The File Read online

  Eleven sharp, and there he sits outside the café, a large man with a pasty complexion and rheumy eyes, wearing gray trousers and a red pullover with epaulettes. A slightly tense greeting. Tea and coffee ordered. Then I come to the point. I have read my Stasi file and it would appear that they had him down as an informer of the HVA.

  “Au weia!” says Laurenz Demps.

  I explain what the file says and show him copies of the relevant pages. His hand shakes slightly as he takes the copies. When he lights a cigarette he spills the ash down the front of his sweater: “You see how agitated I am.”

  But no, he says, he was not an informer, he had nothing to do with the Stasi. “Oddly enough, they never approached me.” However, he does remember talking about me to the head of the university’s International Department. “What was the man’s name? You remember, we had lunch together once in the Operncafé?”

  As soon as he says this, I see it all. I have been puzzled by the fact that the “copy of an IM report” from the foreign intelligence service does not give the informer a code name, but in mid-text identifies my adviser with his full name: “Com[rade]. Dr. Laurenz [name blacked out]” as it appears on this copy. However, I reasoned, if Lieutenant Wendt of Stasi counterintelligence read this to mean that Demps was an informer for the foreign intelligence service, who am I to doubt it? Wendt must have known what he was doing. Perhaps foreign intelligence worked by slightly different rules from the rest of the ministry.

  Now I see that it was that man from the university’s International Department who was the informer—and someone in his position would obviously have had contacts of interest to Wolf’s spies. What the foreign intelligence service has passed on is a copy of his report, hence the identification of Dr. Demps by his real name. It is Lieutenant Wendt who has been sloppy in his work, eliding the informer and the informer’s source.

  As Demps pores over the report, he points out that while much of the information obviously came from him, there are also things he did not know—such as my contact with a Mr. Wildash at the British embassy. “Look at this sentence,” he says, and we both bend our heads over the document. Two historians discuss the interpretation of a primary source.

  Now complete denial of the accusation is, I am told, the most usual first reaction of an IM. The denial sometimes continues long after the informer is confronted with incontrovertible evidence—denial, then, in a psychological as much as a criminological sense. But Laurenz Demps’s reaction seems to me that of an innocent man and his explanation is immediately convincing. On my return to Oxford I find that I still have my notes from that lunch in the Operncafé on (it appears) March 27, 1980. In these notes I describe the head of the International Relations department as a “Smart Alec/Flash Harry. Brown jacket. Loud tie. Sancho Panza mustache.” I note the somewhat forced mateyness of the two Party members, the demonstrative way they use the comradely Du to each other but the more formal Sie to me. Flash Harry had studied “scientific communism” in Leipzig. “You know there is a joke that does the rounds here,” he tells me confidentially, over another liqueur. “We say ‘dictatorship of the proletariat.’ Now I can see the proletariat, but where is the dictatorship?” And so on. I’m glad to hear from Laurenz Demps that this nauseating man has long since left the university. I wonder what he’s doing now?

  But how did Demps himself see me at the time?

  He points to the Stasi report: “Much as it says here!” It was fairly interesting to have an English student, but, you know it is, advising students always takes precious time away from your own research. And then he asks how I saw him.

  As a convinced communist, I say, and as someone with an almost romantic view of the prewar Communist Party of Germany.

  Yes, that’s true, he replies, although adding that there were many things that one didn’t say to a foreigner. According to my notes from 1980, what he did say to me at that lunch was: “We don’t expect you to join the Communist Party of Great Britain…. All we want is that you should take us seriously and tell people in the UK that we are serious people.” But then he added a personal aside: “Will you spit on Churchill’s grave for me?”

  Probably it was little jokes like that which contributed to my lack of interest in looking up my old adviser, after it again became possible for me to enter East Germany. But I have nothing but sympathy—and some admiration—for the way he copes with the shock I have just given him.

  “I thought of all sorts of things when you telephoned,” he says, “but never this.” In fact, he had recently been sent pages from a friend’s file in which he himself appeared as a suspect because he took a leading part in a private discussion group. Picking up my comment about romanticism, he muses, “Yes, but romanticism can be dangerous.”

