The File

by Timothy Garton Ash

  There was also, in the West, a larger fear that seems even more incredible today. This was the fear that in the heightened tension of the so-called Second Cold War—Reagan versus Brezhnev, American Cruise missiles against Soviet SS20s—the Polish revolution might light the fuse for a nuclear war. This was the time of the huge peace demos in Bonn, London and Amsterdam. People put stickers on their cars saying “It’s five minutes to midnight.”

  I certainly had more sympathy with the movement for freedom in Eastern Europe than with the peace movement in Western Europe, and I conducted a polemical exchange with the historian E. P. Thompson, that great Old Testament prophet of the British peace movement, on the relationship between the two. As I recall it now, I thought the danger of nuclear war was greatly, even hysterically, exaggerated. But again, memory has played tricks. I am startled to find that on the last page of my diary for 1980 I myself wrote: “There will be a nuclear war in the next decade.” And then in capital letters, as if the lower-case formulation was still inadequate: “WE WILL SEE A NUCLEAR WAR IN THIS DECADE.”

  Against this backdrop of revolution and looming apocalypse, my own private life was transformed. I fell in love. Danuta had lived in the dissident intellectual milieu of beautiful Kraków, before coming to West Berlin. She was full of poetry and wonder, very pretty, very alive, infectious in her enthusiasms and in her sadness. Between those hectic trips to Poland, there were summer bicycle rides, sunlit afternoons in the beautiful woods along the Wannsee, evenings at the Greek restaurant up the road. But then, when we returned to the Uhlandstrasse flat, a telephone call or radio bulletin brought more news of crisis in the East.

  Dashing to deliver another article to the main post office in the Winterfeldstrasse, for telex transmission to London, I listen on the car cassette player to the voice of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, vaulting through Schubert songs:

  Lachen und Weinen zu jeglicher Stunde

  Ruht bei der Liebe auf so mancherlei Grunde.

  Laughing one moment, crying the next, that’s how it is in love. In love, and in revolution. In my diary the record of our own moments of rapture and crisis alternates with entries like “high anxiety about Poland.” Our own fate and Poland’s seemed completely intertwined.

  Today, our sons like us to tell them stories, preferably funny ones, about life under communism and particularly about the secret police. “Go on, Mama, tell us another story about the stupid police!” For them these are like tales from Narnia. As for the painted fragment of the Berlin Wall which now props up some books on the landing cupboard, that might as well have come from Pompeii.

  Even I need a large effort of memory—or is it imagination?—to recover the experience. For the first time, I personally discovered what it is like to be prevented by a government from doing something that you really want to do. Prevented by a parent, a headmaster, by some private authority—that I had known; but prevented by the government, no. I had read about it, of course, then seen it at first hand in Eastern Europe; but now it was actually happening to me. To me, and to someone I loved.

  Frontiers, visas, permits, became the stuff of everyday life, as they had never been before. Our very dreams were dogged by frontier guards. According to my diary, one night in March 1981, I dream that we are on a train crossing Poland, discussing how to get out. Forge the date stamps on our visas? Then a guard is charging along beside the train on a horse-drawn wooden cart, such as you still see in the Polish countryside, whooping “Ustrzyki Alarm!” The same night, Danuta dreams that we are walking with a group of friends through a wood, to a frontier. We are caught by East German frontier guards. They order the group to divide: those for the German Democratic Republic to the left, those against to the right. Then they start shooting both sides. She escapes, taking, as she crosses the line, an eggplant canapé from a silver tray held by a black man in East German uniform.

  The last surreal detail was probably influenced by Peter Zadek’s exuberantly staged Fallada-Revue, which we had seen at the theater a few days before. It was hardly less surreal for me to find myself, within a few hours, flying back to England for The Spectator’s annual cocktail party. Or, on another brief return, dropping in to the launch of the Social Democratic Party, at the Connaught Rooms in central London. “A rather lacklustre affair,” my diary notes. And I record David Owen’s plangent declaration: “Our country is in real trouble.”

