The File

by Timothy Garton Ash

  This passage illustrates in miniature how small distortions creep into the Stasi records. For example, I would certainly never have referred to the genial Alexander Chancellor, then editor of The Spectator, as my Vorgesetzter, a word with clear implications of hierarchical command. This must be Dr. Georg’s word or—more likely—Lieutenant Küntzel’s, for the lieutenant lived in a world where everyone had a Vorgesetzter. Yet there it is: attributed to me as part of a direct quotation. Now suppose for a moment that the content of this passage were altogether more serious and compromising; suppose that the interpretation of the whole passage hinged—as it sometimes can—on the one word; suppose I had subsequently become a prominent East German politician; and suppose that I woke up one morning to find the passage quoted against me as a headline in a West German tabloid: quote unquote. Calls for resignation follow. Who would believe me when I protested: “No, I didn’t say that! Well, not exactly. And anyway, they’ve got the date wrong. And the title of The Spectator. And the spelling of my name …”

  Yet despite the small distortions and inaccuracies, this account basically rings true. Whether or not I actually knew beforehand about Dr. Georg’s connection with Reuters—of which Alexander Chancellor’s father, Christoper Chancellor, had been general manager—I can just hear myself overplaying my delight at this rather unremarkable coincidence, in the hope of keeping a rather sticky conversation going and getting Dr. Georg to talk more freely.

  “At this time the wife (IMV ‘Michaela’) of [Dr. Georg], who had been in the kitchen, entered the living room,” the report continues. “She was introduced by her husband with the words: ‘My wife, director of the Weimar Art Galleries.’ The IMV thought the visit was to her husband … so she was all the more surprised that G. immediately brought the subject around to the exhibition on the Bauhaus organized by the Art Galleries. He explained that he had seen the exhibition and was fascinated by it. However he could not understand why the Art Galleries had not issued a catalog. The way the question was posed suggested that he would have liked to have heard from the IMV that this was impossible for reasons of cultural policy. The IMV did not go into that, but explained it by the paper shortage….

  “Angered by the rudeness of G., who now only let [Dr. Georg] be a silent listener to the conversation, no longer mentioning the original subject, [Dr. Georg] took his leave of G. on the pretense of having to run an errand in town. At this point the conversation had lasted some forty minutes. Now G. explained to the IMV that he was working on an article about the development of the artistic and cultural life of the GDR and was therefore interested in the IMV’s comments. He posed such questions as:

  —Why was there only now a Bauhaus exhibition organized in the GDR (Weimar)?

  —What is the attitude of the GDR to the Bauhaus?

  —What reception did the exhibition have nationally?

  —What reception did the exhibition have internationally?

  In the conversation it became clear that G. has a good knowledge of the artistic scene, especially in the field of the Bauhaus.”

  At the end of the visit I apparently wrote my name on a piece of paper—“for unknown reasons he did not wish to give the full address”—and expressed interest in further conversations. “The conversation with the IMV lasted twenty minutes, so that G. spent in all about one hour in the apartment.”

  Lieutenant Küntzel finds all this of “operational relevance” for a number of reasons. He notes that Dr. Georg might be of interest to “enemy agencies” because of his earlier connections with Kim Philby but also because in East Germany he is disgruntled with current cultural policy and may have sympathy for “dissidents” (Lieutenant Küntzel’s quotation marks). Those enemy agencies, speculates the lieutenant, might be interested in the possibility of “building up a dissident” (his quotation marks again). So Dr. Georg is at once source and suspect.

  Meanwhile I am highly suspect because, in the lieutenant’s analysis, I used not just one but three “legends” to describe what I was really about: friend of a friend, journalist, student of East German cultural life. “Legend” is the Stasi term for cover story. It is generally used for the stories developed for their own full-time agents and part-time informers, but here is applied by extension to me.

  Measures to be taken include instructing “Michaela” and “Georg” how to behave if I contacted them again and informing counterintelligence department II/13, which was responsible for watching Western journalists.

