by Leo Maxim
I’m surprised that Werner allowed his professional future to be determined by a tram. The stage workshops were in Kreuzberg at the time. If the other tram had come first, Werner would have remained a West Berliner, my parents would never have met, and I would never have been born.
At any rate, Werner passes the teacher-training entrance exam. He is allowed to join the current semester, and becomes a teaching assistant in a vocational school for carpenters in the furniture and building trades. Werner goes home, completely taken aback because everything’s going so quickly. A month after his return he has jumped into a new life.
At the end of 1947 there are different sectors in Berlin, but it still doesn’t really matter where you live or work. The administrative offices and colleges, if they haven’t been bombed to smithereens, are where they were before the war. The main school authority happens to be in the Russian zone, as is the teacher-training college. So Werner isn’t making a political decision when he decides to study in the East. Anyone who wants to be a teacher at this time has to go there. The political division of Berlin isn’t completed until October 1948. From that point onwards the administrations in East and West Berlin are separate. At teacher-training college Werner finds new support, largely thanks to Heinz Wenzel, whom he meets there. Wenzel is a bit older than Werner, and works as a lecturer at the college. Werner is impressed with him because he knows so much and has a sensible-sounding answer to almost every question. “At a time when so few people have perspective, it’s nice to meet someone who does,” Werner writes on a birthday card to Wenzel. Werner is trying to find his bearings, to find which direction to take. And Wenzel is looking for people like Werner, for people who are malleable and ready for the new future. Wenzel is a Communist, a member of the KPD since 1927. In the Third Reich he disappeared and lived in hiding, and wrote school books “for the time to come”. To do that you did need perspective. And optimism.
At home Werner only ever talks about Heinz. He too wants to be a Communist now, and starts reading Marx and Engels. As always with Werner it all happens very quickly. And this time, once again, he can’t keep his enthusiasm to himself. Everybody has to join in, everybody has to listen when Werner comes out with his new truths. Two weeks after the start of his work as a teaching assistant, Werner writes his first report for the headmaster’s office. Among the chief difficulties of his work he mentions “impressions of the world of ideas from the Nazi era which persist in the pupils”. It is necessary “to make these young students understand the reason for the German defeat, explain the concept of democracy and also practise it in school”. In this respect the teacher must be a model. When I read this I’m flummoxed. What’s happened to his own Nazi world of ideas? Did it just disappear like that? Does he now believe that it never existed? Or with his directives, is he referring not to the pupils, but to himself?
While Werner is studying, the GDR is established, a new struggle begins, and now his decision to remain in the East is partly political. In July 1949 Werner becomes an SED candidate. In the CV that he hands in with his application to become a Party member, he writes: “My period of study at teacher-training college helped me to find my class position.” It is a different Werner writing here, a fresh convert. At home the red flag now flies in the window. Werner also buys two flags for his father-in-law Fritz, with whom he has fallen out again because suddenly Fritz doesn’t seem Communist enough to the newly aligned Werner. Werner passes his diploma with merit, and in 1950 he is appointed senior adviser at the main school authority. He organizes the political work in the vocational schools. Young people are to be won over for the newly founded GDR. That is, he is told, more important than any subject teaching. Werner goes from school to school, agitates, explains, persuades and writes assessments and recommendations. Non-political headmasters are replaced by Party members, politically dubious teachers are fired. Everything is turned on its head, and everything has to start over again. Werner works till he drops, he often spends the night in the office so as not to waste any time. It has to be done quickly, the Cold War is in full swing, and Berlin has become its main stage. Werner assembles agitation units who go to West Berlin to persuade the people there of the rightness of the cause. They stand at crossroads handing out flyers. Once, at Bülowplatz, they are beaten up “by an enemy unit”. They return to the East with bruises and torn clothes, convinced more than ever of the aggression of imperialism.
At the weekends Werner works as a volunteer in the reconstruction of Berlin, shifts stones, pours foundations, builds window frames and doors. He works over a hundred half-shifts in 1952 alone. I have in front of me his “reconstruction notebook”, in which every shift is stamped. In the summer he sometimes moves rubble even after work. “Every hour of reconstruction a patriotic deed,” it says in the notebook. By way of recognition Werner is awarded the Reconstruction Badge Grade II. There is a photograph of Werner, taken at the May Day demonstration in 1952. Werner is walking along the street in a light-coloured, tailored suit, with a GDR banner over his shoulder. Werner is taller than all the other demonstrators, and seems to be beaming inwardly. I can imagine them wanting someone like that in their own ranks. He emanates strength and determination.
A short time later Werner is appointed head of the woodcraft school, and six months later the teaching body puts him forward for the title of “Meritorious Teacher of the People”. In an official statement the other teachers write: “In taking over our school, the Headmaster found a tendency towards group formation among the teaching body. With great logic and persistence the Headmaster put in place the beginnings of a teachers’ collective. The whole of the teaching body took part in the circle he ran for the study of the classics of Marxism–Leninism.” That means that Werner isn’t just running a school, he is also shaping people, just as he himself has just been shaped. They sit together in their free time and read Marx. His school “is to be an expression of the new society”, he reports to the main school authority in June 1952. And he means it.