  General Jaruzelski’s imposition of martial law in Poland, on December 13, 1981, struck us both in England, staying with James in his new house in Bartlemas Road, Oxford. On the first evening of martial law, Danuta was trembling uncontrollably Her country was in real trouble. I raged with professional frustration and sheer guilt at not being there while our friends were thrown into camps. I tried to get back in with an aid convoy but, just as I feared, the embassy refused me a visa. “In Poland [he] is already on the black list,” a note on my file now confirms.

  It was not a merry Christmas. This reversion to dictatorship, an iron gate slamming shut across the bridge to Poland, further sharpened the finality of the decision Danuta had taken to make her life with me. And the huge, the incalculable personal cost of starting again in another country. One night she dreamed that she returned to her old home in Kraków. There was a tree in front of the house. She cut it down.

  I, by contrast, was back in my own country, in the same old city. But if the city was the same, the “I” was not. Until this moment of commitment I had still essentially lived, I suppose, with a peculiarly English—and altogether peculiar—ideal of self, an ideal of emotional invulnerability, self-control and self-sufficiency: “somewhat reserved” as Litzi said of Kim. I was the secret soldier, traveling fastest because traveling alone. In another notebook from that time I find: “reading Conrad’s Victory … Heyst: ‘I only know that he who forms a tie is lost. The germ of corruption has entered his soul.’” My own code, until recently. But now I thought differently. “He who forms a tie may not be quite lost,” I wrote. “The germ of salvation has entered his soul….”

  X

  FOR ALL THE IMPRESSIVE LEADS LAID OUT IN THEIR spring 1981 “plan of action”—reactivate the informers, check his mail, coordinate with the HVA, ask the KGB about renewed British interest in Kim Philby—in the autumn of that year the officers of department II/9 were still none the wiser as to what I had really been up to. However, just before Christmas they finally registered a breakthrough.

  On December 24, 1981, Lieutenant Colonel Kaulfuss reports to the head of counterintelligence, Lieutenant General Kratsch. “As can be seen from the enclosed,” he writes, “Garton Ash used his official stay in the GDR for illegal information-gathering.”

  What lurks behind those innocuous words “the enclosed”? A secret informer’s report? A wiretap? A letter snatched by dead of night from my Uhlandstrasse letter box? A KGB tip-off? Eagerly I turn the page …

  … AND FIND: PHOTOCOPIES OF THE EXTRACTS FROM my book about East Germany published that November in Der Spiegel. So the East German secret police discovered what I had really been up to in their country only by reading my own published account, at the same time as several million ordinary readers of West Germany’s leading news magazine.

  Looking through the extracts, printed under the provocative title “Among the Red Prussians,” I can see why the Stasi was annoyed. I describe at length the militarization of East German society, the size of the repressive apparatus and the number of informers. I quote from an article in which the minister for State Security observed that the results achieved by his ministry “would be unthinkable without the energetic help and support of the citizens of our country.” “For once,” I comment, “what the minister says is true.” I illustrate this energetic citizens’ support with the case of the actor playing Dr. Faust in Schwerin, who, after pouring us large martinis and himself a small beer, tried to wheedle out of Andrea’s ex-husband whether he had ever thought of escaping to the West and to find out from me whether I was a Western journalist. “In the GDR,”
I write, “Mephistopheles may still work for the devil, but Dr. Faust now works for the Stasi.”

  Above all, I make an extensive and unfavorable comparison between Polish resistance and German conformity. Perhaps one day the East Germans, too, might take the revolutionary step from the solidarity of private disillusionment to Poland’s public Solidarity, “but today, at the beginning of the 1980s, this seems no more likely than the demolition of the Wall.”

