The File

by Timothy Garton Ash

  I do regret it, not just because he was the officer directly on my case and presumably—if the ratio of officers to those they watched was as Risse remembers—spent many working hours in 1981–82 observing me through his then eyes. I regret it particularly because he was of a different generation from the others. Their careers were all directly shaped by the war: theirs were postwar lives. Wendt, by contrast, was my contemporary, just three years older than me. Like me, he grew up entirely in the divided Europe of the Cold War. Unlike me, he knew nothing but the country and system into which he was born. In its dry, bureaucratic way his file is quite eloquent about how he came to do what he did, but in person he could tell so much more. Perhaps after reading this book he will change his mind? Or perhaps not.

  XII

  THE STASI NOT ONLY BANNED ME UNTIL THE END OF 1989; they also put my personal details into the System of Unified Registration of Data on the Enemy, known by its Russian initials as SOUD. Originally proposed by Yuri Andropov when he was head of the KGB, this was an elaborate system, based in Moscow, for exchanging information between the secret police of all the Soviet bloc countries. There were no less than fifteen categories of Enemy, starting with secret agents, but including people belonging to “subversive organizations” and “centers of political-ideological diversion,” “provocateurs,” “banned and undesirable persons,” “hostile diplomats,” “hostile correspondents,” terrorists and smugglers. I was placed in Category 5: “Persons who execute commissions for subversive activity against the states of the socialist community on behalf of hostile intelligence services, centers of political-ideological diversion, Zionist, hostile émigré, clerical and other organizations.” My “center of political-ideological diversion” was identified as the BBC.

  According to a study made by the Gauck Authority, the Stasi was the largest single contributor to the System and, within the Stasi, Main Department II was the chief supplier of names. Under “terrorists” they listed 132 members of the Red Army Faction and then another nine to whom East Germany had itself granted asylum: the enemy as guest. They also entered ninety-seven members of the Viking Youth, the neo-Nazi group that attacked me in West Berlin. The Gauck Authority’s experts point out that the SOUD data are almost certainly still at the disposal of the Russian intelligence service—a mildly disconcerting thought. However, they also conclude that at the time the System was largely ineffective, especially since most of the Soviet bloc services kept their best sources to themselves.

  Being put into the System certainly did not prevent me from traveling to other countries in the bloc Russia and Hungary, for example, I visited officially as a journalist. The Polish authorities at last lifted their ban in the spring of 1983, allowing me to follow the pope’s second pilgrimage to his native land and watch the great actor exhort his people to “persevere in hope.” “Though the totalitarian communist system remains in outward form,” I wrote, “in reality it is still being dismantled from within.” Thereafter, each visa had to be wrung out of the Polish embassy, but I went back as often as I could.

  To Czechoslovakia I traveled as a “tourist.” Before flying to Prague, I carefully concealed the names and addresses of the people I was going to visit, writing them, in abbreviated form, in minuscule pencil letters on the back of a Eurocheck. I never telephoned dissident friends, just appeared on the doorstep, after checking that I was not being followed. I crept through the woods to evade the police outside Václav Havel’s country farm-house. Then I wrote as “A Special Correspondent” or, once, as “Mark Brandenburg.”

  I also carried money, books and messages to the embattled dissidents in several countries. These came from their exiled friends and comrades in the West and from small charities in which I was active: the Jagiellonian Trust for Poland or our innocuously named Central and East European Publishing Project, which supported samizdat publishers and underground journals across Central and Eastern Europe. Again, I was not alone in this. Although it remained very much a minority activity right up until 1989, people at almost every point on the political spectrum were involved, from neoconservatives like Roger Scruton (the moving spirit of the Jagiellonian Trust) through lifelong liberals like Ralf Dahrendorf (the chairman of our Central and East European Publishing Project) to neo-Trotskyites like Oliver Macdonald (of the journal Labour Focus on Eastern Europe). As in war, we were united by the common cause.