  Some of the small details are wrong. The interpretation is paranoid. Yet overall, the Stasi lives up to its reputation for being everywhere and watching everyone. On account of just one incautious conversation, and a couple of more or less innocent contacts, I have already been entered into the central files as a suspect. By the time I am preparing to cross to East Berlin, after a year and a half in the West, they have pulled together in a summary report their information on my contacts, my West Berlin address and telephone number, my car, my hair, my height (corrected on the file copy to 1.80 meters from “Michaela”’s estimate of 1.65–1.70 meters), even the fact that I appear to be a nonsmoker.

  However, it is also striking what they have missed. For example, there is no indication of broadcasts I had done for the BBC in Berlin, or the articles I had already written for The Spectator about East Germany, including a tribute to East Germany’s most prominent dissident, Robert Havemann. “Edward Marston,” the pseudonym under which I wrote, seems to have been an effective disguise. Nor is there any record of the Christmas I spent with friends near Dresden, and many other visits.

  Not surprisingly, they have little on my life in West Berlin. Yet even the partly blacked-out names, the addresses and telephone numbers, unlock memory’s doors, and send me back to my diary.

  When I arrived in Berlin, fresh from England, I drove to the flat of an old lady called Ursula von Krosigk, to whom I had been introduced by the publisher Graham Greene, a nephew of the novelist. Graham’s father, Hugh Greene, had known her when he was Daily Telegraph correspondent in Berlin during the 1930s, before being expelled by the Nazis. Ursula was white-haired, bolt upright, unmarried, a Prussian noblewoman through and through, but warmhearted, spontaneous and unconventional. Her characteristic defiant toss of the head somehow still recalled the naughty schoolgirl playing truant from her grim boarding school in Potsdam fifty years before. She had lived in Berlin most of her life, and once described to me how the smartly dressed crowd at the premiere of Brecht’s Threepenny Opera swept out of the brightly lit theater past a row of real-life beggars—cripples, war-wounded, unemployed—in the shadows along the Schiffbauerdamm. Many of her friends had been involved in the resistance to Hitler, but her uncle, Lutz Schwerin von Krosigk, had been Hitler’s finance minister. She remembered driving out with him to his country estate on the morning after Kristallnacht, through streets littered with the broken glass and debris from plundered Jewish shops: “No one said a word.”

  Ursula lived on the fourth floor of a nineteenth-century apartment block, at a quiet corner of the Pariserstrasse in prosperous Wilmersdorf. From the window you looked past trees to a red-brick Wilhelmine church. Downstairs there was a rather grand marble staircase and a huge double door made of wrought metal and glass. To get in or out at night, after the porter had locked up, each tenant had an ingenious iron key that you put in one side of the keyhole and pulled out the other. I remember my sense of excitement on that first, warm summer’s evening, as the heavy door closed behind me and I set out to explore the fabled city.

  Indoors, the flat was full of once-fine pieces of furniture and overflowing with books. I slept in a sleeping bag on the drawing-room floor, next to a dusty old sofa propped up by a prewar Baedeker of Dresden, and as I drifted off to sleep I reflected that propping up a sofa was about all that a prewar Baedeker of Dresden would be good for. I was on the floor because Ursula already had a lodger in her spare room. This was James Fenton, who had come to Berlin as a special correspondent for The Guardian afte
r writing about literature, Indochina and Westminster politics for The New Statesman.

  James and I were soon spending a good deal of time together. My diary notes long evenings, over many cold beers and chasers, at our local, trendy bistro, curiously called Bistroquet; or at the corner pub across the square, the far-from-trendy Kuchel-Eck, with its doilies, fruit machines and loudspeakers constantly playing “By the Rivers of Babylon;” or at the Presse-Bar, which we liked because no one from the press ever went near it; or Zwiebelfisch and Ax Bax, favored haunts of now paunchy survivors of the 1968 events; or the bourgeois Café Möhring; or the Dicke Wirtin (the Fat Landlady), where, in the early hours, a desperate Algerian at the next table burned his residence permit and a drunken man in a black-leather jacket then pulled a gun on him.

