The File

by Timothy Garton Ash

  Bernd tells me that Heiner recently died of AIDS.

  I HAD MIXED FEELINGS ABOUT THE SIXTY-EIGHTERS. They were interesting just because they were so unlike most people I had known. I could understand and sympathize with some of their political projects: for example, Friedrich’s campaign to expose the failure to do justice to the victims of Nazi injustice. However, they seemed to me often hysterical, self-obsessed and self-indulgent. I tired of their moaning about problems that struck me either as self-created or as minor compared with those in the East. Heiner told me that President Carter’s visit to West Berlin was just like a visit by Brezhnev to an East European satrap, yet he appeared totally indifferent to what was happening in the professedly socialist state of East Germany, just a few miles away, behind the Wall. For them, the Wall, which encircled West Berlin, seemed to be nothing but a huge mirror in which they could contemplate themselves and their own “relationships.” “The paper narcissi,” says my diary.

  Yet if the sixty-eighters were exotic to me, this heavy-shoed, tweed-jacketed young Englishman must have been a strange apparition to them. Looking back, he now seems pretty odd to me. People may envy the possessor of a file, but being carried off by your poisoned madeleine is not always a comfortable experience. In his novel Ferdydurke, the Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz imagines waking up one day to find himself sixteen again. He hears his “long-buried, squawky little rooster voice,” sees his “ungrown nose on an unformed face” and senses that his ill-mixed limbs are laughing at each other: the nose mocking the leg, the leg sneering at the ear. Time-travel with a file can be rather like that: a bad trip.

  What the Stasi’s Lieutenant Küntzel called my “legends” were in truth less cover stories than different strands of an unformed life. Like the confused ambitious twenty-three-year-old students who now come to my rooms in Oxford to ask me for life advice, I wanted to do everything at once: to write a doctorate about Berlin in the Third Reich, and a book about East Germany, and an essay about the Bauhaus, and brilliant reports for The Spectator, and probably to be George Orwell, foreign secretary and war hero too. Cover stories that I told myself.

  The diary reminds me of all the fumblings, the clumsiness, the pretentiousness and snobbery—and the insouciance with which I barged into other people’s lives. Embarrassment apart, there is the sheer difficulty of reconstructing how you really thought and felt. How much easier to do it to other people! At times this past self is such a stranger to me that where I have written “I” in these last pages I almost feel it should be “he.”

  Personal memory is such a slippery customer. Nietzsche catches it brilliantly in one of his epigrams: “‘I did that,’ says my memory. ‘I can’t have done that,’ says my pride and remains adamant. In the end—memory gives way.” The temptation is always to pick and choose your past, just as it is for nations: to remember Shakespeare and Churchill but forget Northern Ireland. But we must take it all or leave it all; and I must say “I.”

  FOR ALL THE DISTRACTIONS, MY DIARY STILL RECORDS my spending long, weary hours working through Gestapo files, in the sinister-sounding Secret Prussian State Archive, and the records of the Nazis’ so-called People’s Court, in the Berlin Document Center. The People’s Court papers were piled on metal shelves, dusty, uncataloged, while the American director of the Document Center, then still an institution of the American military government, went off to play golf.

  I was appalled at the number of prosecutions that began with a denunciation, not by paid Gestapo informers but by ordinary people: a barber, denounced by a customer; a chemist, denounced by his shop assistant; a housekeeper, denounced by her employers; even someone informing on his own brother and a wife accusing her husband. These are all real cases—taken from People’s Court judgments I photocopied at the time. Many of these trials led to a death sentence.

  At the end of the day I would step out into the sunlit streets of leafy Grünewald, sickened by this seemingly endless record of human baseness and cruelty. Often I felt as if I had blood on my own hands. I would go for a swim to wash the blood off. Then I would have a drink at a café and look at the old women gossiping at the next table. What did you do in the war, granny?

