The File

by Timothy Garton Ash

  Can outside organizations still come to them to vet their job applicants?

  Yes, but only those on a government-approved list of “consumers.”

  Is the BBC still on the list?

  A sudden vagueness sets in.

  These are glimpses, I repeat, just glimpses, by the light of a small penlight. Here I know in advance that I can never really know—unless the British state collapses, like East Germany, which I certainly don’t wish. But there is one small discovery that I do make, just for myself. Coming to this through my Stasi file, I naturally want to know whether MI5 also has a file on me. I don’t really expect to find out, but here I am, so I pop the question.

  “Do you have a file on me?”

  A slight pause. An intake of breath. A man suspended between openness and secrecy. Then: “Yes, since you ask, we do. We have what’s called a white card file on you.” That means: nonadversarial.

  They have me down as having “assisted SIS.”

  Well, I exclaim, I didn’t assist SIS. I nearly joined when I was young and then decided not to, that’s all.

  I mention the little approach to me more recently. Would that have been MI5? “No, that would be over there,” he says, and nods across the Thames, toward the green-glass headquarters of SIS (MI6) on the other bank. However, some record of that would also be in the file, together with a note on a couple of conversations I have had on the way here.

  But, he says, this is the first time he’s told anyone that he has a file. And already he seems worried by having done so. Has he gone too far with the new openness?

  Incidentally, I’m quoting from the notes I made immediately afterward—as I did for my conversations with “Michaela” and General Kratsch and all the rest. In this case, however, I trust that my interlocutors do have a precise record of our conversation, although no tape recorder was visible on their spotless coffee table.

  Now, suppose I’d had an adversarial file. After all, if Isabel Hilton was negatively judged for being secretary of the Scotland-China Association, I was a member of the Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding. Would they have told me about that?

  “Well, we don’t tell anybody….” A dry half-laugh. “Except you just now.”

  But if I were American, I could apply to read my FBI file under the Freedom of Information Act. Why not here?

  Yes, well, for a start, that would double MI5’s budget at a stroke. The Americans have found that it’s a huge amount of work. (All that sifting, copying and blacking out—and I think of the more than three thousand employees of the Gauck Authority.)

  But the Americans have the money. (A small undertone of resentment there.)

  And then, it would be very difficult because the IRA, foreign terrorists and other enemies could get valuable clues, even from other people’s files, about the way MI5 works. (I think, Yes, that’s probably true.)

  What about much older files, for the historians?

  Well, even that’s difficult. Sets a precedent. Gives clues to operational methods. Still, they are trying to help. They hope to open some files from the First World War.

  Later, after discussing some more general questions, I ask point-blank, Can I read my file?

  No.

  Why not?

  Because it’s the property of the Crown.

  In most countries you cannot see the file the security service has on you, but where else in the world would you be offered that explanation? The Crown!

  They give a couple of more reasons. It could set a precedent. It might compromise covert sources. But who on earth could they be—covert sources, on me? Surely not colleagues or friends? Surely.

  Could those friendly British “diplomats,” at the embassy in wherever, have added a few reports? Or perhaps there is actually little or nothing on the file between, say, 1979, when I decided not to join, and 1994, when they approached me again?

  “Anyway,” the other man adds helpfully, “opening files on friendly contacts is also a matter of simple politeness. Wouldn’t it be awful if someone rang up and we couldn’t remember who he was?” How frightfully English: “We did open a file on you, old boy—just a matter of politeness.”

  On the train back to Oxford I interrogate myself. What do I feel? First, satisfaction at an unexpectedly successful inquiry. Why, if the man is to be believed, I may be the first person in Britain ever to have found out, simply by asking, that he has a file. And at the same time, anger. Anger that they are still keeping tabs on me, however lightly. Also, some minor irritation. How much neater it would be if they could have had an adversarial file on me. Then one could say, “See, both the Stasi and MI5 were following me, what a fearless all-around dissident I must be!” (A lot of boasting goes on around secret files.) But life isn’t like that, most of the time anyway. It’s more complicated. The past is never quite past. Years later, some half-forgotten thing you did when you were young catches up. Somewhere, perhaps, there is your own child, growing up with someone else as his father. Or a file, growing too. And you never knew.