  Then it’s time for him to give some American students a guided tour of the Wilhelmstrasse. “After this,” he says, “I’m going to drink a large schnaps.” He is still visibly shaken, like a man who has stood for a moment under the gallows. Had he been a prominent public figure, and I an unscrupulous journalist, he could well have been “hanged.” I can just see the report in Der Spiegel—how often in recent years have we read them—with the little inset black-and-white photograph of a page from the file, and the damning line circled in red: “an IM of the HVA I—adviser of the G. at the HUB.” Damning, but wrong.

  For myself, I am just very, very relieved. I can hardly wait to get back to the hotel, to telephone Winkler and Wolle and explain the Stasi’s mistake.

  As I am writing this book, Stefan Wolle faxes me a newspaper clipping about a newly founded Berlin-Brandenburg Prussian Association. Of the founding members, the report mentions only one name: “Humboldt University historian Laurenz Demps.”

  A telephone number is given, and when I ring up, the Prussian Association sends me an information pack. From this I learn that the association is to cultivate the “true values and virtues of Prussia” and to “lay the foundation-stone for a spiritual renewal of our fatherland” since Germany threatens to degenerate into a “multicultural assortment of intolerant individualists.” The association’s statute makes special mention of the “philosophical writings of Frederick the Great.” Its keynote speaker commends the spirit of the king and his soldiers at the Battle of Leuthen in 1757. “True Prussiandom,” he says, is associated with patriotism, selflessness, tolerance, modesty, loyalty and a sense of duty, but also with “secondary virtues such as punctuality, love of order and cleanliness.”

  V

  MY MOST ASSIDUOUS INFORMER IS “MICHAELA,” THE lady in Weimar. On February 9 the Erfurt office reports to counterintelligence department II/13 (journalists) that I have again been in touch with their IMV “Michaela.” Erfurt also encloses the transcript of a taped conversation with her husband, previously described as “Georg” but now “Michael.” In this transcript, Dr. Georg recalls his experiences at Reuters in London, starting in 1943. As joint managing editor of the European desk, Dr. Georg reports, he had great problems editing features written by such “sworn Soviet-enemies” as “Richard Löwenthal … now professor of politics at the Free University in Berlin,” Alfred Geiringer and the Swiss Jon Kimsche.

  And so the Stasi file, this cardboard time machine, transports me back not just fifteen but a full fifty years, to Britain at war. In fact, the three names he mentions could stand for those of many Central European exiles in London at that time: men and women who owed their freedom to Britain’s solitary stand against Hitler and who subsequently gave much to Britain—and Europe—in return. Turn the page, and I might be reading about Arthur Koestler, or André Deutsch, or Sebastian Haffner, or George Mikes, or about another young Central European exile, then working as a news commentator on European affairs for the BBC’s Empire and North American service, but now known to all the world as George, the Lord Weidenfeld, of Chelsea.

  The communist Dr. Georg had discussed his difficulties in censoring the “sworn Soviet-enemies” with Comrade Hans [name blacked out], who was in a similar pos
ition on Time magazine. His problem with editing those anti-Soviet commentaries “so that the most poisonous parts were removed” got worse toward the end of the war, he says, and he decided to contact the relevant section of the War Office in order to seek a position in postwar Germany. This he did “with the agreement of our comrades—the leadership of the London group had in the meantime passed to Feliks Albin (Kurt Hager).” (Kurt Hager would subsequently become one of the longest-serving members of the East German Politburo and the Party’s chief ideologist.) The War Office, in its wisdom, then entrusted this German communist with the job of building up “the first [postwar Western] German news agency DENA in Hamburg.” The British officials’ grasp of geography seems to have been as shaky as their political judgment, for Dr. Georg also managed to persuade them that to go from London to Hamburg he needed to pass through Berlin.

  So on May 13, 1946, he received his handwritten official permission to travel to Berlin. “It had been agreed with the comrades in London that I should report to the C[entral] C[ommittee]…. The comrades on the spot should decide whether I should take up the Hamburg job or remain in Berlin.” After long discussions, they decided that he should stay in Berlin to build up the East German news agency, “but then I ended up with the Soviet news agency in Weissensee.”

