The File Read online

  III

  THE EVENING BEFORE I FINALLY PASSED THROUGH THE Wall I threw a party for the friends and acquaintances I had made in West Berlin, opening the high double doors that linked the rooms of the flat at Uhlandstrasse 127. According to my diary, I finally went to bed at a quarter to five on Monday morning, January 7, 1980, got up again at a quarter past six, finished packing, wrote a few last letters and then drove through Checkpoint Charlie and the East German frontier post (“all smiles”), along a snowbound Unter den Linden, past the Alexanderplatz and up the Schönhauser Allee to my new home in the working-class borough of Prenzlauer Berg, Erich-Weinert-Strasse 24.

  In the file, IM “Schuldt” reminds me how it looked. Typing neatly, single-space, he records: “It is a relatively small room (for an older building) with a window giving onto the street. The door to the room is closed from inside with a security lock that appears to have been fitted only recently. Apart from a bed, a table and a pair of chairs, one notices above all a large sideboard on which the tenant has—as I discovered—mainly put books. Newspapers were laid out on the table (I noticed, above all, several copies of Sonntag) on which marginalia bore witness to intensive reading. Beside them were several dictionaries.” What he didn’t remark upon, perhaps because he was so used to it, was the general dinginess, the ocher walls, the brown linoleum on the floor, the cheap plastic lampshade and the freezing winter cold.

  In this room, with the dark bulbous sideboard, I lived for nine months, leaving East Berlin on October 7, 1980, the thirty-first anniversary of the founding of the German Democratic Republic. The anniversary was, as usual, marked by a military parade, which—as usual—the Western allies vainly protested was in violation of the four-power status of Berlin, agreed with the Russians in 1945 and still theoretically in force. On my way to watch the parade, I met a cheerful black American GI wandering across the Alexanderplatz with a huge teddy bear, a souvenir of the Moscow Olympics. While giggling Young Pioneers—the communist girl guides and boy scouts—handed chocolates and flowers to the soldiers of the “Friedrich Engels” Guards Regiment, I saw a British officer in khaki uniform and green beret leaping around with a portable stepladder, filming the whole affair. Later, the Engels Guards marched off with carnations stuck in their rifle barrels.

  The history books record that the period from January to October 1980 saw a further intensification of the East-West conflict. In May, West Germany reluctantly joined the American-led boycott of the Moscow Olympics in protest against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan—although the American message had apparently not got through to that GI on the Alexanderplatz. At the end of August, a wave of strikes in Poland culminated in the deputy prime minister’s signing an agreement with the strikers at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk. This agreement accepted the workers’ right to form independent trade unions, a concession unprecedented in the history of communism. The new union would be called Solidarity. Some writers have referred to “the making of the Second Cold War”—a striking phrase, but the Cold War had never really ceased.

  My own life now began to engage directly with this outward history. First in East Germany, then in Poland during the Solidarity revolution, public and private intertwined. The physical distance from my large flat in the West to my small room in the East was less than ten miles; the psychological distance was several thousand. I popped over to the West quite often: my file records the precise date and time of every single border crossing. West Berlin friends telephoned or came to see me in my dingy quarters.

  Yet I find myself earnestly noting, just ten days after going to live in the East: “I have something more than an indifference to [illegible] contacts with my Westberlin life…. It is an active aversion. Why? Because most of their concerns are (relatively) not important. It is important that human beings are diminished and mangled in the name of Equality and Peace and Justice. It is important that someone is sent to prison for years simply for wanting to leave the state in which he happens to have been born. It is important what happens in Afghanistan.” And a month later, after a telephone call from Irene: “Ach, that world, of telephone ‘relationships’ and eternal ‘relationship’ problems.”

