The File Read online

  Unlike the East German guidebooks to Weimar, Dr. Haufe had no illusion that Humanität was in any way embodied by the regime of the German Democratic Republic—though it put Goethe on its 20-mark notes. This regime was, for him, the negation of Humanität. He told me about the Stasi’s opening letters and bugging telephone conversations, and about his own long struggles with the censors, who objected even to a book he had edited under the title German Letters from Italy. The GDR was endeavoring to implement Kurt Hager’s ideological ruling that there was no longer a German nation but rather a separate “socialist nation” and “capitalist nation”—hence the campaign to remove the adjective “German” wherever possible, even from Dr. Haufe’s innocuous book title.

  As a farewell present, he gave me a small volume he had edited. I have it before me as I write. Entitled The Untimely Truth, it contains aphorisms, short prose pieces and an essay, “On Publicity,” by a long-neglected early-nineteenth-century German writer, Carl Gustav Jochmann. Coming from Riga, and inspired by his experience of living in England during the unsettled years 1812 to 1814, Jochmann makes a passionate case for the political importance of free speech. In an editorial postscript dated 1975, Haufe negotiates these subversive views past the East German censor with a fine double edge: “Just because [Jochmann] spoke from the darkness of an underdeveloped, constricted bourgeois world, he spoke also and still with the innocent voice of intellectual integrity and yearning. Public opinion was not yet recognizable as ‘false consciousness,’ as a mask for the purely bourgeois class interest, as it was a half generation later for the young Marx.” His readers, with long experience of reading between the lines, got the message immediately, and the first edition sold out in no time.

  On the flyleaf of my copy I find written in a tiny, neat hand: “Where the truth must be fought, there it has already won, C. G. Jochmann. Believing in the truth of this and similar sentences, cordially dedicated to Timothy Garton Ash by Eberhard Haufe, Weimar, 27.IV.80.”

  A delightful and rather moving visit, then. But that is not how it appears in the Stasi report from “Michaela.” Here I appear as a rude and unwelcome guest: “In the evening G. ignored discreet indications that the family H. regarded the conversation as concluded and he managed to ensure that the hospitality of the family culminated in the offer of a place to stay the night.” There follows her assessment of Dr. and Mrs. Haufe: “Both persons are marked by a bourgeois lifestyle…. I would judge that they get their information from FRG [i.e., West German] mass media.” However, she does emphasize that they are not hostile to “our social system.” Finally, she stresses the need to protect the source (that is, herself) because “only our two families know of the Englishman’s visit.” In sending a copy of this report to Berlin, Lieutenant Colonel Maresch, head of counterintelligence in the Erfurt office, notes that the Haufes are now being investigated by his unit.

  A month later, “Michaela” reports on a further visit I paid to them. Here I apparently failed to recognize Dr. Georg’s daughter from his first marriage, whom I had met while visiting his first wife, the former Mrs. Philby. “Michaela” says that I then became very embarrassed and failed to explain convincingly whether I was really interested in Jewish resistance to Nazism or in Kim Philby. (The answer was: both.) She had also learned from Mrs. Haufe that I had again visited them and gone for a walk in the Goethe cemetery with their son Christoph, who was studying in Jena. At the bottom of the page, Lieutenant Küntzel notes further measures to be taken. These include instructing “Michaela” to develop the contact with me and further investigation of Christoph Haufe in Jena. For him, a student from an already suspect family, this could have had serious consequences. In that system, a few more black marks from the Stasi could add up to dismissal from the unversity. So here is a case where “Michaela”’s harmless prattle endangered someone who was vulnerable and could not simply move on, as I could. Yet the danger came, ultimately, from me.

  Another month passes, and this time “Michaela” reports the text of a postcard I had sent her, giving my telephone numbers in East and West Berlin. Measures to be taken include asking the ministry in Berlin to check the telephone numbers. When department II/9 replies saying the IM must have misread the numbers, the Erfurt office sends back a photocopy of the actual postcard, observing haughtily: “The information given by our IM is thereby confirmed.” Signed pp. Lieutenant Colonel Maresch. This absurd bureaucratic rigmarole takes two months, from June to August, during which I had, in fact, virtually finished collecting the material for my book and left for Italy to start writing.