  Now, when it was too late, the East German authorities sprang into action. The press department of the Foreign Ministry judged that while I “wished to give the impression of an objective comparison of the different social developments in the GDR and the P[eople’s] R[epublic of] P[oland],” in fact I was urging the “spread of counterrevolutionary developments to the GDR.” Because of the role I was clearly playing “in the ideological war of imperialist media against the GDR” I should be placed on the list of those forbidden to reenter the country. They also summoned a British diplomat to the Foreign Ministry for an official protest.

  The record of a meeting on January 4, 1982, with the first secretary at the British embassy is appended; copy to the deputy foreign minister. According to this note, penned by Herr Grundmann of the British desk, Mr. Astley was told that my published works “not only contain maliciously invented lies and vilifications of the GDR but also deliberately incite to action against peace, détente, the peaceful cooperation of peoples and international understanding. This was a violation of the [Helsinki] Final Act and constituted direct interference in the internal affairs of the GDR…. The expectation was emphatically expressed that such activities, which are directed against the development of relations between the GDR and G[reat] B[ritain], would not happen again.”

  In response, “Astley mentioned the so-called personal freedom of the British journalist, whereby the embassy had no possibility of influencing what he writes.” But Comrade Albrecht hit back. I was not just a journalist but had been there under the Cultural Agreement. Astley replied that we did not like everything the GDR published about us. Comrade Albrecht said the comparison was “unserious.” According to this note, Astley then regretted the incident and, as a good diplomat, asked that my conduct “should not be identified with activities of the British Government and not be judged an impediment to relations.”

  The file then moves rapidly to the formal “closing report,” dated April 27, 1982. This now revises their ideological judgment. I am not “bourgeois-liberal,” as they originally thought, but “conservative and reactionary.”

  It then summarizes all the main strands of inquiry in the file. My personal details and historical research, my contacts with the British embassy, Werner, “Michaela” and Litzi Philby “generally known as ‘Red Lizzy.’” “It must be assumed that the real number of his contacts was much larger than that of the known contact partners.” Then Poland and my links with “the leaders of the counterrevolution;” the airport search and its findings; my subsequent articles. Finally, the publication of a book in which I “malign in particularly abhorrent fashion the economic and social development in the GDR and attack the Party and state leadership as well as the foreign and security policy of our republic.” In so doing, I use “both militant and refined anti-communist arguments.” Extracts from this book have been broadcast by the West Berlin radio station RIAS (widely listened to in East Germany), which also interviewed me on the telephone. This telephone interview suggests “that in all probability he is again living in Oxford.”

  Summing up, Lieutenant Wendt concludes that I have used the pretext of my scholarly work on Nazi Berlin to gather material to defame the GDR and, in writing about Poland, have openly declared myself “on the side of counterrevolution.” Since I am now again based in Britain, “the possibilities of further operational treatment are substantially limited. On account of Garton Ash’s repeated attempts to intervene in the internal affairs of the GDR and the P[eople’s] R[epublic of] Poland, the OPK ‘Romeo’ is closed with the introduction of an entry ban by Main Department VI.”

  For reasons that are not clear, the barrier did not actually come down for another seven months. In Werner’s file, one Lieutenant Günther reports from the East German side of Checkpoint Charlie, that on August 25, 1982, I appeared at 9:00 A.M. and applied for a day visitor’s visa. He, the undersigned, knew me from the past, when I had written “a negative article in the Western press” on the checkpoint. “During the passport and customs controls he [TGA] was calm and reserved, and speaks only the necessary minimum with the controllers. In this, he always tries English first, although he speaks German. The citizen was cleanly and decently dressed and his appearance is neat.” He observed my getting into a car, noted the registration number and established that it belonged to Krätschell, Werner.

  In my own file, a short memorandum from Lieutenant Wendt notes that “on December 6, 1982, Main Department VI implemented an entry ban for ‘Romeo’ until 31.12.89.” But how much would have changed by December 31, 1989!

  I would be banned, the memo records, from entering the GDR, from transit journeys not covered by the transit agreements with the Western powers “and, on the instructions of the Comrade Minister, [from] the specific transit between the FRG [West Germany] and Westberlin.”