  How many of us would face a little surprise if the British files were ever opened? Secret file-makers do see things in their own special light. I never in my life consciously “assisted” MI6, yet now I’m told this is the general category under which I’m filed. And I think of the East Germans who discovered, when the files were opened, that the Stasi had filed them as friendly contacts or even as informers. Some of them only pretended they didn’t know or had suppressed the memory. But some genuinely did not know; they were innocent.

  For a moment, I imagine “Michaela” turning around and saying: “Well, you see, your own security service had you down as a British IM!” Rubbish, of course. What she did was to talk regularly, at length and in detail about colleagues, friends and family, to someone she knew was a secret-police officer. I did nothing of the kind—and anyway, it wouldn’t be the same even if I had “assisted” MI6. Assisting the foreign intelligence service of a democracy like Britain against a dictatorship like East Germany is not the same as informing for the domestic secret police of that dictatorship. Yet if I write this up honestly, I shall throw myself open even to that absurd comparison.

  Continuing this self-interrogation on the 5:20 from Paddington, I ask myself: But would you really have wanted to be down in the files as a past “adversary”? Would you seriously wish to have had the politics that would have put you there, rather than the liberal politics you did have and still do? “Bourgeois liberal,” as the opening report on the Stasi file rightly judged. After all, you support this system, don’t you? Parliamentary democracy, for all its faults. Yes, comes the immediate reply, but I support it in my own way.

  We are told that many spies have something of the writer in them, and many writers certainly have something of the spy. The domestic spies in a free country live this professional paradox: they infringe our liberties in order to protect them. But we have another paradox: we support the system by questioning it. That’s where I stand.

  XV

  DECEMBER 1996 AND I AM BACK IN MY ROOM. JOURNEY’S end. The old-fashioned cardboard binder on Frau Schulz’s table has become a neat Word file in the computer before me. There is a cup of coffee at my right hand, next to the mouse. Winter sunlight slants through the blinds. I swivel around and think.

  My investigation of the Stasi’s investigation of me has led me back, down strange side alleys and thorny paths, deep into many pasts—other countries’, other people’s and my own. For years I have been wondering at the seemingly infinite capacity of Central European memories: the capacity to forget. Again and again, we find ourselves watching with incredulity as someone like Kurt Waldheim, the former Austrian president, just “cannot remember” whole patches of his past, until he is gradually, painfully “reminded” by successive documents or testimonies.

  Now the galling thing is to discover how much I myself have forgotten of my own life. Even today, when I have this minute documentary record—the file, the diary, the letters—I can still
only grope toward an imaginative reconstruction of that past me. For each individual self is built, like Renan’s nations, through this continuous remixing of memory and forgetting. But if I can’t even work out what I myself was like fifteen years ago, what chance have I of writing anyone else’s history?

  Who was he, this young Romeo, yomping around Berlin in his heavy Oxford shoes? Like Frau Schulz, everyone giggles at the code name. West German journalists used to describe as “Romeos” the Stasi agents that Markus Wolf sent to seduce lonely secretaries in Bonn. But that’s a travesty of Romeo. The real Romeo, Shakespeare’s Romeo, is no Don Juan or Casanova, let alone some picayune East German version of James Bond. He’s not a cynical womanizer but a young romantic: hot-headed, well-meaning, idealistic and confused.

  In this sense, my code name—which probably derived, I still insist, from my Alfa Romeo car—was curiously apt. For romantic I was, and not just about love. Romanticism, as Laurenz Demps wryly observed, can be dangerous. The romantic can so easily hurt by trying to help, as Romeo did for his friend Mercutio, while trying to stop his fight with Tybalt. Or he may do damage for the sake of adventure, or throw himself into the service of a bad cause.