  Fifteen years on, I now send copies of these documents to the Haufes, explaining that I hope to write about this file, that I would like to visit them again in Weimar and to ask “Michaela”—if she is still there—why she did it and what she has to say for herself. Of course I appreciate that they may be quite unsympathetic to the whole undertaking. But the friendly dedication in my copy of Jochmann’s The Untimely Truth leads me to hope that my visit in 1980 was not as unwelcome as it appears from the Stasi file.

  When I telephone sometime later, from Königswinter on the Rhine, Dr. Haufe says they will be delighted to see me. I rent a car and drive to Weimar. The Haufes greet me in the Cranachstrasse with all the warmth I remember from fifteen years before. They assure me that my visit then had not been unwelcome. “We were trying to remember,” says the energetic Frau Haufe. “It was actually Christoph’s birthday on the twenty-fifth. We had laid the table, with candles. Then you stood before the door. I took you into this room, I remember, I sat you down next to that table over there and brought you some food.” The Proustian effect again. “You were somewhat reserved but certainly not pushy, as she describes you.”

  We talk for a while about the whole business of the files and dealing with the communist legacy. They remind me that the local State Security headquarters were at the far end of this same street. So Weimar was again home to the two extremes: Dr. Haufe at this end of the Cranachstrasse, right next to the Goethe and Schiller cemetery; the Stasi at the other. The Stasi was housed in a handsome villa designed by Henry van der Velde, like the nearby Nietzsche Archive. The Haufes’ current files had apparently been destroyed before the building was occupied by local people—the Haufes among them—on December 5, 1989. But the Gauck Authority had found an earlier file on his expulsion from Leipzig University in 1957–58, the end of his academic career.

  He had been denounced by, among others, one Dr. Warmbier, a lecturer in Marxism-Leninism. Finding the address in the Leipzig phone book—there are not many Warmbiers in the Leipzig phone book—Dr. Haufe sent him copies of the relevant pages. Dr. Warmbier wrote back, apologized, but enclosed copies of pages from his own file showing how he had himself been sacked from the university in 1974 for his increasingly critical views and had then actually been sentenced to two years in prison for “anti-state agitation.” Now Dr. Warmbier had applied for rehabilitation and, says Eberhard Haufe, “I would not like to be the person who has to judge that case.”

  But what of “Michaela”? Well, says Frau Haufe, theirs was never a close friendship. The friendship was really with Dr. Georg, who had one day appeared with his daughter in tow saying, “You have been recommended to us as a pediatrician.” But now she thinks the Stasi probably sent him. He was interesting, clever, witty. They had last seen him when he came to congratulate Dr. Haufe on his fiftieth birthday in 1981. Meat was then scarce, but there was a butcher who made nice little platters of cold meats and he had brought one of those.

  She, by contrast, was vulgar and selfish. And, says Frau Haufe, in high dudgeon and broad Thuringian, she has the cheek to tell the Stasi that we have a “bourgeois lifestyle”! “Here I was, getting up at six in the morning to clean the flat before going off to work, and there she was, lah-dih-dahing around in her Schloss, employing a cleaning lady, which was very unusual in those days, yet she tells them we have a bourgeois lifestyle….”

  As a senior state employee “Michaela” was cert
ainly obliged to cooperate with the Stasi, but she did not have to be an IM. Why did she do it? Probably for her career. She went on, after her husband’s death, to work in the state art-dealing business in Berlin. This was closely involved with the notorious Stasi colonel Alexander Schalck-Golodkowski, entrusted with obtaining as much hard currency as possible for the heavily indebted communist state, by hook or by crook. The Haufes have had no further contact with her, but perhaps she will be in the Berlin phone book….

  AS I RACE UP THE BATTERED AUTOBAHN TO BERLIN, just as I used to all those years ago, I think back over this conversation: how a file opens the door to a vast sunken labyrinth of the forgotten past, but how, too, the very act of opening the door itself changes the buried artifacts, like an archaeologist letting in fresh air to a sealed Egyptian tomb.