  He wrote to the head of the embryonic Hamburg operation, explaining that he could not take up the job for political reasons, since he disagreed with British policy toward Germany. Dr. Georg also recalls, with almost audible amusement, that as nothing had been heard from him for nearly two and half weeks, British newspapers had run reports of his mysterious disappearance and speculated that he had been kidnapped by the Russians. “Since my return to the then S[oviet] O[ccupation] Z[one],” the transcript concludes, “I have had no close contact with any of the acquaintances connected with my London activities.”

  Two touches must be added to this self-portrait of Dr. Georg at war. The first concerns his then boss at Reuters, Christopher Chancellor. The transcript in my file records only that Dr. Georg had learned that Chancellor was critical of his decision to leave Reuters, finding it “arrogant.” While I was writing this book, I met Christopher Chancellor’s son, Alexander Chancellor, my own former editor at The Spectator, at a party given by the editor of The Times for the editor of The New Yorker. Amid this clamor of editors, I asked him if he had ever heard his father speak of one Georg (true name), and explained the circumstances. For a moment, the bitter taste of Central Europe’s tortuous history intruded between sips of champagne on a beautiful summer’s evening in a North London garden. Alexander punched the name into his computer notebook and said he would consult his elder brother. A couple of weeks later we met again and he told me the result of his inquiries. His brother did not know the particular name. However, he did remember that around that time their father had come home very worried and angry about revelations of Soviet spies at Reuters.

  The other touch concerns Dr. Georg’s then girl-friend: Litzi Philby. Kim Philby had parted from the Jewish communist Litzi in 1936, at a time when he was posing as a sympathizer with fascism and supporting the Francoist side in the Spanish Civil War. Litzi, meanwhile, was living in Paris, and it seems that it was through her that Philby kept in touch with Soviet intelligence. In 1939 she moved to London and managed to bring her parents out of Vienna—just in time. In London she got together with Dr. Georg. Some mystery surrounds the circumstances in which she finally divorced Philby and left England, but by 1947 she had joined Dr. Georg in East Berlin, and married him there, using her maiden name. Nine years later they, in turn, were divorced. Dr. Georg went on, after another marriage, to make his life with “Michaela,” and moved with her to Weimar. Litzi stayed in Berlin.

  Early in my time in East Berlin I went to visit this woman whose life was a history of the twentieth century. We talked over afternoon tea and Viennese macaroons in her small flat on the Karl-Marx-Allee. Her bookshelves contained Tennyson, Keats, The Oxford Book of English Verse and Ignazio Silone’s The School for Dictators. My notes record a small, attractive, energetic woman with a Viennese accent and frizzy hair, “very young for her age”—she was then seventy—and, as I rather oddly put it, “inquisitive to a fault.” Soviet agent training? I asked myself. Caution because of bad experience with foreigners posing as … ? Or simply, and in the end this is the hypothesis I prefer, Viennese bourgeois habit. It was probably a mixture of all three. After her exciting youth, she had spent the last twenty years until her retirement dubbing foreign films for the state film distributor. She now enjoyed an excellent state pension as a “fighter against fascism.”

  She talked affectionately and admiringly about Kim. “He was very brilliant,” she said—the last two words spoken in English—and had a genius for languages. However he was, she added, “somewhat reserved.” She was sure the Vienna workers’ rising in 1934 and its brutal suppression had been a formative experience, turning him into a fully committed communist. In fact she herself seems to have played a decisive role. It was through her that the young man from chilly old England was plunged into a new world of high political excitement, quick, warm friendships, seemingly uncomplicated solidarity and probably a fair dash of sexual liberation as well. It may also have been she who introduced him, in the midst of all this, to Soviet intelligence.

  I felt I could hardly ask her about the sex. Instead, I asked her whether she and Philby would have chosen the path they did if they had known what was really happening in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. There was a long pause and then she said, very seriously, “I really can’t answer that. It must seem incredible to you that we didn’t know about it all….”