  Looking back through the old notebooks on my shelf, I find entries in a deliberately illegible scrawl: “Lordly invite for KB & EK?,” “A.M. for ZL?,” “Berlin-Berdyayev.” In translation: could I get a British lord to send an official invitation to the Solidarity activists Konrad Bieliński and Ewa Kulik? Did Adam Michnik have a text for the Paris-based Polish literary quarterly Zeszyty Literackie? Would Isaiah Berlin write a preface to a Polish samizdat edition of Berdyayev? And so on. I remember sitting on a bench in a dusty park in Wroclaw while an underground activist—today a leader of Poland’s feminist movement—read out some messages written in tiny handwriting on cigarette paper. Then she popped the paper into her mouth and swallowed it.

  Possibly some of my own conspiratorial precautions were exaggerated, though since the people I visited would have been endangered far more than me, I am happy to have erred on the side of paranoia. I am delighted to have led the secret police by the nose. The end entirely justified the means; and if, on the way, I enjoyed the excitement of the game, well, why not?

  East Germany did not quite maintain the ban until the end of December 1989. After a forceful intervention by the then British ambassador to East Berlin, they let me in for just two days to attend the official celebrations of the thirty-fifth anniversary of the GDR on October 7, 1984. I did notice, though, that the people at the International Press Center were distinctly cool toward me. (I now learn that Stasi Department II/13 had no less than twenty-four undercover officers among the Press Center staff.) “The city centre,” I reported, “was pullulating with uniformed and plain-clothes police. I was stopped by plain-clothes police (Stasi) every time I returned to my hotel. … When I visited old friends [Werner and Annegret Krätschell, in fact] four men in a dark green Lada waited outside, conspicuously inconspicuous. Well, it’s one way for the state to keep full employment.” I now find a Stasi instruction sheet that tells the frontier guard that from October 8, 1984, the ban is again to be enforced and the visa stamped invalid: “If the object requests an explanation, he is to be told that he had received a visa until 8.10.84 by mistake.”

  In April 1985, I got in for a day and a half, accompanying the then foreign secretary, Geoffrey Howe, on a tour of three East European states. Since I was of the party of journalists invited to travel on the foreign secretary’s plane, I suppose that refusing me entry could have caused a very minor diplomatic incident. Again, the welcome was chilly. After that, they kept me out for four more years, although I reapplied from time to time. Each rejection is neatly recorded on the Stasi’s index cards. On the SOUD card there is reference to a 1986 assessment of me by the HVA’S department III, which coordinated their agents working under diplomatic cover, and was therefore presumably based on reports from their man (or woman) at the embassy in London.

  Meanwhile, Poland and Hungary started to move, with increasing speed and excitement. In June 1989 I was in Warsaw for the semifree elections in which Solidarity triumphed and communism was, in effect, voted away. When the telephone rang at eight o’clock one morning in my room in the Hotel Europejski, the very last voice I expected to hear was that of an official in the East German foreign ministry. He rather ceremoniously informed me that there were now no obstacles to my visiting the GDR. So a few weeks later I was back in East Berlin, at the Hotel Metropol, overlooking the Friedrichstrasse station.

  From there, I spent a good deal of my time organizing the publication, in several leading European newspapers, of an article I had jointly written with János Kis, the leading Hungarian dissident who now headed a fledgling Alliance of Free Democrats, and Adam Michnik, now edi
tor in chief of Gazeta Wyborcza, the Solidarity-opposition daily newspaper that Poland’s communist authorities had conceded at the first Round Table of 1989. “In Poland and Hungary today,” we wrote, “Europe has an unprecedented chance. It is the chance of transforming communism into liberal democracy. No one has ever done this before. No one knows whether it can be done.” And we went on to appeal to Western leaders, and European public opinion, to help in the process. The switch-board operators at the Hotel Metropol were most efficient in helping to get published all over Europe this frontal attack on everything East Germany stood for.

  I had a couple of ludicrous, low-level official interviews. Clinging desperately to the ideological line on the national question given out by Kurt Hager, a man called Dr. Kleitke from the GDR’s Institute of International Relations refused even to speak of “Germans”—instead, talking about “GDR people” and “FRG people.” However, he did daringly admit that there was something of an affinity between a GDR person and an FRG person: “We somehow get on.” But, he hastily added, they also liked Britons and Dutchmen.