  “Watch out, he’s got a gun!” said James.

  “That’s impossible,” said the German girl with us, who worked for the British military government in the still-occupied city, “private handguns are forbidden in Berlin.” But the gun was real.

  Pale, intense, shabbily dressed, his body slightly bowed beneath his large, tonsured head, James was like a dissident monk. His initial knowledge of Germany, and German, was not large. In fact, the local German correspondents at first thought he must be a spy, since, they rather strangely reasoned, no journalist could know so little about the country to which he was dispatched. This did not last long, however, since he had a very sharp eye, an equally sharp mind and the crusading journalist’s passionate tenacity in pursuing a story—especially where it involved wrongdoing by the rich, the powerful or the sanctimonious.

  For various reasons, some of which I perhaps hardly guessed at, this was not a happy time for him, but for me he was an enchanting companion. What set him apart was the poet’s verbal wit and fantasy, unexpectedly, whimsically and sometimes crazily taking flight from the shared ground of experiences that were already interesting enough. I learned much from him about the craft of writing, and we became close friends.

  In the autumn, Ursula gave up her flat and went to live in Munich. We moved a few blocks down the Pariserstrasse, to the pleasingly tawdry Pension Pariser-Eck: all orange lamps and noises through thin walls, very Graham Greene. As autumn turned to a bitterly cold Berlin winter, and the east wind seemed to whistle down the Kurfürstendamm straight from Siberia, we moved, with impeccably bad timing, into a small flat heated by an old-fashioned, tile-clad corner stove. The stove needed constant feeding with coke briquettes, which we had to carry up from the cellar. I briefly fled this hardship in the West for luxury in the East, celebrating a traditional German Christmas Eve with my newfound friends the Krügers, an upper-middle-class family who lived an extraordinary life of “inner emigration” behind the high garden walls of their fin de siècle family villa in Radebeul, near Dresden. On the way, my car, unaccustomed to northern snows, refused to start again on the East German side of Checkpoint Charlie. The guards gave me a jovial push-start into the East.

  When visitors came from Britain, James and I would take them to the Paris Bar in the Kantstrasse, to Exil, a restaurant in Kreuzberg run by “exiles” from Vienna, to Romy Haag’s raucous transvestite cabaret, and then on to another bar or two. Berlin had to live up to the Isher-wood myth. I assigned the part of Sally Bowles to a new friend of mine called Irene Dische, an attractive American girl of German-Jewish origin, who had come to Berlin to be a writer. Talking to Irene now, I see that of course she had us down as Auden and Isherwood—or was it Spender?

  In real life, our West Berlin experience was shaped less by the shades of Isherwood than by those of the ’68 revolt, of which West Berlin had been a center, alongside Paris, Amsterdam, Frankfurt and Berkeley Ten years on, there was no longer the special shop on the Uhland-strasse where you could buy everything you needed for a demo: red flag, placard, gas mask, suitable boots. But the walls of the Free University were still covered with political graffiti, and at least half our friends belonged—like Claudia—to the 1968 generation. You could recognize the sixty-eighter at once: the jeans and open shirt; the inevitable cigarette or joint; the instant Du rather than the more usual and formal Sie; the distinctive vocabulary, with lots of socio-psycho-neologisms about relationships, “structural violence” and so on. The apartment would have bare floorboards, white painted walls and a pine bookshelf with serial copies of the journal Kursbuch and the totemic books by Enzensberger, Bloch, Adorno and Marcuse.

  Yet those who had marched together in ’68 were walking in different directions now. A few had become terrorists in the Red Army Faction (otherwise known as the Baader-Meinhof gang) or other grouplets, planting bombs and assassinating prominent businessmen or senior officials. The West German state had responded with a heavy hand, banning even suspected “enemies of the constitution” from state employment, which in Germany covered an extraordinarily wide range of jobs, from top civil servants to postmen and street cleaners. “Berufsverbot,” the critics dubbed it. Soon after I arrived, there appeared a gloomy film called Germany in Autumn, full of mounted police and sinister, dark-suited establishment figures. Was Germany going bad again?

