to make sense of her suffering? If the cause was just and great, then all had not been in vain. She had suffered today so that others might know a better tomorrow. But that was only my guess.
In conversation she indulged no pathos. Instead, she was full of curiosity, anecdote and sharp judgments, delivered in a quick, businesslike, nasal voice. We got on famously. My diary records an enjoyable supper at her quiet flat, with its parquet floors and overflowing wooden bookshelves. Then there was a chance meeting at the East German premiere of Rolf Hochhuth’s play Lawyers, which dealt with the scandal of a former Nazi military judge who, after sending people to their deaths, often for trivial offenses, had gone on to hold high office in West Germany.
On April 15, 1980, I find, we went to see The Peasants, a play by East Germany’s leading post-Brechtian dramatist, Heiner Müller, and then returned to her flat for what my diary calls a “heart-to-heart.” The diary records her saying to me: “Ah, if you were my son. How well your parents must have brought you up.” I wondered then what my parents would have made of this tribute from a German-Jewish communist. I sympathized with her, admired her, thought of her as a friend.
So I am really saddened when Frau Schulz hands me pages from a file identifying my friend as an informer for an operational group of Main Department XX, which was responsible, among other things, for penetrating and overseeing cultural life, the universities, the churches and what they called “political underground activity.” The first report brings another surprise. It says the playwright Rolf Hochhuth, whom I had met and talked to about his work, had told her that he regarded me as a British spy. “The further deployment of the IM,” it concludes, “is to some extent possible.”
“As per instructions,” begins the next report, dated April 28, 1980, “the contact of an IM of HA XX/OG to the English citizen Gardon-Ash, Timothi, was developed.” There follows information on our visit to the Heiner Müller play and our subsequent conversation about my work on the resistance to Nazism. “To the comment of the IM that such work was overdue in Britain, and to the arguments that the GDR had historically overcome this past—by contrast with the FRG [i.e., West Germany]—Gardon-Ash reacted negatively. He denied the existence of fascist tendencies in the FRG and emphasized that he has many good friends there.”
“Gardon-Ash seemed to be most impressed by Weimar. He would shortly be going there again, to take part in the Shakespeare conference.”
“The IM once again alluded to the comment made by Rolf Hochmuth [sic], who had described Gardon-Ash as a British spy, to which G. replied that Hochmuth, like so many others, reads too many unserious newspapers, according to which every second Englishman abroad must be a spy He did not get embarrassed.”
A third report gives an account, from the same file, of another meeting I had with survivors of the communist resistance to Nazism in Berlin. Whether this is actually a report from Frau R. or from another member of the group is not entirely clear. Asked why I was working on this subject, I apparently replied that Oxford and Cambridge traditionally assign such topics. “A hint by the source [i.e., the Stasi’s informer] that in the twenties and thirties many friends of communism came from these universities (Kim Philby) was met by Gorton-Ash with wordless irony.”
Fifteen years on, I again sit on the same sofa, in the same flat, but with rather different feelings. Frau R. is very old now, but still soignée and sharp. When I tell her why I have come to see her again, she says, “So what should I do? Jump out of the window?” She flatly denies knowing that the Stasi had her down as an informer and simply refuses to look at the photocopies I have brought with me from the file.
Then she reminds me of her great sufferings under the communism in which she so long believed. “No, Tim,” she says, “it’s all not so simple.” And as she talks—with pathos now—of the horrors of the camps, of her dead husband, of her faraway son, we both understand that she is placing the weight of her suffering into the scales of my judgment. The weight is heavy. Within minutes I am telling her that I have no right to sit here as her judge. Her secret will be safe with me. She should, please, live her last years in peace and contentment.
But as I leave I can see, in her eyes, that this will haunt her. Not, I think, because of the mere fact of collaboration—she was, after all, a communist in a communist state—but because working with the secret police, being down in the files as an informer, is low and mean. All this is such a far, far cry from the high ideals of that brave and proud Jewish girl who set out, a whole lifetime ago, to fight for a better world. And, of course, there will still be the lingering fear of exposure, if not through me then perhaps through someone else.