  For these are not simply past experiences rediscovered in their original state. Even without the fresh light from a new document or another’s recollection—the opened door—our memories decay or sharpen, mellow or sour, with the passage of time and the change of circumstances. Thus Frau Haufe, for example, surely had a somewhat different memory of “Michaela” in 1985, when the GDR still existed, than she did ten years later, on the eve of my visit. But with the fresh light the memory changes irrevocably. A door opens, but another closes. There is no way back now to your own earlier memory of that person, that event. It is like a revelation made, years later, to a loved one. Or like a bad divorce, where today’s bitterness transforms all the shared past, completely, miserably, seemingly forever. Except that this bitter memory, too, will fade and change with the further passage of time.

  So what we have is nothing less than an infinity of memories of any moment, event or person: memories that change slowly always, with every passing second, but now and then dramatically, after some jolt or revelation. Like one of those digital photographs whose every color, tint or detail can be changed on a computer screen, except that here we’re not in control and can’t revert at will to an earlier image. They say “The past is a foreign country,” but actually the past is another universe.

  Is it then ultimately true that “Imagination and Memory are but one thing”? (The words are Thomas Hobbes’s, in a passage that James Fenton chose for the epigraph of his German Requiem.) The Polish-American-Jewish writer Jerzy Kosinski used to let it be understood that, as a Jewish boy in Poland during the war, he was separated from his family, thrown into a slurry pit by the peasants in the village where he was hiding and perhaps even struck dumb at the age of nine, like the character in his novel The Painted Bird. The novel was promoted, praised and sold as a Holocaust testament. But researchers went to the village and found the surviving peasants there remembered it quite differently: the young Kosinski was never thrown into the slurry pit, and anyway he had been hiding together with his family. Now either all the peasants’ memories were wrong, or Kosinski’s memory had merged with imagination, and he really believed these things had happened to him, or he had deliberately embroidered his memories. His friends defended him fiercely. Erica Jong, for example, said, “What difference does it make whether he experienced [these things] or not?”

  Yet there is a real dividing line between the memory, however faded or enriched, of something that actually happened, and imagining something that never happened. There are historical facts. Either the young Kosinski went splash into the slurry pit or he did not. Either “Michaela” signed a written undertaking to be a Stasi informer or she did not.

  Like the materials used in a collage, these pieces of evidence have different textures: here a fragment of hard metal, there a scrap of faded newspaper, there again a wisp of cotton wool. Reporters, investigators and historians will compose widely varying collages from the same box of scraps, and further change the picture with the oil paints or watercolors of their own imagination. But there are special truth tests to which their pictures, unlike the poet’s or novelist’s, must always submit. These tests apply to every line I write. That is what makes it so difficult.

  CHECKING INTO A HOTEL, I REACH FOR THE PHONE book. There is one entry with “Michaela”’s real name. For a moment I wonder whether I should simply appear at her front door—in effect to “doorstep” her, like a tabloid journalist from the Sun or Bild-Zeitung—or to risk failure by being a gentleman and phoning beforehand. I dial the number. “Ah, Herr Esch, you visited us in Weimar, didn’t you, and I’ve since read your book….” I explain that I am very briefly in Berlin and have a particular reason for wanting to see her. We fix a time in the afternoon for me to call. “You’ll certainly have many questions,” she says, and “really I’m looking forward to it.”

  A gray tower-block of characteristic socialist-modernist design, well located and smart by East German standards. Privileged. A tall, rather loud woman greets me: “Hello, how are you?” Large features, bright lipstick, gray eyes behind metallic spectacles. Trousers and high heels. A hand-me-down Marlene. Tasteful interior decor, neo-Biedermeier furniture.

  “Well,” she says brightly, when we are settled with coffee and cakes, “what are you up to these days?”

  “Frau [real name],” I say, “do you have an inkling of why I have sought you out today?”

  A pause, just slightly too long, then: “No, not really.” That “really” again.

  Then I tell her.