  Sure enough, in 1983 I was turned back from the underground frontier crossing at the Friedrichstrasse station. When I asked the officer why, he replied, “Giving reasons is not internationally customary.” Sometime later, also at the Friedrichstrasse station, I was hauled off the main-line train from West Berlin to Poland. Again, the frontier guard gave me no reason, but he did carefully give me back the five deutsche marks I had paid for the transit visa.

  XI

  NOW I WANT TO KNOW ABOUT THE STASI OFFICERS. For if I and my friends were the first side of the triangle, and the informers were the second, then the officers were the third. What was it like to work in the ministry? How did they come to be there? What did they think they were up to in investigating me? What are they doing now?

  This is not easy. A few former officers have been talking to historians and journalists. The now senile Erich Mielke was interviewed in prison for Der Spiegel; Markus Wolf has become a darling of the television talk shows. Some lesser-known figures have formed an Insider Committee to explore the history of their ministry with more understanding than outsiders have thus far shown. They have also participated in workshops with former victims of the Stasi: a strange mixture of oral history and group therapy. One group has met regularly for several years, chaired by an East Berlin clergyman, Ulrich Schröter. Many of the former officers are unemployed, but some have found interesting new jobs. Pastor Schröter tells me of one who works as a funeral orator. He is much in demand for the last rites of former colleagues.

  I soon realize that those who are most ready to talk are mainly from the foreign intelligence service, the HVA. What they were doing, spying abroad, was more like what “normal” secret services do, what all states do, so they feel they have less or even nothing to be ashamed of. Wolfgang Hartmann, for example, a leading light of the Insider Committee, suggests lunch in the Sternchen pub, just off the Karl-Marx-Allee, near where I took tea and macaroons with Litzi Philby. When I arrive, he tells me this was a favored spies’ rendezvous. A sprawling, beery, wordy sort of man, Hartmann was himself an agent runner, traveling to West Germany on false papers for secret meetings with what he delicately calls his “partners.” His best “partner,” he says, was a senior government official in Bonn. One of the sixty-eighters, you know….

  Wasn’t he frightened on these secret missions, with the risk of a long jail sentence accompanying every step?

  The first time, certainly, but you soon got used to it. It was really so easy, as a German in Germany, and he carefully cultivated the accent of the Mannheim area from which his parents came.

  I find that he has marvelously acquired the slightly lugubrious manner of an old-fashioned West German Social Democrat. Cover or reality? Perhaps he himself no
longer knows.

  Sturdy Klaus Eichner was a senior figure in the department that pursued counterintelligence in the offensive sense of trying to spy on the other side’s spies, whereas the counterintelligence work of General Kratsch’s Main Department II was supposedly about defending East Germany against foreign spies within its own borders. Unlike English, German has different words for the two things—the former is Gegenspionage; the latter, Spionageabwehr—but the experts say that in practice they always overlap.

  Eichner made a special study of Western intelligence services. He says the Stasi had fully penetrated the West German foreign intelligence service: “We knew everything they knew about us.” But the British secret service (SIS, also known as MI6) was excellent. Theirs was “high-quality” work, concentrated on a few individual agents and always “gentlemanlike”—he uses the English word. He once had a chance to compare the notes made by an SIS officer and his East German counterpart, both working under diplomatic cover, on an encounter between them. The Englishman’s report was so much better! Subtle, perceptive, interested in the real person, whereas the East German was lost in ideological clichés. No, he won’t tell me how they obtained the British report.

  Sitting in his small high-rise flat, Werner Grossmann, the last head of the HVA, describes how, in late 1989 and early 1990, he and his colleagues frantically destroyed their files. When the large shredding machines were shut down, after the ministry was stormed, they carried on with their small personal shredders—“like that one over there,” he says, and points behind the net curtains. There it is, the little secret-eater: a sentimental reminder of happier days, like an old soldier’s rifle on the wall.