I now almost wish I had never confronted her. By what right, for what good purpose, did I deny an old lady, who had suffered so much, the grace of selective forgetting?
IX
FROM THE AUTUMN OF 1980 THE FILE IS FULL OF Poland. An internal memo notes that I again plan to travel there. How did they know? There is a detailed report on my conversation about “the counterrevolutionary organization KSS ‘KOR’” with an editor of an “anti-Soviet emigré journal” in Bonn. Did they tap my phone or his? On the same sheet, there is information from another source that “because of the situation in Poland, two signals intelligence regiments of unidentified U.S. units have been stationed on the signals espionage object Devil’s Mountain in West Berlin.” Then there are copies of my reports from Poland for Der Spiegel. Altogether, it seems to have been these articles and my links with “antisocialist forces” in Poland that finally led to their concerted investigation.
By then I was again based in West Berlin. On October 7, 1980, as the Engels Guards marched off at the end of that military parade, with carnations in their rifle barrels, I drove back through Checkpoint Charlie, taking my last notes and possessions from the small room in Prenzlauer Berg to the large flat in Wilmersdorf. I was based in the Uhlandstrasse for another year and there I wrote my book about East Germany, for a West German publisher and audience. Extracts from the book were serialized in Der Spiegel, to coincide with its publication in the autumn of 1981. Throughout that year, however, my great obsession was really Poland, as the Solidarity revolution rolled from one crisis to the next.
The Stasi, too, were obsessed by Solidarity. While I was with the strikers in the Gdansk shipyard, Comrade Colonel-General Markus Wolf was in Warsaw talking anxiously to his colleagues in the Polish services. They assured him the Polish Party would never recognize an independent trade union. Wolf flew back to East Berlin, rang the foreign minister to give him this reassuring inside information, and the minister said, “Have you listened to the news … ?” In early October Erich Mielke told his senior officers in the Ministry for State Security that what was happening in Poland was a matter of life or death for the East German state. At ground level, my informers’ files—from “Schuldt” to Frau R.—all contain specific inquiries about popular reactions to Solidarity. The whole vast apparatus of the ministry was mobilized to find out whether the East Germans might catch the “Polish disease.”
Poland itself now became an “operational area” for the East German Security Service, a status previously reserved for countries outside the Soviet bloc. They had “operational groups” in all the major Polish cities and a special “working group�
�� in Berlin. It was this group that was to arrange for informers to be attached to me on my trips to Poland. There is no evidence here that this actually happened, but I have already discovered that there is material in my informers’ files that is not in my own. If the Poles one day decide to open their secret-police files, as the Germans have, I may yet find something there.
What this file does contain is photocopies of papers taken secretly from my luggage at the East German airport of Berlin-Schönefeld, while I was boarding a flight for Warsaw. These include samizdat journals, biographical notes on leading figures in Polish politics, maps, visiting cards, even the covers of books I had with me—and then handwritten pages from my own notebook.
On one of these pages I have noted down, from memory, different formulations of the dissident’s first commandment, which I call the principle of As If. I recall a poem by a contemporary Polish poet, Ryszard Krynicki, dedicated to one of the bravest and most charismatic of Polish dissidents, Adam Michnik:
And, really, we did not know that living here and now
you must pretend
that you live elsewhere and in other times.
To this I add comments by the great Russian dissident Andrei Sakharov and by a German friend, Gabriel Berger, who had been imprisoned in East Germany for political reasons: “Sakharov: Behave as if you lived in a free country! Berger: as if the Stasi did not exist.” Found again, in a Stasi file.
