The File Page 15

  Now a snapshot from family life. In 1971 a parcel is sent to his eight-year-old daughter from West Germany: two bars of chocolate, sweets, cheese, sugar, tea, a child’s toothbrush, soap. Emergency rations, as if to Biafra! Alarm bells ring. A formal disciplinary investigation is launched. How did it happen? While they were on holiday in Bulgaria, his daughter had struck up a friendship with a West German girl. “Although an attempt was made by Comrade Major Kaulfuss to prevent this contact, by changing the bathing place, further contacts nonetheless occurred between the children, during which the daughter of Comrade Major Kaulfuss gave the West German girl their home address.” Conclusion: this contact might be exploited by Western intelligence. If another parcel arrives, it should be brought in to the department for examination, and then sent back.

  The file has an old address in Karlshorst, where the Red Army headquarters used to be. In a dusty, run-down street, I find a two-story semidetached house, painted a dirty reddish brown. There is another metal fence and gate, locked with a buzzer system—and the occupant’s name. Kaulfuss. I ring. One of the net curtains in a first-floor window is pulled back. A face appears, briefly. Is it the same as the photo in the file? He opens the front door but waits at the top of the steps, twenty feet away. Yes, it’s him all right.

  “Herr Kaulfuss?” I say, raising my voice.

  “Yes.”

  “My name is Timothy Garton Ash, I’m a contemporary historian from Oxford, and want to talk to you about the history of the MfS.” I use the official abbreviation for the ministry, not the implicitly pejorative “Stasi.”

  Slowly he comes to the gate, but does not open it. Like Kratsch, he wears a tracksuit of some synthetic material, this one black and purple. He has a bitter, down-turned mouth, as in the photograph, and his eyes are bloodshot. Drinking?

  Would he have time for a conversation?

  “No.” He had been approached by the Insider Committee and declined. All sorts of people had come to see him, the West German security service, the West German foreign intelligence service, and even what he rather confusedly calls the FBIA. He had turned them all down. Anyway, it’s all there in the documents.

  Yes, I say, but documents never tell us everything. Conversations with historical witnesses are invaluable for understanding the background and the motives of those involved. (Perfectly true, but also: keep him talking, don’t let the line snap, wind the old carp in gently….) And (risk it now) I have a personal reason: when I was here as a research student, in the early 1980s, your department had a file on me, an OPK.

  We debate a little more.

  “Ach,” he says, “come on, we’ll talk for fifteen minutes,” and the gate buzzes open.

  He leads me to a rocking sofa in the garden. I smell alcohol, cigarette smoke, boredom and emptiness. He is completely unrepentant. The state was threatened by Western agents, terrorists, provocateurs, subversives. As its name suggests, the State Security Service gave ordinary people security, and they look back to it with longing now, when there’s so much insecurity: crime, unemployment, drugs. Yes, there was a minority who suffered for their political views. But that’s normal. Exactly the same thing happened in West Germany. What was that word they had for it? I suggest: Berufsverbot? Yes, that’s it! It was exactly the same!

  But I thought your system was supposed to be better?

  “Na ja …” He laughs bitterly. Anyway, most people did appreciate the security, and they didn’t mind giving up a little liberty in exchange.

  Was he at all disillusioned near the end? No, he had a sense of quiet satisfaction. After all, this state had achieved something: in every year of the history of East Germany there was real growth in the Gross Domestic Product. In West Germany it was the other way around. There it shrank every year. I express some mild incredulity. He explains that the workers’ share had shrunk. But West Germany had still got richer, hadn’t it? Yes, but most people can’t afford what’s on sale.

  Had he actually been to the West?

  Well, not before unification, of course. But now he had, to the North Sea coast and to West Berlin. But he was not impressed. No. One time his granddaughter had asked him for a cuckoo clock. So he went across to the Kaufhaus des Westens, the big department store in West Berlin. He was disgusted. All those goods that ordinary people can’t afford. And they didn’t have the cuckoo clock.