  I did not confine myself to the archives. I also talked to the veterans and survivors. There was Albert Speer in Heidelberg, with his well-polished tale of the unpolitical technocrat. There were casual acquaintances, each with an extraordinary personal history: a motor mechanic, for example, whose parents died while he was still a baby on the desperate flight west before the advancing Red Army, so that he knew neither his birthplace nor his birthday—nor his real name, nor his parentage. All that he knew is that he came from somewhere in the Memelland, a once-German territory in what is now Lithuania. Then there were the grand old men of the German resistance to Hitler who met again every year, on the anniversary of the July 20, 1944, bomb plot, in the courtyard of the former Wehrmacht headquarters, where the leader of the plot, Count Stauffenberg, had stood before the firing squad.

  Just before he died, Stauffenberg cried out in defiance “Es lebe das heilige Deutschland?”—Long live sacred Germany! Or was it “Es lebe das geheime Deutschland?”—Long live secret Germany!—a reference both to the resistance conspiracy and to the semimystical ideas of the poet Stefan George? Stauffenberg’s last words are still disputed. Amid the ghosts of secret Germany I was searching for the answer to a personal question. What is it that makes one person a resistance fighter and another the faithful servant of a dictatorship? This man a Stauffenberg, that a Speer. Today, after years of study, and after knowing personally many resisters and many servants of dictatorships, I am searching still.

  Not just to a professional student of history but to any Englishman living in Germany at this time, and probably to most British newspaper readers, the past was still the most interesting thing about Germany—and “the past” meant essentially the twelve years of Nazism. The great achievements of postwar reconstruction, the civilized democracy and exemplary social market economy presided over by Chancellor Helmut Schmidt: all were greatly admired, but boring. Even the far-left terrorist threat and the strong reaction of the West German state were given their special edge because of the fear, bequeathed by Hitler, that Germany could again be dangerous.

  James was almost as fascinated as I was by the Nazi past, and we worked on several stories together. With Friedrich, our sixty-eighter journalist friend, we observed the trials of the Majdanek concentration-camp guards in Düsseldorf. When an elderly Jewish woman testified that she had been forced as a prisoner to carry canisters of the poison Zyklon B to the gas chambers, a German defense lawyer leaped to his feet demanding her instant arrest—for aiding and abetting murder.

  We also pursued the mysterious case of the then West German president’s youthful membership in the Nazi Party. A distinguished painter, Heinz Troekes, told us how the young Karl Carstens proudly used to wear his Party badge at the artillery school where he was an instructor and Troekes a pupil. But President Carstens continued to win popularity by his knickerbockered rambling around the German countryside, and the story faded away. I was on the case as both fledgling historian and apprentice journalist, James as a fully fledged journalist but also as a poet. Out of this experience he wrote one poem, “A German Requiem,” which captures better than anything else I know the elusive, haunted quality of German memory:

  How comforting it is, once or twice a year,

  To get together and forget the old times.

  One evening Friedrich rang to say that a neo-Nazi group called the Viking Youth would be out in force at the opening of a new pub called the Café Vaterland. He had seen some of them earlier at a discussion with schoolchildren about the American television series Holocaust, which was making a huge impact in Germany at this time. Their “ideologist” had said that they would again erect concentration camps in Germany.

  The Café Vaterland was on the ground floor of a nondescript modern block on the Tauentzienstrasse. The walls were decked
with military bric-a-brac and a crude oil painting showed Hitler sitting on the lavatory. When we arrived, the place was already half filled with teenagers in leather jackets and boots. They ate bread smeared with dripping and greeted each other with a Peter Sellers version of the Nazi salute, stopping with a bent right arm, halfway up. The rest of the pub was packed with journalists, observing these Viking Youths. At about midnight, since nothing seemed to be happening, we left and walked around the corner to where my car was parked in a dark street. Suddenly there were several black-jacketed figures running toward us. They carried beer bottles broken off at the base to give a jagged cutting edge.