  I talked deep into the night with a small group of dissidents in the flat of one of their leading figures, Gerd Poppe. (His own multivolume Stasi file reveals that the Stasi tried to break up his family, instructing an agent to woo his wife and schoolteachers to turn his children against him.) They were all deeply depressed and pessimistic about the chances of East Germany’s following where Poland and Hungary now again led. The article I then wrote was greatly influenced by this conversation, and therefore, in the event, too pessimistic. The Spectator’s subtitle had me “sighing for a chink in the Wall.” While I saw the immense possibilities of what was happening in Poland and Hungary, I, like Gerd Poppe and his friends, just could not believe that change could come so fast in East Germany and that within a few months people would simply be walking through the Wall.

  In fact, the only person I know to have predicted this was not a dissident, or a political scientist, or a diplomat, or a journalist, but Ursula von Krosigk, the old lady with whom I stayed when I first came to live in Berlin. At breakfast one day she told me that the previous night she had had a curious dream. In her dream, the frontier between East and West Germany was opened for just a few hours. But so many people poured across the frontier in those few hours that it could never be closed again—and Germany was reunited.

  The most moving conversation on this visit was with Werner’s eldest son, Joachim. The sweet little twelve-year-old in the Stasi’s covert photograph of 1980 was now a tall and angry young man of twenty-one. We sat on the balcony of the vicarage, in the sweltering July heat, and he told me how he and his friends had tried independently to monitor the local elections, how the state had falsified the results, and how, when they tried to protest the falsification, the police had dragged them by their long hair across the cobbled streets. Most people in the country, he said, were too stupid, passive and frightened to do anything. Perhaps one day change would come in East Germany, but it would take many years and by then he would be old and gray. He wanted to live, to travel. So far he had got out only once, for four days, to West Berlin. If ever the chance came …

  Some weeks later I received a letter from Joachim. The postmark was West Berlin. He had gone on holiday to Hungary and, like many others, escaped across the now loosely guarded frontier to Austria. Thence he had returned, via a reception camp, to a place within a few miles of the old vicarage in Pankow. But of course, his family could not visit him and he could not visit them—probably for many, many years to come. There was a place in Pankow where, if you stood on some old concrete blocks, you could just see across the Wall to a railway station in West Berlin. After arranging a time by telephone, he went to stand on the station platform in the West, while his little brother and sister stood on the concrete blocks. They waved and shouted to each other, across the Wall. Afterward, his little sister was so upset that their mother said, “Please, never do that again.”

  Then it was October, and Erich Honecker had at last been deposed under the combined pressure of Gorbachev and the demonstrations in Leipzig, now recurring with ever larger numbers every Monday evening, like contractions at a birth. The demos started each time with a service at the Nikolaikirche, the Church of St. Nicholas. I flew to Berlin, hired a car, paid one more speeding fine on the autobahn to Leipzig, steered through the freezing fog to a parking place near the Nikolaikirche, persuaded the usher at the closed door to let me in to the packed church, squeezed my way into a side aisle—and almost collided with James Fenton, his great head bowed as if in prayer. Another circle closed.

  Then it was November, and I had just walked through the newly breached Wall at the Potsdamer Platz, across to West Berlin and back again, as in a fairy tale. I sat with Werner in my room in the Metropol. We looked down from the high window toward the south side of the Friedrichstrasse station, where usually almost no one walked because that way led only to the Wall. But now Ursula’s dream had come true and crowds of people were streaming to and fro. Werner clutched his pipe and said, “Look at that! You can’t imagine what that means to me.”

  As we watched, spellbound, we knew that nothing would ever be the same again. Communism was over. The Cold War was over. It was all over. And the one thing we did not know, Werner and I, was that he was also “Beech-tree” and I was also “Romeo.”