  Although an East German prosecutor could certainly have argued that I was collecting information for “foreign organizations,” in the deliberately vague wording of Article 97 of the Criminal Code, I was probably never at risk of the prescribed jail sentence of “not less than five years,” let alone of the death sentence envisaged in “especially serious cases.” By the 1980s the usual measure against lesser enemies was what finally happened to me: expulsion. But I might have done more serious harm to the people I met. Werner, for example, was being investigated under Article 100, which covers the offense of aiding those identified in Article 97—meaning, in this case, me. The recommended sentence was between one and ten years in prison.

  As to my support for Solidarity and the anti-communist dissidents of Central Europe, well, the history of the twentieth century is strewn with the moral remains of men and women who have gone astray through romantic involvement with a political struggle in a faraway country—whether Che Guevara’s guerrillas, or the Vietcong, or either side in the Spanish civil war, or the communist struggle against fascism in Europe. Look at young Kim Philby, led on by Litzi in Vienna. Or Frau R., who ended up as a Stasi informer. Youthful idealism can come to that.

  I was just so lucky. Lucky in the country of my birth. Lucky in my privileged background, my parents, my education. Lucky in true friends like James and Werner. Lucky in my Juliet. Lucky in my choice of profession. Lucky, too, in my cause. For the Central European struggle against communism was a good cause. Born a few years earlier, and I might have been backing the Khmer Rouge against the Americans. Born to a poor family in Bad Kleinen, East Germany, and I might have been Lieutenant Wendt.

  In 1939 Thomas Mann wrote a great essay entitled “Brother Hitler.” Mann discovered in the self-professed “artist” Adolf Hitler some elements of what he himself regarded, by introspection, as the artistic temperament. In this sense, he said, he had reluctantly to recognize Hitler as his “brother.” I can’t quite bring myself to say “Brother Romeo” of the man who informed for the Stasi as IM “Romeo” and is now media-representative for the post-communists. But I can understand each of the informers in my file, and the officers too, even Kratsch. For when they tell their stories you can see so clearly how they came to do what they did—in a different time, a different place, a different world.

  What you find here, in the files, is how deeply our conduct is influenced by our circumstances. How large of all that human hearts endure, that part which laws or kings can cause or cure. What you find is less malice than human weakness, a vast anthology of human weakness. And when you talk to those involved, what you find is less deliberate dishonesty than our almost infinite capacity for self-deception.

  If only I had met, on this search, a single clearly evil person. But they were all just weak, shaped by circumstance, self-deceiving; human, all too human. Yet the sum of all their actions was a great evil. It’s true what people often say: we, who never faced these choices, can never know how we would have acted in their position, or would act in another dictatorship. So who are we to condemn? But equally: who are we to forgive?

  “Do not forgive,” writes the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert,

  Do not forgive, for truly it is not in your power to forgive In the name of those who were betrayed at dawn.

  These Stasi officers and informers had victims. Only their victims have the right to forgive.

  The file is a gift. As I close it, I take away a new version of the principle of As If. The East European dissidents’ principle of As If said: Try to live in this dictatorship as if you were in a free country! As if the Stasi did not exist. My new principle is the opposite: Try to live in this free country as if the Stasi were always watching you! Imagine your wife, or your best friend, reading the Stasi record of what you said about them to another friend last Saturday night, or of what you did in Amsterdam last week. Can you live so you would not be embarrassed by it? Not seriously embarrassed, I mean. A little embarrassment will be unavoidable; such is the crooked timber of humanity.

  What is it that makes one person a Stauffenberg, another a Speer? Twenty years on, I am little closer to an answer. A clear value system or faith? Reason and experience? Sheer physical strength or weakness? Firm roots in a family, community, nation? There is no simple rule, no single explanation. Yet as those who worked for the secret police talk to me about their lives I feel again and again that the key lies in their childhood. I think, for example, that Major Risse was saved, as a human being, by his mother’s love. But what touches me most, being a father, is the part of the fathers.

  This is so obvious in postwar Germany. There is the absent father: away at the war, killed on active service, or somewhere in a prisoner-of-war camp. There is the father who was a Nazi or the father who was a victim of the Nazis. The psychological legacy of Nazism and war prepares the candidates for the next round of dictatorship. Then, in those vulnerable years between childhood and maturity, the young Romeo years, they are caught.

