The File Page 7

  Mark, who today is editor in chief of Reuters, was told after unification that the next-door flat had been a Stasi surveillance center, with wires from a control panel leading to a number of bugs planted in the wall of the Reuters flat, including several in the bedroom. They also had a visual observation post across the street. In technical coverage, the Stasi consistently outdid all but the wildest Western fantasies.

  My favorite place of all, and a refuge from the general grayness and conformity, was Werner Krätschell’s vicarage. A large man with a broad, strong-boned, truly Lutheran face and a deep, musical voice, Werner came from a long line of Prussian soldiers and priests. When the Wall went up, in August 1961, he was a twenty-one-year-old theology student and, illegally, on holiday in Sweden. After long discussions with his brother, he finally decided to return to the East. A group of West Berlin students, who were frantically forging identity papers for people to get out of East Germany, now rather bemusedly helped Werner to forge papers so he could get back in without being detected, since officially he was still there. Today, he says that he can only half disentangle the real mixture of motives for his extraordinary decision to go back, but one motive was a sense that “he would be needed there” more than in the West.

  He was certainly needed there. As a parish priest he offered pastoral care in a society that needed it at least as much as any other, despite the state’s ideological claim to provide total welfare from cradle to grave. Later, as dean of Pankow, he was increasingly called to look after those who sought out the church as a space of freedom where you could speak a few truths, rather than as a place of Faith in revealed Truth.

  Over coffee or a glass of wine, Werner would tell me, in his rich, slightly old-fashioned German, about his efforts to negotiate with officials of the party-state. Steeped in the tradition of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the anti-Nazi Confessing Church during the Third Reich, he still believed that a dialogue with the communists could bear fruit. Yet he also told me about the repression and the costs that his own family bore. Like many clergymen’s children, his eldest son, Joachim, was not even allowed a normal secondary education.

  I treasured these conversations and the warm, tranquil atmosphere of the old vicarage. Occasionally we would go out together for a meal or a lecture, or to drive through the Brandenburg countryside, with Fontane’s Travels around the Mark Brandenburg as our guidebook. So little had changed in a hundred years!

  Several of my meetings with Werner are described in observation reports: some now in my file, some in his, some in both. The shortest of these is on October 17, 1979, when a Stasi shadow picked me up at Friedrichstrasse at 18.35 but lost me by 18.45. According to my diary, I was off to a reading by the communist writer Stephan Hermlin.

  For February 27, 1980, they record a visit paid by “Romeo,” “Beech-tree” and his son to the City Library: “17.40 hours ‘Beech-tree’ parked his Wartburg in front of the building. The three persons then entered the City Library. They checked their coats into the cloakroom and proceeded to the lecture room on the second floor. Here they listened to a lecture on Prussian history and Prussiandom.” Some might say that this report was itself another small page in the history of Prussiandom, although Werner, with his romantic attachment to the Prussian heritage, is still reluctant to accept this.

  In Werner’s own file I find the same report but also, carefully preserved in a buff envelope, some black-and-white photographs of us as we were entering the City Library—presumably taken with a concealed camera. There is Werner, with his large frame and broad, strong features. He was forty then, the age I am now. There is young Joachim, a little figure with curly side-locks, looking uncannily like one of the small Jewish boys in Roman Vishniac’s haunting photographs of the vanished world of East European Jewry before 1939. Joachim was twelve years old then, the age my eldest son is now. And there am I, aged twenty-four, fresh-faced, still clean-shaven, hair short and parted almost in the center, tweed jacket, with a silk handkerchief in the top pocket, cord trousers and doubtless those Oxford shoes.

  My diary records the previous thirty-six hours in the life of this earlier self, this me/not me. A Polish lesson in the morning. Then a call at the Albanian embassy: “Albanian raki and conversation,” the diary says cryptically. Drop in to the British embassy to collect my mail, which was delivered there, as for several British people living in East Germany, because it seemed likely to be quicker and safer. A few hours’ reading. Dinner at Stockinger, a restaurant on the Schönhauser Allee, with Ursula von Kardorff, a hugely spirited survivor of wartime Berlin who was working on a new guidebook to the city. Turning aside from the diary, I take the Kardorff guidebook down from my bookshelf and read “Stockinger … typical GDR-style rusticity with pretentious cuisine.”

  Later in the evening, across to West Berlin, “over Charlie.” First to the Paris Bar, then off to the Kurfürstendamm flat of a lady called Ingrid Schick and “red wine and rowdy argument from about 10 p.m. to 5.15 a.m.” From there, straight to an early breakfast at Mau Mau, an all-night café. Back across the frontier to East Berlin, getting home shortly before 7:00 A.M., “meeting on the stairs a frontier guard, just off to do his day’s work.” Two hours’ sleep. Some work in the library. A meeting with Dr. Demps, the “adviser” assigned me by the university. Then off with Werner and Joachim to that lecture on Prussia and Prussiandom. Afterward we had dinner at Stockinger again. And so to bed.