  XIII

  NOW IT IS OCTOBER 1995. I COME INTO MY ROOM IN Church Walk, Oxford, and find, rolled up on the floor under the fax machine, pages from an informer’s file that Werner has just faxed me from the vicarage in Pankow. Thirty pages of handwritten reports by a case officer on his regular secret meetings with IM “Freier,” in the conspiratorial flat of “Elisa.” The word Freier means both an old-fashioned “suitor” and, more often now, the customer of a prostitute. The latter meaning is intended here. In American slang one says “a John,” but IM “John” rather misses the Stasi’s little joke. Thinking of “curb-crawlers,” shall we say “Crawler”?

  IM “Crawler” was a churchman, and he informed extensively on Werner, his fellow priest. The report of a meeting on February 7, 1979, concerns vague rumors that Werner had been seeing an “unidentified female person.” Could “Crawler” try to wheedle something out of him? Captain Exner notes:

  At the moment the IM sees no possibility of clarifying this anonymous tip in the context of a confidential talk (cozy, relaxed private meeting with alcoholic drinks). He will attempt to take any opportunity, on his own initiative, but believes that the most favorable opportunity will be the aforementioned church retreat…. The undersigned indicated to the IM that the expenses he might thereby incur would be reimbursed.

  Last week in Berlin, over a glass of wine one evening in the vicarage, Werner read out this passage to his wife, Annegret, and me, and we almost burst our sides laughing. How many marriages, I wonder, could so easily pass the Stasi-file test?

  The report continues: “In connection with this assignment the IM once again attempted to raise a personal concern. He looked for the possibility of a journey to the FRG [West Germany], which was assured him by the undersigned.” So “Crawler,” like “Michaela,” was partly working for an exit visa, and the Stasi was again routinely using the state’s Wall-tight control over its citizens’ possibilities of travel as an instrument to secure collaboration.

  The identification of “Crawler” has been confirmed, in writing, by the Gauck Authority. But when Werner rang him up, he flatly denied the charge, and followed up with a letter of contorted exculpation.

  I wonder if he has a fax machine?

  This, in everyday life, is the process for which English has no word but German has two long ones: Geschichtsaufarbeitung and Vergangenheitsbewältigung. “Treating,” “working through,” “coming to terms with” or even “overcoming” the past. The second round of German past-beating, refined through the experience of the first round, after Hitler. Now again the lines of investigation, exposure, recrimination and reconciliation cross and re-
cross the land. And not just this land. In the age of photocopiers, fax machines, fiber-optic cables and satellites, perfect facsimiles of the incriminating document can be flashed across the world in a few seconds, and reproduced in countless copies the next day. Yesterday your secret was hidden in a single dusty cardboard file. Today it lies open on a million breakfast tables.

  Countries all over the world face this problem of “the past.” All the post-communist states of Europe and Asia, the former dictatorships of Latin America and South Africa. Some, like Spain after Franco or Poland under its first post-Solidarity government, try to draw a thick line under the past. Let bygones be bygones! Adam Michnik is an outspoken advocate of this approach. “Give priority to compassion,” he says, and argues that, anyway, the secret-police records cannot be believed: “For example, can we put our faith in documents prepared by Stasi informers? No one has convinced me that these documents can be trusted.”

  Others have taken different paths. They have had trials: some that don’t deserve the dignity of the name, like that of the Ceauşescus in Romania; more orderly show trials, like that of the former communist leader Todor Zhivkov in Bulgaria. They have had administrative purges, like the Czechoslovak “lustration”—with its connotation, from the Latin, of ritual purification. They have had commissions of historians, lawyers and elected politicians to look into aspects of the communist past such as the Prague Spring or the declaration of martial law in Poland. In Chile and South Africa they have had commissions for “truth and reconciliation.”

  Only the new Germany has done it all. Germany has had trials and purges and truth commissions and has systematically opened the secret-police files to each and every individual who wants to know what was done to him or her—or what he or she did to others. This is unique. Apart from anything else, what other post-communist country would have the money to do it? The Gauck Authority’s budget for 1996 was DM 234.272 million, which is about $164 million. This is more than the total defense budget of Lithuania.