  Sometimes—quite often, in fact—the Stasi comes as a substitute father. You are invited into the headmaster’s office. He introduces you to an elderly man, dignified, inspiring, a war veteran. The old man appeals to your patriotism, youthful ambition and thirst for adventure. Your case officer is the father you never knew. But evil does not confine itself to one tune. Like Erlkönig, the elf king in Schubert’s tremendous setting of Goethe’s poem, evil woos in many guises and with such diverse charms: sweet music, bright flowers, golden robes and great games.

  I am the father now. In just a few years’ time, as the century ends, my own sons will set off on that perilous journey between childhood and maturity, each to his own personal Berlin. With luck they will never have to confront the extreme choices that so many had to face in Europe over this rotten twentieth century: to be a Stauffenberg or to be a Speer. But they will face many lesser choices and the elf king will be waiting for them, in the shadows by the roadside.

  How to arm them for their journey? Unlike those lost children whom the Stasi gathered in, they will have bags of love under their saddle, mother’s to one side, father’s to the other. But will that be enough? They will also have education, a knowledge of other times, countries and beliefs. My Stasi officers, narrowly brought up in an impoverished, occupied land, then stuck behind the Wall, had so little of that from which to question the worldview they were fed from above.

  Of course, it is possible for someone to have wider knowledge and still to persecute others for thinking or behaving differently, but it is, at least, less likely This is the lesson of my other Berlin—the philosopher, not the city. Recognizing the diversity of human cultures, seeing that people pursue goals that cannot be reconciled, we acknowledge the relativity of our own ways and beliefs. This makes for tolerance. But in the peroration of his greatest e
ssay, Isaiah Berlin quotes another writer: “To realise the relative validity of one’s convictions and yet stand for them unflinchingly is what distinguishes a civilised man from a barbarian.”

  Here is the more difficult part. From what source can we derive those firmly held standards of right and wrong, strong enough to challenge, if need be, the very system that we have been brought up to accept as right, and to counter the deep normative power of the given? Where to find the courage to defend those values “unflinchingly,” even to the death, if we know all along that they are only relative? And how to impart not just the values but also the courage to our children?

  I place a compact disc in the computer’s CD-drive, and click the “play” button on screen. From a loud-speaker somewhere behind the text I have just typed there comes the voice of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, recorded in 1958, at the height of the Cold War, singing Schubert’s great, dark song. Can any father hear it and not be moved?

  Through night and wind the father rides, his child in his arms. He holds him fast, he keeps him warm. The voice is strong and firm. Then the elf king comes out of the night, and woos the child with such beautiful lines: about those bright flowers, golden robes and great games, about his daughters who will cradle you and dance with you and sing you to sleep. And if you’re not willing—the voice is suddenly harsh—he must then use force. Against the music’s threatening insistence the child cries out, “Oh, Father, Father, he’s seizing me now.” The father rides for dear life. He reaches home at last. The voice sinks almost to nothing: “In his arms … the child … was … dead.”

  I save the file called Romeo on my computer and close the door. I go to my sons.

  Acknowledgments

  I AM MOST GRATEFUL TO WERNER KRÄTSCHELL, Joachim Gauck, Hubertus Knabe, Klaus-Dietmar Henke, Christa Schulz, Frau Duncker, Clemens Vollnhals, Roger Engelmann, Hanna Labrenz-Weiss, Hella Trümpelmann, Eberhard Haufe, Heinrich August Winkler, Stefan Wolle, Ulrich Schröter, Christian Jessen-Klingenberg, Isabel Hilton, Mark Wood, Jim Reed, Tony Nicholls, Ralf and Ellen Dahrendorf, Graham Greene, James Fenton, Ian McEwan, David Corn-well, Craig Raine, Gill Coleridge, Georges Borchardt, Toby Mundy, Stuart Proffitt, Jason Epstein and a number of men and women who, for diverse reasons, prefer to remain anonymous.