  In East Berlin, I was still meant to be working on my thesis about Berlin in the Third Reich. The file contains references written by my Oxford mentors, Tim Mason and Tony Nicholls, for the British Council, which had arranged my stay as the first visiting research student under the new cultural agreement. Tim Mason was an inspiring teacher and, most unusual among Oxford historians, a Marxist, though of a distinctly unconventional, English-empirical kind. Indeed, he plainly did not qualify as a Marxist in the Stasi’s judgment, for he is assessed in my file as writing “from a bourgeois democratic position.” On the wall of his room in St. Peter’s College hung a poster showing Marx and Engels declaring “Everyone’s talking about the weather—we don’t!” This perfectly summed up Tim Mason’s bottomless contempt for English middle-class triviality, his high seriousness and painfully acute puritan work ethic. Tragically, he would take his own life some years later.

  I am touched—with a sense of obligation—to read Tim’s warm letter of recommendation. I fear he and Tony Nicholls were subsequently disappointed that I did not complete my doctoral thesis on Berlin under Hitler, but I think they saw the point of what I did instead. At its best, the Oxford history school has been tolerant of variety, even of eccentricity. “In History’s house are many mansions,” the then professor of modern history, Richard Cobb, himself a full-blooded explorer of the outermost frontiers of the discipline, used cryptobiblically to declare, at one of his not always entirely sober, sparsely attended, yet, for me, utterly entrancing lectures, delivered in some inspissated corner of the university on a dismal Friday afternoon.

  In fact, I did continue to spend time in the archives, but the East German authorities gave me only very restricted access to the relevant files. The main reason was probably that a full reading of the Nazi records would have shown how relatively small, and perhaps also how penetrated by the Gestapo, had been the communist resistance to Nazism; whereas the East German state was built upon the myth of a large communist-led “antifascist resistance.” I also worked at the old Prussian State Library on Unter den Linden, in the so-called Special Research Department, which contained all the books and journals that the state did not want its ordinary citizens to read. It was known colloquially as “the poison cupboard.” While I read yellowed copies of the Nazi newspaper Völkischer Beobachter, a senior officer of the “Felix Dzerzhinsky” Guards Regiment, the military arm of the Stasi, sat at the next table studying copies of a West German illustrated news magazine and a Western armaments journal.

  As my glance strayed from the Nazi newspaper to the Stasi officer, so altogether my attention was shifting from Hitler’s Germany to Honecker’s. I now firmly planned to write a book about the current German dictatorship. Communist austerity brought a distinct simplification of everyday life: one small room instead of five large ones, one kind of heavy black bread in the gloomy state-owned corner store, rather than the twenty different kinds of bread, roll, croissant and pastry at the baker’s near my flat on the Uhlandstrasse. Helped by this enforced simplicity, I became more single-minded and set out to gather all the information I could.

  IM “Schuldt” rightly observed that I studied the press closely. I watched television, listened to the radio, read the more adventurous current fiction, which was also a partial substitute for the lack of a free press, and went often to the theater. The Berliner Ensemble had now become little more than a Brecht mausoleum, but at the Deutsches Theater or the Volksbühne I found the kind of sly cultural resistance so familiar from my studies of Berlin in the 1930s. Sometimes it was the very same theaters, and even the same texts. I remember, for example, an electrifying reading of extracts from Heine’s “Germany: A Winter’s Tale” at the Deutsches Theater:

  I saw the Prussian soldiers again.

  They’re still the same as ever.

  Lo
ud laughter.

  And still they strut about as stiff,

  as straight and thin as a candle,

  as if they’d swallowed the corporal’s stick

  Old Fritz knew how to handle.

  The stick has never quite been lost,

  although its use has been banned.

  Inside the glove of newer ways

  there’s still the old iron hand.