  Werner would become a dear friend. When my first child was born some years later, Werner became his godfather: Uncle Werner, behind the Wall. We have worked together on the research for this book. Shortly after unification, he met Colonel Wiegand, the senior Stasi officer responsible for the churches. Wiegand began the conversation by telling him that they had been especially interested to listen to a telephone call that Werner had made to me in Oxford from a friend’s flat in West Berlin, on one of the rare occasions when he had been allowed out. Werner had assumed that it was safe to telephone from the West, but apparently the Stasi could get a fix on any number in West Berlin. For calls between West Berlin and West Germany it had a sophisticated listening station located, suitably enough, on the Brocken mountain, scene of the fabled witches’ sabbath, or Walpurgis Night. Their equipment could be programmed to record any conversation in which a particular word or name was mentioned.

  By August 1980 I had collected enough material to start writing. After saying farewell to Andrea, I took the train to Italy, where I began work on the book while staying with my friends Sally and Graham Greene. I was deeply frustrated by the Western accounts of East Germany that appeared at this time, often produced by sixty-eighters revolting against what they saw as the crude anti-communism of the older generation. The word “Stasi”—or “State Security Service” or “secret police”—did not appear at all in the twenty-page index to the best general book about East Germany then published in Britain. Instead, Jonathan Steele’s Socialism with a German Face: The State That Came in from the Cold concluded that East Germany’s “overall social and economic system is a presentable model of the kind of authoritarian welfare states which Eastern European nations have now become.” But presentable to whom? Not, I found, to most of the East Germans I met. I had no partisan agenda: of Right against Left. My objection to these descriptions was not that they were Left but that they were wrong—inaccurate, partial, patronizing, deaf to the plain truths that the people who actually lived there could tell you. I wanted to describe it as it really was.

  This description included the Stasi. “Suspicion is everywhere,” I wrote. “It strikes in the bar, it lurks in the telephone, it travels with you in the train. Wherever two or three are gathered together, there suspicion will be.” I quoted Western estimates that there were at least one hundred thousand informers working for the secret police. I was particularly interested in the way the communist regime drew upon older German traditions and habits of obedience.

  After I had been writing for just a few days, the BBC World Service reported that
an occupation strike had begun at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk. Italian newspapers printed grainy photographs of a mustachioed worker called Lech Walesa. I knew at once that I simply had to be there. I cut short my holiday and took the train back to Berlin. Sitting in the station buffet at Munich, I read a report in Le Monde of how the strikers had refused the government’s offer of a special supermarket instead of the monument they demanded to commemorate the workers killed in the previous round of protest on the Baltic coast. They preferred the symbol to the food. Early on the Monday morning, I went to the Polish embassy in East Berlin to get a visa, and soon I was inside the Lenin Shipyard.

  I sat with the unshaven, exhausted strikers watching the end of a communist party Central Committee meeting on television, and when the Party leaders were seen standing up to intone the “Internationale,” the people around me spontaneously rose to their feet and began singing the Polish national anthem. “Arise, ye prisoners of want,” piped the television, “Poland is not yet lost,” thundered the strikers, “so long as we live!” Their hands shot up, making the V for Victory sign. Yet in all our minds was the thought that Soviet tanks might again roll, as they had to crush the Prague Spring just twelve years before.

  IV

  THE SOURCES THE STASI THEMSELVES CONSIDERED most important were the “unofficial collaborators,” the IMs. The numbers are extraordinary. According to internal records, in 1988—the last “normal” year of the GDR—the Ministry for State Security had more than 170,000 “unofficial collaborators.” Of these, some 110,000 were regular informers, while the others were involved in “conspiratorial” services such as lending their flats for secret meetings or were simply listed as reliable contacts. The ministry itself had over 90,000 full-time employees, of whom less than 5,000 were in the HVA foreign intelligence wing. Setting the total figure against the adult population in the same year, this means that about one out of every fifty adult East Germans had a direct connection with the secret police. Allow just one dependent per person, and you’re up to one in twenty-five.

  The Nazis had nothing like as many. In 1941 the full-time staff of the Gestapo, the Nazis’ secret state police, for the vastly larger territory of Greater Germany, including Austria and what is today the Czech republic, was fewer than 15,000. Even adding the Reich security service and other possibly comparable units, one still can not reach anything like the Stasi proportions. We have no national statistics for the number of regular informers under the Nazis, but it seems clear that this was also very much smaller. Over its relatively short life, starting with real popular enthusiasm and ending with five and a half years of war, the Third Reich could rely much more on voluntary denunciations—as I found in those dusty People’s Court files. In East Germany the regime was never popular to start with, and the longer it went on, the more it came to rely on this huge network of informers.

  I appear to have had the attentions of five. Their evidence and operational potential are carefully weighed by Lieutenant Wendt. As I study their reports on me, and set out to identify, find and talk to them in person, I am drawn back not just into my own past life but into these other lives that briefly crossed with mine.

  I was not a victim of these informers, as many East Germans really were of theirs. They did me no serious damage. Yet, knowing how the system worked, I may fairly guess that they did harm others. I cannot say how typical they are of Stasi informers in general, although I know enough of other cases to say that some elements are common. However, the fact that they happen to have informed on me gives me a special chance to test the accuracy of the files—and to enter into their own experience. Why did they do it? What it was like for them? How do they see it now?