  “Yes,” she says immediately, “one was obliged to in my position.” About once a month they would come to see her. Her secretary would say, “Boss, you have a visitor again.” They introduced themselves as coming from the local council, but gave only a first name: “Heinz” or “Dieter” or “Michael.” The conversation was purely in her official capacity, dienstlich, nur dienstlich. But surely my visit was an entirely private one? Yes, but Litzi and Georg were convinced that I was working for British intelligence, so this was at least a semiofficial matter, halbdienstlich. How she clings to the sheet anchor of dienstlich.

  She talks in a rather matter-of-fact, outwardly self-confident way, but then asks nervously: “What did they report?” Not “I” but “they.”

  I give her photocopies of the reports and she starts reading. She is shaken by the detail and by the information on her husband.

  I ask how the interview normally proceeded. Did “Dieter” or “Heinz” have a notebook? Yes, yes, they had an open notebook and they carefully wrote everything down. And really one cooperated. One was obliged to. And one tried to tell as many harmless details as possible. And then, one thought they might help with one’s work. And sometimes they did help: with difficulties over planning permission, things like that. The Stasi intervened to get things done. And, you see, there was this law case about two Dürer pictures from the Weimar collection that American soldiers had stolen at the end of the war. And she thought, if we win the lawsuit, then perhaps I’ll be sent to America to collect them! Well, they won, but the Ministry of Culture sent someone else to America. She complained to the Stasi about that.

  Anyway, Dr. Georg died in 1984, after his daughter by his first marriage, to Litzi Philby, had emigrated. On his deathbed he said he still believed in socialism. Then Litzi emigrated to Vienna, to be nearer to their daughter, “Michaela”’s stepdaughter, who had recently been allowed out. Yes, Litzi had worked for the KGB; but by the end she was disillusioned and resolutely apolitical. Then “Michaela”’s own daughter, her child by Dr. Georg, had emigrated. She herself moved to Berlin, took early retirement—with a good pension as the widow of a “fighter against fascism”—and, in 1987, resigned from the Party. In a friend’s file there had been mention of contacts with “the Jew [Dr. Georg’s real name].” That was shocking, although of course one knew there was this latent anti-Semitism around. “But I haven’t applied to see my own file, I don’t want to do that.” She seems halfway to seeing herself as an object of Stasi surveillance, almost as a dissident.

  But then she goes back to reading the photocopies. The banal, grotesque detail she had supplied about me, about the Haufes and their “bourgeois lifest
yle,” about young Christoph Haufe. Lieutenant Küntzel’s list of measures to be taken: investigation of the family and of the student Christoph, instructing the IM for a further contact. Suddenly she puts the papers down and says, “I can’t read any more. I feel sick, I want to puke.” She turns and walks to the door, and when she comes back she is crying. Her voice is strangled as she says, “This can’t be excused.” Still, she tries to explain.

  Her grandfather was a Prussian officer, but her grandmother was Jewish. So according to the Nazi classification in the Nuremberg Laws her father was a so-called Mischling. However, because he was a gifted gynecologist, the SS employed him despite his mixed blood in one of their own maternity hospitals, in Thuringia. After the war her father had come back to be a senior doctor in Brandenburg, joining first the Social Democrats and then the Socialist Unity Party formed from the forced merger of the Social Democrats with the communists. She was fifteen in 1945, and for her this was a time of elation and true belief in a new beginning. She was sure they were building a better Germany. Of course, she says, the style of the new regime was awfully petit-bourgeois and philistine for someone from her background, but still. Her hopes faded only slowly. The Soviet crushing of the Prague Spring was an important moment of disillusionment. But even in the 1970s she still believed that socialism was the better system. Anyway, it was there, it was the only thing she had known all her adult life.

  In 1975 she got this good job in Weimar. But with it came “Dieter” and “Heinz.” As she talks, emotionally, disjointedly, she reveals rather vividly the mixture of motives that made her collaborate. Some residual belief in the system. The sense that it was an official duty: “in that position one was obliged to …” Then there was the hope of using the Stasi as a player in the bureaucratic game. For her own purposes too: through Dürer to America! Also, Georg and Litzi thought I really was a spy and, after all, there was a war on, wasn’t there? A Cold War between her system and mine.