The File

by Timothy Garton Ash

  The HVA was the foreign intelligence service of East Germany. Its full name was Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung, which, since the more usual meaning of Aufklärung is Enlightenment, could be translated as the Department of Enlightenment. Headed by Markus “Mischa” Wolf, it was famously fictionalized as “the Abteilung” in John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Its first department, HVA I, was responsible for spying on the West German government in Bonn.

  Next the plan turns to “operational observation and investigation.” The measures to be taken include further investigation of Mr. and Mrs. Kreisel, the couple from whom the Humboldt University had rented my room with a view. A third category, “further measures,” gives instructions for a “search” by Main Department VI, responsible for controlling cross-frontier traffic, and for department M to begin a “post-control.” “West Berlin address of G.,” it says, but this presumably refers to letters coming from my West Berlin flat, since only in exceptional circumstances was the Stasi able to open someone’s post in the West. And then, again for Lieutenant Wendt, the task of compiling a report on whether to turn this OPK investigation into a full-blown Operational Case, or OV. OV was the top category of operation, covering known opponents and critics of the regime. My friend Werner Krätschell, for example, appears here as OV “Beech-tree.”

  Finally there is “cooperation with other service units.” Here coordination is proposed with department XX/4 (charged with infiltrating the churches) in respect of my contact with the Reverend Beech-tree. Inquiries are to be made “to the Soviet security organs about possible current interest of the British Secret Service in information on the Philby case.” “Concrete coordination” is to be pursued with AG4 to see if it would be possible to “attach” informers to me during my visits to Poland. AG4 was a Stasi working group established to follow the alarming development of the Solidarity revolution in Poland. Responsible: Major Risse.

  Signed by Lieutenant Wendt, and countersigned by Lieutenant Colonel Kaulfuss, head of II/9, the department covering all West European intelligence services.

  So that was their “plan of action,” then. My plan of action, now, is to investigate their investigation of me. I shall pursue their inquiry through this file, try to track down both the informers and the officers on my case, consult other files, compare the Stasi record with my own memories, with the diary and notes I kept at the time, and with the political history I have since written about this period. And I shall see what I find.

  The cumbersomely named Federal Authority for the Records of the State Security Service of the former German Democratic Republic is usually called the Gauck Authority for short, after Joachim Gauck, the forceful and eloquent East German priest who heads it. My file comes from the Gauck Authority’s main archive in Berlin, which is, in fact, the former central archive of the Ministry for State Security. The ministry had a huge complex of office buildings, occupying a block and a half on the Normannenstrasse in the east end of East Berlin. The minister’s offices and private apartment have been kept much as he left them: his desk with the many telephones (secret, top secret, ultra top secret), his tidy little bedroom, a tray of clay models presented to him by children at the Richard Sorge kindergarten. There’s a clay banana, a gnome, a little dog marked “Jeanine,” a lemon from “Christin.”

  Most of the other buildings have been given over to new purposes. All the external windows were once specially sealed so that no secret papers could be smuggled out by a double agent, or simply blown away by some careless draft. Now the windows are unsealed. Where the Kaulfusses and Wendts plied their dreary trade, there are now ordinary offices, a supermarket, Ritters Sport-sauna and an employment agency. But the archive is working still.

  In the catalog room, middle-aged women in bright pink sweaters and nylon trousers patter around in plastic sandals among the huge card-index machines. I say machines, because they are motorized. The actual card-index boxes are suspended from axles, like the cars on a Ferris wheel. Press the button for K and the big wheel grinds around until the K cards are uppermost. The FI6 index—the abbreviation refers to the type of card—contains real names, but they are ordered according to the Stasi’s own phonetic alphabet, so that, for example, Mueller, Muller, Möller and Müller are all filed together. (If you pick up names by bugging or wiretapping you don’t know exactly how they are spelled.) From here, the ladies in pink patter off to check the F22 index—arranged by case numbers—and sometimes also the officers’ individual casebooks, before finding the actual files in purpose-made stacks on one of the building’s seven specially reinforced floors. Pitter-patter, pitter-pat, go the plastic sandals, as the archive churns out its daily quota of poisoned madeleines.