  No, he doesn’t like going to West Berlin, after working against it all his life. But one time, shortly after unification, he couldn’t resist going across on a little private tour of the Western secret service headquarters that he knew only from photographs, the CIA “objects” in Dahlem and so on. They looked very much as in the photos.

  He has relaxed, so the time seems right to ask about my file. But he clams up again.

  No, he’s warned me, he won’t talk about his work.

  No, he doesn’t remember Lieutenant Wendt.

  No, he doesn’t remember my case.

  Were there so many Operational Person Controls?

  Well, no, not in his department anyway. It was something …

  Fifteen minutes have become fifty. But now his wife is calling. She needs to be rocked on the garden sofa. She has not been well, you understand.

  As we walk back to the rusty gate, I ask if his department caught many spies.

  Oh yes, and of course they were sent to prison for long sentences. But he doesn’t want to talk about that. What he wants me to understand is that things can’t go on like this: the crime, the unemployment, the inequality. People are angry.

  I take my leave, but as he retreats from the gate he raises his voice: “It can’t go on like this, I tell you, and when the call comes for us to take to the streets, we’ll be there….” Heroic, pathetic defiance.

  Then creak, creak, goes the garden sofa.

  NOW FOR COLONEL FRITZ, KAULFUSS’S SUCCESSOR AS head of department II/9 and the man who signed off my file in 1982. Unlike his predecessor, Alfred Fritz is still a busy man. At the gate of their neat gray semidetached house, also in Karlshorst, his wife tells me that he’s out from early morning to late at night: “You know how it is, in the insurance business.”

  I leave my card and she suggests that I telephone at ten in the evening. When I phone, and start explaining once again that I’m a historian working on the Stasi files, he says, “Didn’t we have something to do with you during my time in the service?” I tell him about the file. After some dithering, he finally agrees to meet—“if you think it’ll be any use”—at half past seven in the morning.

  According to his service record, the colonel is now sixty-five. I expect another aged, paunchy, slow-moving figure, like Kaulfuss and Kratsch. But the man who greets me, with an ingratiating grin, looks a youthful fifty-something. He has blow-dried bouffant hair and wears black jeans, a shirt with a lurid pattern of pink and gray triangles and a matching wide tie held in place by a large tiepin. His shirtsleeves are neatly rolled halfway up the forearms. He looks every inch the West German insurance salesman in his new—what? disguise? uniform? identity?

  I thank him for making the time in a busy day. Yes, that’s the trouble, he’s never been so hard-pressed.

  Worse than in the ministry?

  “No. You know what it’s like in that job, the evening meetings with agents and so on….” And he looks at me expectantly.

  “You know what it’s like” … what does he mean?

  Lifting my visiting card from the table and looking at it with a smile, he says: “Well, there are all sorts of cover, aren’t there? ‘Contemporary historian,’ for example. Historian or SIS, it’s all the same to me. There were several here already. I have no inhibitions.”

  I assure him that I really am a historian. He seems a little disappointed. Perhaps he had looked forward to comparing notes with an old sparring partner. Or perhaps he just doesn’t believe me. Still, he’s ready to talk.

  In the beginning was the war. The war had been a formative experience for him, as for Kaulfuss and Kratsch. Hi
s elder brother was killed at the front.

  And your father?

  “I never knew my father. I was what they call an illegitimate child.” He keeps smiling, but I can hear the tension in his voice and feel the old pain.

  In the early 1950s he was working in the finance department of the local government in Schwerin. He was a candidate member of the Party. When he was approached by a man from the ministry he felt it was “an honor” to defend East Germany against the foreign spies who were infiltrating the country en masse.

  “You must remember what it was like then. This was the time of the ‘trashcan kids.’ The CIA would pay youths from West Berlin a few pennies to come over and search the trash outside Red Army headquarters, here in Karlshorst.” Most of them were caught.