  Some of these friends would tell us how there had been a moment back in the late 1960s or early 1970s when they, too, might have become terrorists. But instead they had—despite Berufsverbot—become teachers, or social workers, or academics. Or they had gone back to poetry and painting, or on to publishing and journalism, or got into other isms: environmentalism, feminism, structuralism. Claudia was a schoolteacher, Paul an eternal student and part-time art dealer, Peter an artist, Yvonne a psychologist and translator, Elmar a political scientist. Friedrich was a freelance journalist, now embarked on a crusading investigation of the way in which the West German courts had failed to pursue Nazi crimes—and especially the crimes of German lawyers and judges themselves. Here was a particular interest of the German sixty-eighters: exposing the sins of the fathers.

  Early in 1979 I moved into what was called a Wohn-gemeinschaft—the sixty-eighters’ term for a communal flat—in the Traunsteinerstrasse in Schöneberg. My flat-mates, or fellow communards, were a nice, mildly left-wing American academic called Hugh and a man called Bernd. Bernd’s father had worked for the Nazis as an aircraft engineer, and then been carried off by the Americans to work for them. In the wake of 1968 Bernd had become not just a leftist but a member of the Socialist Unity Party of Westberlin, a puppet-sister of East Germany’s ruling communist party. He wanted, as he tells me now, to join something that was “serious,” by which he meant: connected to real power. At that time it still looked as if Soviet power was growing, while, after Vietnam, that of the United States seemed to be fading. Helped by his Party card, Bernd had got a job with an East-West trading company that was, though I did not know this at the time, a direct subsidiary of an East German enterprise with close connections to the Stasi.

  Bernd was a heavily built, irascible man, with a brow that creased into thick worry lines. His touch could not be described as light. Nazism and Marxism furnished his spontaneous terms of reference and abuse. My diary records that when I overstayed my allotted time in the bathroom one morning, so that his careful daily routine was disrupted, he beat on the door with his fists and shouted, “Ruling class!” When Heiner, the main tenant, threatened to sue him for having his children in the flat, Bernd retorted: “You Nazi pig. You’re like the concentration camp guard who murders people during the day and then plays the piano and drinks his wine in the evening.”

  In fact I owed my place in the commune to this titanic quarrel between the two of them, which had resulted in Heiner’s moving out. Before he left me his two beautiful, airy, high-ceilinged rooms, with an arrangement of empty picture frames on the white-painted walls, he sat me down for a chat. By candlelight, and through clouds of cigarette smoke, I found myself launched into a two-and-a-half-hour psychoanalytic session, which mainly consisted of Heiner talking about himself. I record one characteristic passage describing how he had seen himself at the age of fourteen: “
At that time I started from the assumption that I was strongly ego-positive, heterosexual, but perhaps with anal aspects.” All this just to hand over the keys.

  When he had gone, I noted the contrast with Jay, the British public school and Oxford friend who had just visited me: “from the reserved, oblique, ironical, snobbish, inhibited, emotionally-tangled Englishman to the open, direct, earnest, left-wing, jargon-ridden, liberated, emotionally-tangled German.” A few days later the telephone rang. I picked up.

  “Hello, is Heiner there?” asked the anonymous caller.

  “No.”

  “Well, are you gay?”—he used the German word schwul.

  “No,” I said, and put the phone down. Seconds later, it rang again.

  “Hello,” said the same voice. “Are you an Englishman?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, what I meant was: do you sleep with men?”

  “No!”

  Heiner, I now discover from Bernd, had decided a couple of years earlier that he was homosexual and at that time was exploring the matter, programmatically. But I don’t think that he was necessarily making a pass at me. He may just have thought he was making me feel at home.