Now I take down the original notebook from my shelf in Oxford and read on…. At dawn on a snow-filled January morning I board the special bus that scuttles through the Wall to Schönefeld Airport. “Black ice on the frontier.” Then: “Customs officer at airport. My papers gone through page by page. An envelope containing DM 2,000. His question, with a probing glance: ‘Is it yours?’ “Meanwhile, as I see now, they were secretly copying those papers. Next entry: “Middle-aged man on the Interflug jet. Woolly waistcoat and the kind of face that goes with carpet slippers.”
Another close search at Warsaw airport. Avoiding the pirate taxi drivers at the arrivals gate, who will charge you the earth in deutsche marks or dollars, I take an ordinary, battered Lada taxi through gray, snow-covered streets to my usual haunt, the Hotel Europejski, once the smartest hotel in town but now quite seedy. (How pleasing to find that Graham Greene, the high priest of seediness, also stayed here.) A few telephone calls from my hotel room, with strange background noises on the line. Then the film speeds up.
Frantic bustle at the Solidarity offices in Szpitalna Street, ancient duplicating machines pounding away in the corner, a babble of excited conversation louder than at any cocktail party, workers jostling professors to get at the latest barely legible communiqué laid out on a makeshift trestle table. Around the corner, at the café, Janek, Joanna, Andrzej, chain-smoking, drinking endless glasses of tea, joking and talking all at once. “Cześć!” “Hej!” and off to the tram drivers’ depot, where a public transport strike is threatened. The transport workers’ leader is twenty-eight-year-old Wojciech Kamiński, mustachioed, leather-jacketed, bright-eyed. His father fought against Hitler with the Polish army in the West, then, returning to Poland, was imprisoned by the communists. The son is now spoiling for his fight.
Race down to the remote southeastern corner of the country, where the farmers are demanding their own Solidarity. Wood-built villages, picturesque under thick snow, broad peasant faces, women making baskets by hand: which century are we in? Dash back to Warsaw for another crisis meeting of Solidarity’s national leadership, rough-faced miners and steelworkers amid the polished wood and genteel secretaries of the Club of the Catholic Intelligentsia. Excitement, laughter, beautiful women and a great cause. What more could I want? And, everywhere, the wonderful logo of this peaceful revolution: SOLIDARNOŚĆ in bright red, jumbly letters, positively bouncing across the page, with the sturdy letter n bearing aloft the national flag, red on white.
Poland was what journalists call a “breaking story.” To follow such a story is like being lashed to the saddle straps of a racehorse at full gallop—very exciting, but you don’t get the best view of the race. Yet I tried also to achieve a view from the grandstand, even an aerial view, and to understand the story as part of history. The history of the present.
For me, Poland was also a cause. “Poland is my Spain,” I wrote in my diary on Christmas Eve, 1980. In my reports and commentaries, I tried always to be strictly accurate, fair to all sides and critical of all sides. Impartial I was not. I wanted Solidarity to win. I wanted Poland to be free.
Many of those I spent time with belonged to the Polish generation of 1968. Several would become, and remain, good friends. Helena Luczywo, the diminutive, tireless editor of samizdat and Solidarity papers, chain-smoking, chain-talking, was a constant guide and helper. Wojciech Karpiński, literary critic, aesthete, connoisseur of Nabokov and Gombrowicz, became my informal tutor in Polish cultural history. Then there was Adam Michnik, with his extraordinary energy, his verbal brilliance and bewitching display of bad teeth; Marcin Król, the most eloquent advocate of liberal conservatism among that generation; and the poet Ryszard Krynicki, weighing every word as if the moral condition of the world might hang upon it.
There were things, important things, that they had in common with the sixty-eighters in Germany: the casual way of dressing, the programmatic informality (straight to ty, rather than the formal pan), the attitude to sex and to personal relations more generally. But other, more important things were utterly different. The German sixty-eighters had never themselves lived under Nazism. The Polish sixty-eighters had lived and still lived under communism.
The year 1968 in Poland had seen a horrible campaign by the ruling Party against those of Jewish origin, both within its own ranks and among the students—especially those who were themselves the children of Jewish communists. Now these children of the Polish counterparts of Red Lizzy and Frau R. played a part in the anti-communist opposition out of all proportion to their numbers: one more chapter in the extraordinary Jewish contribution to the history of Central Europe.