  These were exciting years. He felt he was doing an important job. And in the 1950s they still had public support. They even went and explained what they were doing in factories, and people applauded them. (Does it not occur to him, even now, that people might have applauded out of fear?)

  Things changed for the worse in the 1970s. There was less idealism, more simple careerism inside the ministry.

  Would that be true of young Lieutenant Wendt?

  He doesn’t know. Wendt was always very reticent.

  And Major Risse?

  “I think Risse meant it honestly, like me.”

  There was also a sense of things going wrong in the country. Privately, he and his colleagues identified two main problems, the Car Problem and the Travel Problem. The Car Problem was that there were simply no decent cars available. People could only get a puttering little Trabant or Wartburg, and they had to wait ten years even for that. The Travel Problem was that most people weren’t allowed to travel anywhere, except to a limited number of countries in the Soviet bloc.

  Did they ever discuss the Freedom Problem?

  “No!” Pause for thought. “Although the Travel Problem was somehow related to it.”

  Also, they found they were being called upon to do more and more different jobs. I quote to him a remark that Colonel Eichner of the HVA had made to me: “We had a state. Then we had the Party to try to make the state work. Then we had the State Security to try to make the Party and state work. And still it didn’t work!”

  “That’s about it,” says Fritz.

  The men from his department would even have to go and stand guard at soccer matches. It was ridiculous. Their proper job was to look for Western spies, although now they concentrated on what they called “espionage from legal positions”: diplomats, accredited correspondents, visiting academics and so on. His department, which covered all West European countries, ran perhaps thirty Operational Person Controls a year.

  Did they actually catch any spies?

  Yes, a few. Westerners were usually held in custody for a month or two, then expelled; in a serious case, they might be tried and convicted, but then they were probably expelled too. If they were East Germans, however, they received long prison sentences.

  In his time they didn’t have much success with the French or the British, who were their main concern. There was one diplomat they nearly got to work for them: a woman who had a love affair that they found out about by “B measures.” (“B measures” meant bugging, as opposed to “A measures,” which meant wiretapping.)

  Of course they tried to use this information to recruit her. She was married, you know.

  “You mean, you tried to blackmail her?”

  “Yes, every secret service does it.” But this time it didn’t work out. The guy she had an affair with was an Englishman, who later went back to England. Then, sneering slightly, he asks, “That wasn’t you, was it?”

  “No.” (And anyway, none of your business.) I sense from the crooked smile on his face how he misses that side of the job: the voyeurism, the intimate details, the games they could play with a woman’s life. I suppose today he must content himself with the peeping into private lives done by newspapers and television. A Western version of organized voyeurism, also justified, supposedly, by some higher goal: “state security” then, “the public interest” now.

  He returns to his favorite theme: how hard they worked. He was at his desk by 7:15 in the morning, 7:30 at the latest. He had to report to General Kratsch at a quarter to eight. Then it was reading the files, discussing current cases with his colleagues: plans of action, coordination, observation reports, concluding reports, bringing on new informers, checking old ones. Lunch, for department heads and above, was in a special canteen on a slightly raised area in the center of the ministry compound. “Monarchs’ hill,” people called it. Office work continued into the late afternoon, and in the evenings there were those meetings with informers. A twelve-hour day, at least, and many weekends as well.

  Did he meet socially with colleagues?

  At Christmas or New Year’s they had an office party “in an object, you know.” For example, once they had a party in Wandlitz. “Then the table was nicely laid, there was plenty to eat and drink and there was dancing and a nice atmosphere.” Otherwise they had no time for socializing.

  Now he has to work just as long hours, because you can’t live on the pension the former officers get. It is not the full entitlement on their actual salary but 70 percent of a state pension calculated on the average East German wage. It’s so unjust, he says. It violates the basic principle of equality before the law…. At which his wife, who has been cleaning around the room, exclaims angrily, “There’s no point!” and slams the door so hard that the handle falls off. (From his personnel file, I learn that his wife and three daughters all worked for the Stasi.)