  What did she think of East Germany now?

  “Well, let’s say it is not what we hoped for or believed in.”

  She critized the general mistrust, the fearfulness and timidity of the leadership, the lack of freedom of expression and freedom of movement, and the privileges—even her own. However, she still believed in something she called socialism. “What’s the alternative? I see none.”

  Back to the file and “Michaela” reports that on January 5, 1980, she received from me a copy of an exhibition catalog entitled Between Resistance and Conformity: Art in Germany 1933–1945. She confirms that the handwriting on the attached greeting card is the same as that on the piece of paper on which I had written down my name during my last visit. “In order to implement further measures to strengthen the contact as well as Blickfeldmassnahmen [a special Stasi term meaning keeping someone in view] I will send a letter of thanks to the address given below:

  Tim Gartow Ash

  Kunstgalerie

  Berlin-West.”

  Underneath is typed “Michaela.” The report is not signed by hand, but a note at the bottom seems to refer to an IM file.

  Five months later a minute “produced from verbal information given by IMV ‘Michaela’” reports that her husband had told her how, on the weekend of April 26–27, I had tried to visit them again. Dr. Georg had declined to see me, saying he was too ill. However, he had found out some details of my Weimar visit by asking the doctor who was looking after him at the time. The doctor happened to be married to Eberhard Haufe, “a free-lance scholar of German literature,” and I had stayed with them.

  I remember that weekend. These were the Shakespeare Days in Weimar, and the main event was a lecture by George Steiner. It was a characteristic bravura performance, from Lear to Twelfth Night by way of Oedipus and Don Giovanni. Afterward I had supper with the great man. I felt there was something particularly appropriate about talking to Steiner here in Weimar, in the shadow of Buchenwald—surely the quintessential example of that profoundly disturbing proximity of high culture and barbarism about which Steiner had written so eloquently. But my notes record little conversation on that subject: “No, what he wanted to do was to gossip—and did so, relentlessly, unceasingly, cascading for over an hour over supper in the [Hotel] Elephant. Have you heard the latest about the Regius Professor? etc.
‘My, how you must miss it all!’” My notes express a disappointment that today I find just a little unfair, for, after all, the sage had been talking very seriously about great matters all day.

  Nonetheless, it was not Shakespeare and George Steiner but Goethe and Eberhard Haufe who made that weekend memorable.

  Wer den Dichter will verstehen

  Muss in Dichters Lande gehen

  To understand the poet you must visit his country, Goethe wrote, and no place in Europe is more eloquent of the writers who lived there than Weimar. First, his own house, with the wonderfully preserved library and his standing desk: Hebbel called it the only battlefield of which Germany could be proud. Then Schloss Kochberg, where Goethe worshipped Charlotte von Stein, before bedding the more comfortable Christiane. On to Schiller’s house, the tomb of the two poet-princes and the wonderful parks: On The Ilm and Tiefurt and that of Schloss Belvedere—the residence, two hundred years after the duchess Anna-Amalia, of IM “Michaela.”

  The eloquence of the place was matched by the company of Eberhard Haufe and his family, with whom, as my diary records, I walked in the parks and visited Schloss Kochberg. Eberhard Haufe was a small, fragile man, with a precise and somewhat old-fashioned manner of speaking. Since his dismissal from the University of Leipzig in the late 1950s, for political reasons, he had lived as a textual editor and critic, working on editions of the German classics and his special passion, Johannes Bobrowski, the poet of the European East.

  As we walked we had the kind of intense conversation about books, ideas and politics that I would often have with intellectuals and churchmen in Europe behind the iron curtain, but less often with their counterparts in the West. Here there was the added charm of being in Weimar with a scholar of the German classics, and I felt, as we walked through the Tiefurt park, that the white-haired, delicate figure beside me was not just an expert on the intellectuals of classical Weimar; he was one of them. He stood in a continuum, and a conversation, that stretched back two centuries. A conversation that was and still is at heart about the true meaning of one central but elusive concept of German writers and thinkers from Herder to Thomas Mann: Humanität (literally “humanity,” but with a very large H).