  Down the corridor, they show you the “tradition room.” Medals, busts of Lenin, certificates of merit, banners celebrating the work of “Chekists,” the Soviet term for secret-police officers: “He alone may be a Chekist who has a cool head, a warm heart and clean hands (F. Dzerzhinsky).” On the table there are what look like jam jars. Each one is carefully labeled and contains a small piece of dirty yellow velveteen. These are samples of personal smell, taken so that, if need be, bloodhounds could be given the scent. According to the Stasi dictionary, the correct term for them is “smell conserve.” I stand there, stricken with a wild surmise. Perhaps somewhere in this vast building my own past smell is still conserved like jam?

  Nearby there is what they call the “copper cauldron,” a cavernous, metal-lined room in which the ministry had planned to put a vast new computer system, containing all the information on everybody The metal was to insulate it from outside electronic interference. Instead, the copper cauldron now contains hundreds of sacks stuffed with tiny pieces of paper: documents torn up in the weeks between the beginning of mass protest in the autumn of 1989 and the storming of the ministry in early 1990. On the plausible assumption that the Stasi would have started by destroying the most important and sensitive papers, the Gauck Authority is now trying to reconstruct them, shred by shred.

  It’s a weird place, this Gauck Authority: a ministry of truth occupying the former ministry of fear. Back at the administrative headquarters in central Berlin there are long, echoing corridors with new West German lights and plastic flooring but still a faint residue of that unmistakable East Berlin smell. Lugubrious, beer-bellied porters at the door, elaborate visitors’ passes, regulations, small-print forms in triplicate, expenses—all the ponderous apparatus of German bureaucracy. And the habits of a bloated welfare state. As in so many German institutions, every second employee seems to be out to lunch, or on holiday, or “at the doctor’s.” The time-honored recognition signal of the German office worker, “Mahlzeit!” (Have a good meal!), echoes down the corridors. “May I use your shredder?” one secretary asks another. For a moment you imagine a successor ministry piecing together these shredded documents, in a kind of infinite regression.

  Meanwhile, every page of every document you get to see has been renumbered by the Authority’s archivists, with a neat rubber stamp over the Stasi’s own careful handwritten pagination. It’s like a parody of German thoroughness. One extreme follows another. Probably no dictatorship in modern history has had such an extensive and fanatically thorough secret police as East Germany did. No democracy in modern history has done more to expose the legacy of the preceding dictatorship than the new Germany has.

  A special law, passed by the parliament of united Germany in 1991, carefully regulates how the files can be used. Frau Schulz has read my file before I did because, in scrupulous bureaucratic implementation of that law, she is supposed to photocopy the pages on which the names of Stasi victims or innocent third parties appear, to black out those names on the copies and then to copy the pages again, just to make quite sure the name cannot be deciphered using a strong light. She is also meant to cover up any passage containing personal information about other people that is not directly related to the inquiry. But what is not relevant to understanding a secret police that worked
precisely by collecting and exploiting the most intimate details of private life?

  The effect of reading a file can be terrible. I think of the now famous case of Vera Wollenberger, a political activist from my friend Werner Krätschell’s parish in Pankow, who discovered from reading her file that her husband, Knud, had been informing on her ever since they met. They would go for a walk with the children on Sunday, and on Monday Knud would pour it all out to his Stasi case officer. She thought she had been married to Knud; she found she had been married to IM “Donald.” (Vera refers to him in a memoir as “Knud-Donald.” They are now divorced.) Or the writer Hans Joachim Schädlich, who found that his elder brother had been informing on him. And they only discovered from the files. Had the files not been opened, they might still be brother and brother, man and wife—their love enduring, a fortress sure upon the rock of lies.

  There are also lighter side effects. After the law came into force, students at the Humboldt University in East Berlin would boast to their girlfriends: “Of course I’ve applied to see my file. I dread to think what I’ll find there, but I simply have to know.” Luscious Sabine would be really impressed. Then came the dreadful letter from the Authority: so far as we can establish, you have no file. Humiliation. Sabine turned to someone else, who had.