  I made full use of my unusual freedom of movement, as a research student with a visa for the whole country, by contrast with the accredited correspondents for Western newspapers, who had to ask permission to travel outside the city limits of Berlin and were presumably followed more intensively than I was. My diary laments horrendous repair bills for the car as I drove throughout the country on potholed roads. To Leipzig for the trade fair, where I first saw at close quarters the Party leader, Erich Honecker, and was astonished by how small he was. To Dresden on the anniversary of the February 1945 Anglo-American bombing of the city: “Ach, why did you do it?” asked one middle-aged woman in a café. To Greifswald, to visit my friend Rolf-Achim Krüger, who was studying medicine there; to the Baltic island of Ruegen; to Schwerin, with Andrea and her ex-husband, for a very bad performance of Goethe’s Faust. Then as often as possible to the wooded hills of Thuringia, my favorite of all the German lands, and of course to Weimar, that best and worst place in German history. Back in the capital, I went with a Polish friend to the Ballhaus Berlin, a dance hall that still had numbered table-telephones. Spotting some pretty women, we dialed their number. But this was East Berlin, so the telephone didn’t work.

  Usually, though, I managed to talk to people wherever I went, and afterward wrote down what they had told me. There were initial barriers of suspicion, heightened by fear of the Stasi. I have not projected this fear backward onto the experience; this was something friends kept telling me about at the time. In Schwerin we were warned, “Watch out! The actor playing Faust works for the Stasi.” The Stasi shadows swarmed like bluebottle flies at the trade fair in Leipzig. Rolf-Achim even wondered whether my car was bugged, as we drove down the autobahn singing the Wolf Biermann protest songs he had taught me. “The green bursts from the branches,” we sang, as we sped through the night, “then they’ll know the score!”

  I ate often at my local corner pub in Prenzlauer Berg, a place of varnished wood and decrepit waitresses. Since seats in restaurants and pubs were invariably scarce, I usually had to share a table. Once, while I drank my beer and waited for a greasy Wiener schnitzel, three young workers at my table were complaining loudly about their military service. Suddenly they stopped talking and looked suspiciously at this silent but keenly listening tablemate. An informal interrogation began, led by a thickset, muscular man with one finger missing on his right hand and wearing a University of California T-shirt. “All right, so you say you’re a historian,” he barked. “Tell me, where was Karl Marx born?” Fortunately I knew the right answer. “OK, who was leader of the KPD [the German Communist Party] in 1930?” Right again. “Ummm, who brought Hitler to power? And”—he could no longer restrain himself—“don’t say the fucking monopoly capitalists.”

  My English cheque card finally disarmed their suspicion. Then California apologized, and told his story. He was now twenty-two. His parents lived in West Berlin. On the night the Wall went up, the three-year-old boy happened to be staying with his grandparents in the East. The East German authorities did not let him out again. He had subsequently been placed with foster parents, lost his finger during military service and now worked as a truck driver. Sometimes his father would come over from West Berlin to visit, bringing a small present in his latest gleaming Mercedes. Hence the University of California T-shirt.

  That was his story. You may find it incredible, and no doubt there were important details—perhaps a complicated family situation—that he did not tell me. Yet a lawyer involved in these cases has estimated that when the Wall went up in August 1961 there were as many as four thousand children separated from their parents. A confidential report that I recently found among the papers of Chancellor Willy Brandt suggest that in August 1972 the GDR was still holding more than a thousand such children. So California’s story may well have been true: he was one who didn’t get away.

  In any case, his hatred of the system was profound. “Afghanistan?” he said. “The Americans should march in from Pakistan and drive out the Russians.” They would need an invitation, of course, but the Russians had shown how that could be arranged. Look at the Czechoslovak communists’ invitation to the Soviet Union to “save” Czechoslovakia in 1968, or Babrak Karmal’s recent invitation to do the same for Afghanistan.

  Down the Erich-Weinert-Strasse, in a back court-yard garret, lived an acquaintance from the mildly dissident artistic scene of Prenzlauer Berg. He wore a permanent two-day stubble, and wrote poems and music. I christened him “the Young Brecht.” As a schoolboy in 1968, he and some friends had organized, in protest against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, a reading of Brecht’s wonderful anti-Nazi resistance song from Schweyk in the Second World War:

  But time can’t be halted. The boundless ambition

  of those now in power is running its course.

  Like blood-spattered cocks they will fight for position

  But time can’t be halted. Not even by force.