  Yes—he goes on—the social security, that was one of the really good things about East Germany. And now there’s all this insecurity and crime and unemployment. What use is freedom if you don’t have the money to enjoy it? He sees all the difficulties now among his customers. They badly want his private insurance policies, because the state no longer provides security, but often they can’t afford the premiums.

  From the world of state security to the world of private insurance, Alfred Fritz personifies a much larger transition. Yesterday, the officer in gray uniform, today the salesman in black jeans; but inside, it’s the same old Fritz.

  MAJOR RISSE HAS MOVED TO DRESDEN. I OBTAIN HIS address from the local Residents Registration Office. You can find almost anyone’s address, anywhere in Germany, just by asking.

  He is not at home. Looking around for something to do while waiting, I see in the middle distance a temple-like building with a large inscription that says “German Hygiene Museum.” Inside, there are special shows on the Pill and AIDS, and a permanent exhibition entitled Digestion, with vast illuminated plastic innards looming above you: stomach, bile duct, upper colon, lower colon, rectum, each in a different color. I ask a white-haired lady behind the counter for directions to the “glass cow,” a transparent, life-size model, showing all the bones, internal organs, brains and nerves. She says, “Go through AIDS into Digestion, and the cow’s on your right.”

  The most famous exhibit is not the glass cow but the glass person, a woman, standing with arms raised on a table that has buttons marked with the names of her different parts: liver, heart, kidneys, and so on. Press a button and the part lights up. The attendant tells me that this model is new. The old one was getting rather worn, so after unification they made a brand-new person. “Doesn’t she look good? But inside she’s just the same.”

  When I reach Klaus Risse on the telephone in the evening, he says he would like to talk. He’s interested in seeing the ministry’s work described more “objectively.” He has a strong Saxon accent and seems chatty, as the Saxons often are.

  “Could we meet now?” I ask, late though it is. “I hoped to get back to Berlin this evening.” No, that’s impossible, he’s expecting his wife any minute. But we could meet for breakfast tomorrow. Eight o’clock, then, in the foyer of the hotel? Agreed. As I take a room for the night, I wonder if he will come after all. Won�
��t his wife try to dissuade him?

  Meanwhile I study my photocopied pages from his personnel card and file. Born near Dresden in 1938, his father killed at the front in 1944: the missing father, again. An internal ministry questionnaire asks if he had ever traveled outside the GDR. His answer: “1954—1½ hrs. Westberlin, with a friend, looking at the shops.” In 1975 he moves from Dresden to department II/9 in Berlin. From 1978 to 1983 he is head of section A, responsible for the British. His hobby is fishing.

  On the personnel-card photograph he looks pretty ugly, but the man who waits in the foyer the next morning has a pleasant, open face and clear eyes. He is neatly dressed in white shirt and tie, brown jacket and step-in shoes. His opening line is much like that of his former colleagues: “I wanted to work for a better world.” But soon he leaves that well-trodden path. The system went wrong, he says, because it was bound to go wrong, because of human nature. People can’t be transformed, turned into something other than they are. Communism failed to allow for what he calls “the inner Schweinehund.” It could only have worked if people had been angels. His judgment is simple but not shallow: that was communism’s basic flaw.

  Of course, he did not know this back in 1945, when they started to rebuild from nothing. His father had been killed on active service. One of his brothers was horribly run over by a tractor, dragging antitank defenses through the village in the last days of the war. His mother, a farm laborer, saw her son’s head crushed under the wheels. The family was bombed out, all their possessions were destroyed. From April to October he went barefoot: “We were the poorest of the poor.” But his mother kept them going; first his mother and then the state. He did well at primary school and the state gave him the maximum scholarship to go on to a boarding school. The state helped, but it was his mother who scraped and saved to buy his clothes and books, to see him through. His voice chokes with emotion at the memory.