  At this point, my memory goes into slow motion. I see the thugs coming out of the darkness into the light of a streetlamp. I see myself walking slowly—idiotically—around the car, to open the driver’s door. James is on the pavement, vaguely brandishing a collapsible umbrella. Friedrich is running away diagonally across the street, toward a brightly lit multistory parking garage on the other side. I don’t remember at all the sensation of the bottle hitting me on the side of the head. Perhaps I lost consciousness for a few seconds, since the next thing I see is both James and Friedrich bending over me, as I begin to pick myself up off the dirty tarmac. I think I first realized what had happened from the horrified expressions on their faces, looming above me, garishly illuminated by the streetlamp. Then, to complete this B-movie sequence, I put my fingers to my neck, bring the hand down again and look at the blood.

  One of the thugs had got me with a broken-off bottle just behind the ear. Dazed and bleeding, I was driven by a passing motorist to the nearest emergency department and sewn up by a very unsympathetic elderly nurse, while James and Friedrich loudly insisted on immediate access to a telephone. She said, “Your friends there are worse than the Nazis.” Next day a journalist from one of the tabloids got annoyed with me because I had washed my bloodstained shirt, which he wanted to photograph. “Where’s the bloody shirt?” he demanded.

  The East German communist party daily, Neues Deutschland, covered the story under the headline PLAYGROUND FOR FASCISTS IN WESTBERLIN. In line with the Marxist theory that fascism grows from capitalism, it reported that “with the support of the beer company Dortmund Union-Schultheiss” the owners of the pub had

  established a center of neo-Nazism and militarism in the middle of Westberlin. Members of the neo-Nazi Viking Youth felt encouraged to make their first terror actions against those with different political views. They threatened three journalists, among them two Englishmen who were working on a documentary on the Nazi Reich. They followed the journalists onto the street and beat them up. So far the state attorney has done nothing.

  In fact both the West Berlin authorities and the British military government took a close interest in the case. I was interviewed at length by the local security service. I was given a minute medical examination by one Dr. Spengler, at a morgue. The Viking Youths were identified and arrested. We gave evidence at their trial in the forbidding court building of Moabit—Berlin’s Old Bailey—and they were convicted.

  James did not, however, share my special interest in East Germany, although my diary records one earnest conversation in which he appears to have said that the possibility of development within socialist societies was the most important political question for leftists like himself. What has happened to the Left since 1989 suggests that this was ultimately true. At the time, though, it was a very hard truth for Western leftists to accept, especially for those who in 1968 had been confronted on the streets of West Berlin by horrible old women waving their umbrellas and screeching, “Go over there!”—meaning, to the East.

  The sixty-eighters coped with this awkwardness in several awkward ways. Some now bent over backwards—or was it forwards?—to see all the good and progressive elements in East Germany: social security, full employment, equal opportunities for women, kindergarten for all. As scholars or journalists they wrote idealized accounts of East Germany that added up to a comprehensive misunderstanding of their own country. Theirs was a revolt against the crude Cold War anti-communism of their parents—less pro-communism than anti-anti-communism. It was also a hope against hope that the whole millennial project of socialism was not being discredited by the “socialism” being practiced in the East.

  A few, like Bernd, became out-and-out defenders of the Eastern system, Wall and all. A few went further still. All the Stasi foreign intelligence officers I have now talked to, including Markus Wolf himself, tell me that the sixty-eighters provided a rich field for the recruitment of agents. Numerically, of course, these agents were an insignificantly tiny part of that generation, but so were the terrorists. However, most of this political generation took none of these paths. Instead, they simply looked away. From West Germany, they looked and traveled west, south, north but never east. Even in West Berlin they somehow managed this, although the East was all around them.

  In James’s case, I don’t think ideological worries contributed much to his relative lack of interest in the East. When we talk about it again today, he reminds me that The Guardian had an Eastern Europe correspondent who protected her territory more jealously than Leonid Brezhnev. East Germany was part of her patch. If James had tried to cross the Wall she would probably have shot to kill.

  Born in 1949, James was an English sixty-eighter. I, six years younger, was not. The ideological evaluation in my Stasi opening report—“bourgeois-liberal”—was just about right. I cared passionately for what I saw, with a rather simplistic romantic patriotism, as the British heritage of individual liberty. And I wanted this liberty for other people. My intellectual heroes were Macaulay, George Orwell and Isaiah Berlin. “Ich bin ein Berliner,” I used to say, meaning an Isaiah Berliner. With these personal politics, I was never likely to take a sympathetic view of East Germany. But liberal anti-communism was not the primary source of my fascination with the East. I was fascinated because here, in East Germany, people were actually living those endlessly difficult choices between collaboration with and resistance to a dictatorship. Here I could pursue the Stauffenberg/Speer question in, as it were, real time.