  When I tell people about my file, they say strange things like “How lucky!” or “What a privilege!” If they themselves had anything to do with Eastern Europe, they say, “Yes, I must apply to see my file,” or “It seems that mine was destroyed,” or “Gauck tells me mine is probably in Moscow.” No one ever says, “I’m sure they didn’t have one on me.” One could describe the syndrome in Freudian terms: file envy.

  Actually, mine is very modest compared with many. What is my single binder, against the writer Jürgen Fuchs’s thirty? My 325 pages against the 40,000 devoted to the dissident singer Wolf Biermann? Yet small keys can open large doors. This is a way into much bigger rooms. Wherever there has been a secret police, not just in Germany, people often protest that their files are wholly unreliable, full of distortions and fabrications. How better to test that claim than to see what they had on me? After all, I should know what I was really up to. And what did my officers and informers think they were doing? Can the files, and the men and women behind them, tell us anything more about communism, the Cold War and the sense or nonsense of spying? This systematic opening of secret-police records to every citizen who is in them and wants to know, is without precedent. There has been nothing like it, anywhere, ever. Was it right? What has it done to those involved? The experience may even teach us something about history and memory, about ourselves, about human nature. So if the form of this book seems self-indulgent, the purpose is not. I am but a window, a sample, a means to an end, the object in this experiment.

  To do this, I must explore not just a file but a life: the life of the person I was then. This is not the same thing as “my life.” What we usually call “my life” is a constantly rewritten version of our own past. “My life” is the mental autobiography with which and by which we all live. What really happened is quite another matter.

  Searching for a lost self, I am also searching for a lost time. And for answers to the question How did the one shape the other? Historical time and personal time, the public and private, great events and our own lives. Writing about the large areas of human experience ignored by conventional political history, the historian Keith Thomas quotes Samuel Johnson:

  How small, of all that human hearts endure

  That part which laws or kings can cause or cure.

  But looking back I see how much the experience of my own heart, at least, was caused by our modern “laws and kings”: by the different regimes of East and West, and the conflict between them. Perhaps, after all, Johnson was expressing not a universal but a purely local truth. Happy the country where that was ever true.

  II

  I SET OFF FOR BERLIN ON MY TWENTY-THIRD BIRTHDAY, July 12, 1978, driving my new, dark blue Alfa Romeo up the motorway from London to the Harwich ferry terminal. From the Hoek van Holland, I raced down the autobahn to the Helmstedt frontier crossing, at the “iron curtain” between West and East Germany, then nervously observed the speed limit on the designated transit route across East Germany to West Berlin. I lived in West Berlin for a year and a half, before driving through Checkpoint Charlie on January 7, 1980, to that room in East Berlin. My original purpose was to write an Oxford doctoral thesis about Berlin under Hitler.

  For this period, from July 1978 to January 1980, the chronology I recently compiled for my history of Germany and the divided continent lists major political events from “Summit of world’s leading industrial countries (G7) in Bonn” to “President Carter announces sanctions against Soviet Union, interrupts ratification of SALT II treaty, and threatens boycott of Moscow Olympics.” In between it notes the election of Karol Wojtyla as Pope John Paul II and his first papal visit to Poland, the first direct elections to the European Parliament, Nato’s “twin-track” decision (to deploy new nuclear missiles in Europe if the Soviet Union would not negotiate a reduction in theirs) and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. We see now that this was the buildup to the last great confrontation of the Cold War: Reagan versus Brezhnev, American Cruise missiles against Soviet SS20s, the Polish revolution in the East and the peace movement in the West.

  My own diary has a quite different chronology. Instead of the G7 summit, I note a long conversation with the poet James Fenton about German literature, Macaulay, and the (remote) possibility of journalism’s being an art form. Instead of the crucial January 1979 Guadeloupe summit, which led to the Nato twin-track decision, I have lunch with Jay Reddaway, a friend from undergraduate days, at the Café Moskau in East Berlin and then an evening in West Berlin that apparently proceeds via drinks at Bilitis to dinner at Foofie’s (can this be real?) and then more drink at Ax Bax. The pope in Poland does feature, but the first direct elections to the European Parliament find me having breakfast at the Café Einstein, visiting an art gallery and failing to complete an article for The Spectator.