In January 1953 Werner is given a special honour. He receives a letter from the Central Committee of the SED. The comrades write: “In recognition of your achievement in the construction of our democratic school system, you have been granted a flat in our first Socialist street, the Stalinallee. We wish to congratulate you and hope that you will be happy in your new home.” Werner even kept his housing allocation form. Stalinallee Block B South, third floor right. The flat is handed over on Stalin’s seventy-third birthday. There is a ceremony in the Staatsoper, to which the first 1,148 tenants are invited. The mayor, Friedrich Ebert, delivers a speech. The newspaper Neues Deutschland publishes a list of all the names. “These are the people our Republic needs. Hard-working, dogged, dynamic,” writes the central organ of the SED. Werner has become a kind of prototype of the Socialist citizen.
Werner has a folder containing the certificates that he has acquired over the years. His appointment as senior teacher, as Studienrat, the award of the Pestalozzi medal for loyal service in bronze and silver, for the title Socialist Labour Activist. What a rise. Werner is showing himself and everyone else that the son of a worker can really achieve something in this new state. After all the years of imprisonment, of humiliation, of being lost, he is suddenly in the front row, he has become an important, respected man. He no longer needs to look back, he now looks straight ahead.
Werner (second from the left) at the May Day demonstration, 1952
In his private life, too, Werner is making changes. In November 1951 he divorces Sigrid and a year later marries the policeman’s daughter Hildegard, with whom he had been in love for some time. They have a daughter called Karola, to whom Werner is lovingly devoted. He is no longer aggressive, the tension has gone, because he’s content at last. His old family is slowly forgotten. There is no room for Wolf, his sister Rita and Sigrid in Werner’s new life. He gradually forgets all about them. His daughter Karola says Werner was never ill intentioned, he just repressed everything. “He’s quite good at
that, deliberately repressing things. He decides to do it, and then eventually it’s really gone,” she says. Karola describes Werner as a trusting man of total honesty, who internalized Socialism and lived it. “You couldn’t talk to him about certain problems in the GDR. He just wouldn’t have it.” Karola isn’t allowed to wear jeans, and Western television is strictly forbidden. Werner talks about the new society, about the great future that awaits them all. And in fact, Karola says, he wasn’t really a particularly political person. He wanted to achieve something, he wanted to be part of things, and fulfil the tasks he was assigned as well as he possibly could. And he was also grateful to the state that had allowed him to do so much.
Perhaps Werner was a person who would have worked well in more or less any system, in any role. He would always have made the best of things. His life’s happiness would not have been threatened if Hitler had won the war, or if he’d happened to end up in the West. He would certainly have been a good stage painter if he hadn’t been a good headmaster. Just as he had been a good model-maker, a good soldier, a good prisoner. And now a good citizen of the GDR.
16
Alienations
GERHARD COMES TO EAST BERLIN in January 1952. And not by chance. He is on a secret Party mission that not even his wife is allowed to know about. My mother told me years ago that Gerhard had been involved in Secret Service matters of some kind. She didn’t know anything more than that, because even after the end of the GDR Gerhard didn’t want to talk about it. Before I started writing this book, I went to Gerhard to ask him if I could see his Stasi file. I wrote the question in the blue notebook on his coffee table. He read it and nodded. I couldn’t tell from his expression whether he was pleased or annoyed that I was poking around in his past. He let me get on with it. A few months later this big pack of papers lay on my desk. Two hundred pages of material. I read all night, and the next morning Gerhard had turned into someone else as far as I was concerned. I know you have to be careful with the things in those files, but if only half of what they contain is true, Gerhard was a brave man in the GDR as well. A devout believer, certainly, and loyal to the cause until the bitter end, but also truthful and critical. The very opposite of the ossified functionary that he was in our family. Why did he hide from us for all those years?
*
According to his Stasi file, Gerhard’s double life begins in Düsseldorf, where he lives with his family after the war. He works as an editor with the KPD newspaper Freiheit, and early in 1950 he receives information about a man who worked for the security service (SD) in the Third Reich, and is now supposed to be working for the Americans. This man arranges to meet him and says he was recruited by the US Army after coming back from a prisoner-of-war camp, to work with other former Gestapo and SD members to set up a new Secret Service in West Germany. Gerhard finds the story shocking and at the same time extremely interesting. He tells his editor-in-chief about it. He says the Party administration should be informed, ideally KPD head Max Reimann in person. Two days later Reimann calls Gerhard in, praises him for this important information and asks him to do further research. Not for an article, however, but for the Party’s news agency. From now on his editorial work is just a facade, and Gerhard is an agent. This sounds like a considerable change, but it could be that Gerhard didn’t see it that way at all. He was familiar with this sort of thing from his illegal work in France. He just kept going as before. His code name was the same as it had been in France. He calls himself “Paul”.