  Here too I found that intimate proximity of high European culture and systematic inhumanity that George Steiner identified in his In Bluebeard’s Castle, a book that made a great impression on me when I read it at the age of seventeen. In my diary I called this phenomenon Goethe Oak, after the ancient oak tree on the Ettersberg, near Weimar, under which Goethe had supposedly written his sublime “Wanderer’s Night Song,” but which was then enclosed on the grounds of the Buchenwald concentration camp. Goethe and Buchenwald, the highest and the lowest in human history, together in one place. A place called Weimar. A place called Germany. A place called Europe.

  This fascination with dictatorship and resistance, with the extremes of good and evil, civilization and barbarism, also led me further into communist-ruled Europe. I traveled through Albania in the summer of 1978, on a Progressive Tour with seven Marxist-Leninist teachers from Leeds, a Scottish engineer and a former imperial policeman called Mr. Godsave. Over a cup of spirit-laced coffee known in communist Albania as a Lumumba—after the Congolese independence leader, Patrice Lumumba—Mr. Godsave confided in me that he had now visited every communist country in the world. Why? “Must get to know the enemy.”

  The next summer I drove through all six countries of what was then called Eastern Europe. In Poland I discovered the spirit of resistance that I had long been seeking. outwardly poor, dirty, neglected, though still with pockets of ancient beauty, the country was made magical by its people, now supercharged by the recent, incredible pilgrimage of a Polish pope. In Kraków, over a beef dish presented as “Nelson’s bowels,” giggling, indomitable Roza Woźniakowska told me how, as archbishop of Kraków, the future pope had ordered that a lecture on “Orwell’s 1984 and contemporary Poland,” banned by the authorities, be delivered in church. In Warsaw, the irrepressible Wladyslauw Bartoszewski, who had survived both Auschwitz and Stalinist prisons, in
formed me at the top of his voice over lunch in a crowded restaurant: “We count on the collapse of the Russian empire in the twenty-first century!” What a contrast to craven East Germany.

  Returning to West Berlin, I found that James had decided to leave. He asked if I would like to take over the lease of his flat at Uhlandstrasse 127. Although the war had disfigured the outer façade, now just an ugly cement rendering with strange teardrop gouges for decoration, it was a fine old place inside. You walked up another marble staircase, under Wilhelmine plaster busts and a flower-strewing cherub, to a gray-painted wooden door. This opened onto a long corridor, wide enough to take a grand piano and perhaps fifteen feet high. There were two smaller rooms off to the left, then three beautiful, large, high-windowed rooms, each connected to the next by a handsomely carpentered, high double door. The previous tenants had been political refugees from Iran. They had now gone back to their—as they thought—liberated homeland, but above the big double bed there was still a lurid poster proclaiming “Death to the Shah!”

  How could I resist such a place? So I took it on, saying farewell to my little commune in the Traunsteinerstrasse. The diary records my last sighting of Bernd, setting off for a business trip to East Germany. Although theoretically convinced that the German Democratic Republic was the better Germany, Bernd did not much like going there. On this occasion, his car was loaded with cans, jars, bottles, tubes and packets of Western provisions. “You know the food over there is so bad,” he explained, “and the service …” Good-bye, comrade.

  The Uhlandstrasse flat was wildly expensive for a student. In fact, ever since I came to Berlin I had been enjoyably but rapidly spending a small inheritance left me by my paternal grandfather, a sometime president of the Institute of Chartered Accountants, whom I knew only from the stern black-and-white portrait photograph on the piano at my grandmother’s house. I somehow don’t think he would have approved of the fruits of his Victorian thrift being spent in Ax Bax, Romy Haags and Foofie’s, let alone in Warsaw or Tirana.