Those who had gone on to join the opposition, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, had tales to tell of secret-police harassment, discrimination and imprisonment beside which the German sixty-eighters’ stories of Berufsverbot and “structural violence” seemed to me, for the most part, trivial and hysterical. I loved these Polish tales of opposition. I hugely admired the older intellectual leaders of Solidarity, men like Bronislaw Geremek, the historian who now turned his hand to making history, and Father Józef Tischner, with his unending supply of earthy jokes from the villagers of his native mountains. Those who impressed me most of all, however, were the steelworkers and peasant farmers and office clerks and housewives who now found their own voice and used it to speak simple but deeply moving words. It was a pentecostal moment: they spoke with tongues.
The revolutions of 1989 would be like that all over Central Europe, but Poland in 1980–81 was where I saw it first. It was not a poet but a worker in Poznan, a small man with a pale face and dirty black jacket, who told me, “This is a revolution of the soul.” There was also, of course, real hardship, roaring inflation, a good deal of chaos and the fear of Soviet invasion. But this fear was often more acute outside the country than it was in Poland itself. Zbigniew Herbert, the great poet of Polish resistance, returned to Warsaw early in 1981 joking that he couldn’t stand the tension abroad. I have since encountered this strange optical shift in traveling to other crisis spots—Nicaragua, El Salvador, even Bosnia. From outside, you imagine that everyone must be living every minute on the edge. Come inside, and there are normally dressed people going about their usual business, shopping, flirting, gossiping, in a tranquil main street.
This particular winter journey ended with three burly secret-police men knocking on the door of my hotel room, driving me to the police station in their battered Polonez, and giving me twenty-four hours to leave the country. I then flew to Hamburg for a meeting with the publisher and senior editors of Der Spiegel, and
a conversation I shall never forget. According to my notebook it went something like this. Editor, to me: “Will the Russians invade next week?” I explain that Warsaw is the worst place from which to make that judgment. Publisher, to editor: “Do we have tanks?” After a moment, I realize he means photographs of tanks for a cover story. Editor: “Actually the Russian tank didn’t sell so well.” (An earlier cover had shown a Russian tank crushing a white Polish eagle.) Publisher, sprawled back in his chair, musing half to himself: “Blood must flow properly, so we have a good cover story….”
There was a special sharpness to the contrast between Germany and Poland. Generally speaking, in Poland the experience and hope of freedom outweighed the fear of war; in Germany it was the other way around. There were many reasons for this—different histories, different approaches to Russia—but one particular German fear was that if the Warsaw Pact did invade Poland, the East German army would have to be involved, as it had been in the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. German soldiers would again cross the Polish frontier, forty-one years after Hitler’s Wehrmacht. On the day I left East Berlin, my diary records: “It seems to me now oddson that the Russians will march into Poland. (And the Germans? Dr. D. today says Ja.)” Dr. D. was, of course, Dr. Demps, who had just given me a farewell lunch and that handsome volume of Zilie drawings.
It is so difficult to transport yourself back into the fears of that time. Because it did not actually happen, we somehow feel that it could never have happened. Yet today, as I write this, I have before me the official record of what the East German leader, Erich Honecker, told the Polish Politburo member Stefan Olszowski on November 20, 1980: “We do not favor bloodshed. That is the last resort. But even this last resort must be applied when the Workers’ and Peasants’ Power must be defended. That was our experience in 1953 and it was also the case during the 1956 events in Hungary and in 1968 in Czechoslovakia.” I also have before me a graphic diagram, from the archives of the East German Defense Ministry, showing the army’s contingency plan for crossing the Polish frontier. How close the Soviet Union actually came to invading Poland, and what German participation was seriously considered, will always remain a matter for historical speculation, but this fear certainly did not come from thin air.