  I start with that “IM of the HVAI—adviser of the G. at the H[umboldt] U[niversity] B[erlin]—” who according to the opening plan of action is to be brought into the “operational treatment.” My adviser, Laurenz Demps, was someone I knew more than casually. He was a large, hearty Berliner, with an extraordinary knowledge of the city’s history and a sharp sideline in black humor. I still have the handsome volume of Heinrich Zille drawings that he gave me as a farewell present. He was also a staunch Party member with a romantic nostalgia for the street-fighting days of the communists in Weimar Berlin.

  The case interests me particularly because he is one of relatively few East German historians to have retained his position after the country was united with the West. In fact, he has been made a full professor at the Institute of History in the Humboldt University, despite a rigorous purge of former staff by the new Western management. Before calling Laurenz Demps himself, I discuss the case with the director of the Institute, Heinrich-August Winkler, a distinguished West German historian, and with Stefan Wolle, an East German who refused to make the political compromises necessary to climb the academic career ladder under communism and now has to start again from a relatively humble position. They both point out that, unlike many of his colleagues, Demps has come unscathed through the university’s extensive vetting procedures. These include, crucially, the prescribed inquiry to the Gauck Authority, known colloquially as “being gaucked.”

  Yet there would be an explanation for Laurenz Demps’s getting a clean bill of health from the Gauck Authority if he was an informer for Markus Wolf’s foreign intelligence service, the HVA. For most of the records of that service have been destroyed—or in part, it is sometimes said, transported to Moscow. Klaus Eichner, a ruddy-faced former colonel of the HVA, describes to me how already in the late autumn of 1989 they were busy shredding and burning the most sensitive files, and removing their agents’ cards from the ministry’s central records. This temporarily stopped when the Stasi headquarters were occupied in mid-January 1990. But then, in an extraordinary decision of the Round Table negotiating the transition from communist rule, the foreign intelligence service, alone among all the departments of the Stasi, was formally empowered to continue its own “self-dissolution.” So throughout the spring and early summer they went on destroying any files that would identify individual agents and informers. “I was destroying my life’s work with my own hands,” says Colonel Eichner.

  Names from two backup copies of card indexes have since reached the West German authorities, and some of Wolf’s senior officers have talked, thus producing evidence for a number of trials. But these sources mainly concern agents working in the West. That being so, an informer of the foreign intelligence wing will usually be exposed only if there happens to be a cross-reference in the files of other departments. Otherwise he or she will come through not as the life-threatening “gauck-positive” but, like Laurenz Demps, as “gauck-negative.” Another revealing colloquialism: having a Stasi past is like having AIDS.

  “For what it’s worth,” says Stefan Wolle, who himself studied at the Humboldt in the 1970s, “people used to say that Demps had something to do with the Stasi.” And then: “Well now, if you want to hang him …” But he says it with a kind of wry weariness, and I hear behind his words: “Well, if you really must …” This from Stefan, who ever since the fall of communism has argued vigorously for a radical purge of former Stasi collaborators.

  “Well now, if you want to hang him …” What a responsibility! With just eleven words in a file—“an IM of the HVA I—adviser of G. at the HUB”—I can, if I choose, ruin a man’s career, perhaps even his life. For IM is the kiss of death. What earthly right have I to play judge and hangman? And for what? The actual content of the two-page document headed “copy of an IM report,” passed to department II/9 by the HVA in July 1980, is wholly inoffensive. It ascribes to Dr. Demps the view that I work purposefully and thoroughly, with a bourgeois-liberal attitude—although “no commitment to the working class”—and concludes with the suggestion (wishful thinking, but perhaps encouraged by me) that he might come to Oxford as examiner of my thesis. It has done me no harm.

  Only the clear identification of Demps as an informer makes the thing serious. If this is true, there is an argument of historical justice for at lea
st reporting it to the university, from which other scholars have been purged for being informers. When I say “purged” I should be more exact. They have not been banned from working altogether, just dismissed from this particularly sensitive position as university teachers; and by no means all those identified as informers have been sacked. According to the university’s first West German rector one in every six professors and one in ten university employees had worked for or in some way cooperated with the secret police under the old regime. Of these, many have left voluntarily and some seventy have been dismissed. But the university “commission of honor” has also found in many other cases that the offense was not serious enough to merit dismissal. Clearly someone should not, in fairness, escape this rigorous but discriminating judgment just because of the historical accident that a particular set of files has disappeared.

  None of which makes me any happier as I telephone Professor Demps, one day in June 1995, to arrange my appointment. I have had no contact with him since 1981. He is clearly surprised by my call and the news that I have “something I want to discuss” with him, but agrees to meet. We fix a rendezvous in a café on the Wilhelmstrasse, about which he has just published a rather well-received book. His exceptional knowledge of Berlin’s local history has also earned him a place on a prestigious commission to propose changes to East Berlin street names: Marx-Engels-Platz to be Schlossplatz, part of Karl-Liebknecht-Strasse to be Schinkelallee, part of Karl-Marx-Allee to be Hegelallee, and so on.