The File

by Timothy Garton Ash

  VI

  IM “SCHULDT” SUPPLIES SEVERAL MINUTELY DETAILED reports of encounters at which we appear mainly to have discussed the history of the Third Reich. Except for his description of my room in Prenzlauer Berg, they do not add much. As “Schuldt” himself ruefully observes of one meeting: “All in all, this ‘working lunch’ was not very successful for me.”

  My diary enables me to identify him. He was a middle-aged lecturer in English literature whom I had met, incongruously, at the Queen’s birthday party in the garden of the British ambassador’s residence. I remember him as heavy-featured, balding, lugubrious and quite boring, though with good English and occasional drops of wit.

  He seems to have been the kind of informer—the experts at the Gauck Authority tell me there were many such—who spent countless hours writing or typing absurdly detailed reports. The Stasi was their pen pal. The Pooterish depths this reached can be seen in an extract from the professor’s account of a lunch with the third secretary at the British embassy, included in my file because they also discussed me. “The whole atmosphere of the meeting with Mr. Wildash,” records IM “Schuldt,” “was businesslike but more conventional than I had expected (is this a case of the conventional distance of a young man from a ‘professor’?). While I was at pains to order Czech specialties (e.g., dumplings) to eat, my companion partook of a dish of chicken liver. He drank two or three bottles of Pils, although he had come by car.” I wonder how many miles of such stuff—“(e.g., dumplings)”—there are in the one hundred and eleven miles of files now administered by the Gauck Authority. Twenty miles? Forty?

  “Schuldt”’s own file helps me to understand why he did it. This time, the archivists find all three parts of an exemplary informer’s record. His Part I comprises two substantial binders, Part II no less than four, and even the slim Part III, documenting his expenses, is strangely eloquent. Together, they tell a sad story. It begins in 1960. “Schuldt” is a bright but erratic junior lecturer in English at a provincial university. He is in his early thirties, unmarried, had attended a good school during the war and briefly been in the Hitler Youth. His head of department thinks he sometimes does not pay enough attention to detail, but finds his work full of stimulating ideas. His spoken English is clearly good, since he has recently returned from serving as a special interpreter on a trip to Asia with the prime minister.

  But now he has been denounced for telling disrespectful anecdotes about this trip in a pub, for drinking too much and for making homosexual advances to students. A student reports one incident in detail. After many rounds of drinks, he had invited them back to his flat and started making advances: “[‘Schuldt’] then said that if [the student] took off his leather shorts he would fetch another bottle of wine from the cellar.” “Schuldt” defends himself in a ten-page typewritten letter, full of references to the position of homosexuality in European cultural history and craven self-criticism. His conduct was, he writes, “a grave violation of my duties as a member of the Party.” He will now “endeavor to bear the tide of Comrade with honor.”

  There follow preliminary conversations with the “Candidate.” The blackmail is not explicitly recorded, but there is a full account of the formal recruitment interview in the town hall on December 29, 1961, between 9:00 and 11:30 A.M. He gives detailed assessments of many colleagues in the university. Then there is a special brown envelope bound into the file. Printed on the cover is the single word “Pledge”: the pledge, that is, to work for the Stasi. This envelope is empty. Part II, however, contains a full record of his work from 1962 onward, with regular, detailed reports on colleagues, students and acquaintances. Meanwhile, Part I continues a watchful trickle of other informers’ reports on him (in 1970 he’s still drinking heavily) and photocopies of his correspondence. Part III records the expenses: 5 marks for food and drink, 28 marks for wine and cigars, 100 for telephone, 200 for travel, and the occasional “premium” for good work.

  In 1975 we find a certificate recording the presentation of a bronze medal for “loyal service in the National People’s Army.” This medal is awarded, says the citation, “as a sign of recognition for honest, conscientious and loyal duty done in the Ministry for State Security.” Signed by Erich Mielke, the minister.

  “Schuldt” now becomes more interesting to the Stasi because he meets the first secretary at the British embassy. This friendly contact he energetically pursues, in close coordination with his case officer. Included are photocopies of the title pages of several volumes of the Penguin Modern Poets sent him by the genial first secretary, as also are copies of all their correspondence. In the third volume we find him enjoying the privilege of attending a conference on English literature at Peterhouse College, Cambridge. Detailed assessments of several of the participants follow. Professor Raymond Williams is singled out as a “progressive citizen.”

  In volume four I appear—drinking, as he sourly notes, rather a lot of his brandy. Perhaps he hopes for a refill from the Stasi. (According to the expense vouchers, at their next meeting his case officer gives him two hundred marks, ostensibly for the costs of a trip to Berlin but enough to cover several bottles.) He then submits his own memorandum on another possible visit to England. There is a dinner at the British ambassador’s residence in the spring of 1980, with George Steiner as the guest of honor (“Professor Steiner continued to hold forth …”), and another in the autumn, to which, he carefully reports, Timothy Garton Ash was given a lift by Mark Wood of Reuters. In December 1980 he receives a premium of three hundred marks and is praised especially for his work on the British embassy, all done, the commendation notes, “in his free time.” Then, in January 1981, they develop a strategy for trying to restore the contact with me.