  In an excited letter to a friend he then wrote: “We are forming a resistance group.” For this, he was condemned to two and a half years in prison, of which he actually served fifteen months. By the time he came out of prison, his mother had emigrated to the West. She was not allowed back to visit him; he was not allowed out to see her.

  He won a place to study at the Humboldt University, but as an ex-prisoner was disqualified from taking it. Then he himself applied to emigrate. He was refused. His wife left him. Now he worked three days a week in a cemetery, and spent the rest of his time in the bohemian milieu of Prenzlauer Berg. I remember the correspondent of a leading liberal West German paper, who also knew Young Brecht, telling me she thought he had made a rather happy little life for himself behind the Wall.

  California and Young Brecht were extreme cases. More typical were the nice couple from whom the university had rented my room. Intelligent, well educated, well informed through watching Western television, they nonetheless devoted virtually all their energies to private life, and particularly to extending, decorating and maintaining their cottage on a small lake some half an hour’s drive from Berlin. They had rebuilt the place with their own hands, including, as they proudly showed me, an electric water pump, a roofed veranda, spotlights for evening table tennis, a small private pier and a motorized rubber dinghy.

  My friend Andrea, too, concentrated on private life, bringing up her small children in the charmed atmosphere of a run-down old villa on the very outskirts of Berlin. There were lazy afternoons in the garden, bicycle rides, sailing and swimming in the lakes. Modest idylls, especially for children. “Inner emigration” and “the unpolitical German” are the large phrases behind which such lives disappear.

  I deliberately did not seek the company of Western correspondents, partly because I wanted to find out for myself and partly because I thought this might arouse the authorities’ suspicions. However, I did, perhaps incautiously, see quite a lot of Mark Wood, the Reuters correspondent. A loop of old-fashioned yellowing telex tape hung from a nail on the wall of the gloomy Reuters office on the Schönhauser Allee. It was an obituary of Hitler’s deputy Rudolf Hess, then the only Nazi prisoner of the wartime allies remaining in the Spandau fortress. Mark’s predecessors in this office had included the thriller writer Frederick Forsyth, who had written a famous Reuters news story. On his way back to the office, late one night in April 1964, he had seen Russian tanks rolling into the city center. He telexed to London a dramatic, urgent story—an “eight bells snap,” which, on those old-fashioned telex machines, meant that a bell actually did ring eight times at the other end—and then went out to investigate. Only when
news of the impending third world war had been flashed around the world did he realize that these were just preparations for the regular May 1 parade. He was soon withdrawn from the Berlin office.

  One snowy day in January, Mark and I drove out to look at the walled and closely guarded settlement at Wandlitz, where the top Party leadership lived in villas set among special shops and extensive gardens. The young guard at the gate noted down our passport details. When, feigning innocence, we asked him what this compound was, he nervously replied, “It’s nothing.” The senior officer then informed us that it was “a military object.”

  In the file, I find a report from the head of Main Department PS (Personal Security, responsible for the security of the leadership) to the head of department XX/4. Describing the Party leaders’ self-made ghetto as “the residential object of the leading representatives,” it records that we appeared at 17.55 hours in a dark green Alfasud (dark blue, actually), asked the way to a restaurant in Wandlitz and at 18.15 hours were “banished from the object.” It also notes, unsurprisingly, that Mark was being covered by II/13 (journalists), while I was still with XX/4 (churches), in connection with the Reverend Beech-tree.

  As we sat up at 1:00 A.M., drinking in the flat next to Mark’s office, the telephone rang. Heavy breathing, then the line went dead. Half an hour later the phone rang again and a voice said, “I see you have a guest.” We guessed they were bored, or simply wanted us to go to bed. Knowing the place to be bugged, we took pleasure in loudly deploring the latest article by “Edward Marston,” my pseudonym in The Spectator. “Did you see Eddie Marston’s latest piece, Tim?” “Yes, terrible, wasn’t it? He must have been drunk again.” Now I ask Frau Schulz to inquire if there is a file on this enemy of the people, but alas, the central card index has no entry under Marston, Edward.