  Where the historical chronology dourly records “Gromyko in Bonn,” I am in Franconia, drinking too much smoked beer and visiting the scene of Hitler’s Nuremberg rally. In my diary, Nato’s momentous twin-track decision is completely ignored. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan finds me on the night train to visit Albert Speer at his gingerbread house in Heidelberg. While Jimmy Carter is threatening sanctions against the Soviet Union, I am occupied with preparations for a party. So much for living “in the heat of the Cold War”—to use the deliberately mixed metaphor of my friend Mark Wood, the Reuters correspondent in East Berlin.

  For this year and a half, the Stasi’s intelligence is fragmentary. There is the observation report on my East Berlin evening with “Beret.” In a summary report from department XX/4 (churches) they have correctly identified “Beret,” as well as listing two other West Berlin contacts, Ingrid [surname blacked out by Frau Schulz] and Heinrich [surname blacked out], together with my West Berlin telephone number. They also record that I was born in a place called Winbredow (that is, Wimbledon), describe my Oxford college as “St. ansowts” (St. Antony’s) and give a date wrong by three months for a journey to Poland. They indicate that I am working, together with the English citizen Morris [surname blacked out], on the conflict between the churches and the regime in Nazi Germany. However, “it has been established that G. has extensive knowledge of cultural monuments and places, cultural [sic] and cultural personalities of the GDR and especially of the Bauhaus problematic. In June 1979 G. first identified himself as a so-called freelance contributor to the English weekly ‘Spekta,’ which wished to write a report on the antifascist resistance struggle.” The man from Spekta.

  This information derives mainly from department XX/4’s own inquiry into the Reverend Beech-tree and from a four-page report by Lieutenant Küntzel, of the Erfurt office, on a meeting with Contact Person “Georg” and IMV “Mi
chaela.” The V after the IM indicates that “Michaela” belonged to the Stasi’s highest class of informer, those deployed in direct contact with the enemy. Lieutenant Küntzel reports that on June 30, 1979, Dr. Georg [surname blacked out], living in Schloss [name blacked out] in Weimar, was visited by an unknown person with an English or American accent who introduced himself as Tim Gartow-Ash, a freelance contributor to the English weekly “Spacktator.”

  This blacking out is, as you can see, often ineffectual, for there cannot have been many Dr. Georg [somebodies] living in a Schloss in Weimar. On the other hand, the law on the Stasi files grants the right to anonymity only to innocent third parties or victims, not to collaborators. A glance at my diary establishes the identity of Dr. Georg, as well as the fact that the Stasi has again got the date wrong.

  Dr. Georg was one of those older Jewish communists who were among the most interesting people to talk to in East Germany, indeed throughout communist-ruled Europe. I probably knew at the time I visited him that he had been the editor of an East Berlin daily paper and head of an officially tolerated satirical cabaret, and perhaps I also knew that he had spent the Nazi period in England, where he worked for Reuters. It was only later I learned that he had met in England and subsequently married Alice “Litzi” Kohlman, the warm and energetic Austro-Hungarian-Jewish woman who had been Kim Philby’s first wife and, by some accounts, instrumental in leading the young Englishman on to work as a Soviet spy. Only from this Stasi report do I discover that Dr. Georg had himself worked for Soviet intelligence during his time at Reuters.

  Now aware of that background, I am hardly surprised that he was suspicious of the story with which I came to him. According to Lieutenant Küntzel, Dr. Georg rapidly established that I did not actually know the person—Sanda [surname blacked out]—who I claimed had suggested that I should visit him. When I asked how he came to speak such good English he told me that he had spent many years in England, where he worked for Reuters: “At this G. pretended to be interested and asked if one [name blacked out] had at that time been director of ‘Reuter.’ When this question was answered affirmatively, G. broke out in expressions of delight: ‘Imagine, what a coincidence, Chancellor’s son is now my superior (Vorgesetzter).’ The whole outburst was well feigned, but [Dr. Georg] could detect that G. knew about his work for ‘Reuter.’ Having become suspicious and being strengthened in the feeling that the attempt to make contact with him had another character than that claimed, [Dr. Georg] became reticent towards G., without, however, appearing impolite.”