From now on Gerhard regularly meets his informant, who gives him detailed information about the process involved in setting up the West German Secret Service, and gets money in return. Two months later Gerhard becomes a “resident” of the news agency. This means that he is now running a whole network of informants, who have been working for the service for a long time. Almost all of these informants are former SS men who have ended up working in West German politics and administration, and who are being blackmailed by the KPD news agency. They provide secret information for free, and in return the comrades refrain from exposing them. That’s the deal.
One of the informants is called August Moritz, a former SS Obersturmbannführer who was in France during the war, running the Gestapo divisions in Orléans and Marseilles, amongst other things. In Gerhard’s Stasi file he is listed under the name “Kornbrenner”. August Moritz is wanted as a war criminal, and living under a false identity in Düsseldorf. In 1954 the military court in Marseilles sentenced him to death because Moritz had had dozens of French civilians and partisans tortured and killed, and helped to organize the deportation of Jews. His mission in Gerhard’s network is to locate former SS men and recruit them for the Secret Service.
The first time I read that, I couldn’t believe it. Gerhard worked with someone like that? A man who had killed partisans and Jews, and who would have killed Gerhard if he had fallen into his hands in France? How could Gerhard live with himself, protecting a man like that? Nobody can have so much discipline, so much self-control, I thought. Even Markus Wolf, head of the Foreign Policy News Agency APN, which took over the KPD agents in 1951, writes that collaboration with August Moritz was an “almost unconscionable burden” for Gerhard. In the files, however, there is nothing to suggest that “Resident Paul” had any problems with “Kornbrenner”. In a report, Gerhard even singles out Moritz’s work for praise, and recommends that they go on working with him: “The information is correct, the predicted developments apply. We can draw conclusions from these which will be significant in our struggle for peace and the unity of Germany.” Gerhard can clearly keep work and emotions separate. But how much the agent Paul and the human being Gerhard must have made one another suffer.
Paul’s network is constantly growing. He now has a secretary and two couriers who bring his reports to East Berlin. In January 1952 Gerhard’s informant in the West German Secret Service is transferred to Berlin. The Party decides that Gerhard is to go with him. That is also the reason why the family doesn’t come back to Düsseldorf after their winter holiday in Oberhof, and why they are suddenly called Oswald. Gerhard needs the new name because the comrades in Berlin assume the Americans have unmasked him. Three months after Gerhard’s transfer, the West German counter-espionage service discover the “Kornbrenner network”. August Moritz and four of his former SS comrades are arrested. In December 1953 they are sentenced to several years’ imprisonment after the first major trial for treason in the BRD.
Just a few weeks after Gerhard’s arrival in East Berlin, the head of espionage, Markus Wolf, starts to examine the networks of the former Party news agency. The whole apparatus is assessed as a “security risk”, for which reason Wolf recommends “immediately cleansing the service and phasing it out”. According to a report marked “top secret”: “Throughout the whole of the old news agency, conspiratorial work, the selection of colleagues and sources, was so careless and badly organized that the enemy must have been fully aware of all of its work, and able to use the apparatus to disorient our own Party leadership. (…) In particular, it is not yet certain to what extent the enemy has been able to use the apparatus to recruit former colleagues, or the extent to which the carelessness that has been uncovered was due to deliberate sabotage. In the case of some former members of staff, this material is very grave and extensive, even though it is less a matter of proof in the judicial sense.”
Today some people say that Markus Wolf dissolved the Party’s news agency to rid himself of vexatious competition, and at the same time gain valuable sources in the West. All the service staff were subjected to examination. Many of them ended in prison as “traitors” because they knew too much, or because they had become dangerous for some other reason. In a record of a conversation at the Stasi Main Administration Reconnaissance, dated 9 August 1952, it says: “A memorandum about Resident Paul must be prepared by 15.9.1952, so that a decision can be made on whether he is to be withdrawn from service or arrested.” Gerhard probably never knew how much danger he was in.
/> On 18 September 1952 Markus Wolf presents a report on Gerhard. Wolf writes: “Paul’s past needs a more thorough examination. If the possibility of deliberate sabotage on his part is left open, it must at any rate be established that he lacks the firm Marxist foundation, that he has never had the opportunity to acquire a real class consciousness, that he is the type of the intellectual with many bourgeois weaknesses and thus, in spite of his intelligence, was not capable of performing the duties of a qualified resident. (…) In France he was in contact with the future renegade Herbert Müller, with the traitor Werner Schwarze and others. Paul’s account of his participation in the Resistance movement is romantic and fantastical. (…) In Paul’s case it must further be borne in mind that because of his family relationships he has a wide range of acquaintances both at home and abroad, particularly among Trotskyist elements. His Jewish origins cannot go unmentioned here. Paul’s work is certainly known to the enemy.”