  At the same time, however, department 26 is bugging his flat, and they record him as saying to a friend: “The GDR keeps collapsing.” So he’s unlikely to be getting a silver medal. But the meetings, the reports and the little presents continue. In March 1984 he suggests that he might go to Poland to reestablish contact with that British diplomat, now at the embassy in Warsaw. Always game for a little trip at the Stasi’s expense. But there the volume abruptly ends.

  I turn back to Part I and find, folded inside another brown envelope, a “concluding report” dated October 4, 1984. “The last meeting with IM ‘Schuldt’ took place on 16.5.84,” it says. “On 10.7.84 IM ‘Schuldt’ died unexpectedly….” He was fifty-seven. “No political-operative consequences follow from the sudden demise of IM ‘Schuldt.’”

  VII

  IMB “SMITH” CONTRIBUTES A SARTORIAL CRITICISM. He says I “make a pretty casual impression (open collar, which requires a tie, but no tie …).”

  He places me, accurately enough, as “a member of the bourgeois intelligentsia with a liberal-humanist education and a liberal-democratic attitude.” He also finds me “somewhat naive in [my] curiosity. Seeks every opportunity to learn more. Talks to old workers in ‘the pub at the corner,’ that is, with citizens who remember [the Nazi] period.”

  I cannot remember “Smith” at all, and my diary notes only “long lunch w. British Communist at Humboldt Univ.” After several false traces—are there so many “Smiths”?—the archivists finally bring up the right file. He is an Englishman, a former polytechnic lecturer who took a job teaching at the Humboldt University in the 1970s, married an East German woman and settled down. Here, in Part I of the file, is Lieutenant Wendt’s proposal to make contact with him, using a “legend.” Wendt will ring up, pretending to be from the city council. When they meet, Wendt will introduce himself as “Heinz Lenz” from the Ministry for State Security and say that the Englishman’s name has appeared on the books of a Western intelligence service in West Berlin. It looks bad, and they need his cooperation to clear this up. In effect: prove your innocence!

  The trick works. Within a week there’s another meeting with candidate-informer “Doktor,” as he’s now called. Two weeks later the candidate writes out and signs a handwritten undertaking to keep th
ese contacts strictly secret. Later in Part I, I find the standard brown envelope saying “Pledge.” It contains his handwritten pledge to “support the M[inistry] f[or] S[tate Security] on a voluntary basis.” For this purpose, it concludes, “I have chosen the code name ‘Smith.’” By 1981 he’s an IMB. This abbreviation replaced IMV (as for “Michaela”) in 1980, but meant essentially the same: the highest class of informer, one having direct contact with the enemy.

  As an Englishman I have often thought to myself, If Britain were a communist police state, would we have lots of informers? Well, here’s a British informer—and a busy one. His Part II comprises some six hundred pages, in three binders, and that takes us only to 1986. The last binder cannot be found; perhaps it was still in Wendt’s office cupboard, perhaps it was shredded or burned.

  He starts by informing mainly on his contacts with the British embassy. Then he is asked to report on the British Council library in West Berlin. A detailed description—with sketch map—is delivered. Then there are formal typewritten instructions for a trip to Britain. What to do if the British “special services” try to contact him: “Don’t become nervous, remain outwardly calm!” His special mission is to give a detailed description— with sketch map—of the British Council headquarters in Spring Gardens, in central London. Leave it to “Smith.” And sure enough, here is his map: Whitehall, Trafalgar Square, the Mall and then Spring Gardens drawn in the wrong place.

  Later, he is given another formal instruction. From 1100 hours to 1300 hours on December 4, 1982, he is to observe a female person and her partner in the Jade restaurant at the Europa-Center in West Berlin. For this he will receive DM 150 expenses. His report, which is far from illuminating, says he suspects that the Chinese waiter was watching them too.

  Between these more or less farcical missions comes the handwritten version of his encounter with me and fairly detailed information on other British people in East Germany. Then, to execute the plan of action at the beginning of my file—“taking account of the subjective and objective possibilities of the IM”—there are minutely detailed instructions for the attempt to reestablish contact with me. He should try to find out from Mr. Wildash at the British embassy where I am, but to do so casually. “Not a lecture!” cautions Wendt. “Smith,” like many academics, is clearly inclined to lecture instead of converse. They agree on the text of a letter that he is to ask Wildash to forward to me. And here is the letter. Perhaps I may remember our meeting? He has now read my articles on Poland and would like to discuss them further:

  “If you are in Berlin at any time (West or East), I would be glad of a chance to meet and chat about these things. If you have produced more material and could send copies of it, that would also be very welcome (in this event, I need hardly add, please send it to the British embassy with a note inside saying who it is for, and not to my private address!).” I like that “I need hardly add”: for fear of the Stasi, you know….

  I have no recollection of ever receiving this letter, but now, fifteen years later, it is delivered to me in a file.

  By 1986 the department seems to be fed up with “Smith”’s giving them long-winded lectures on European politics instead of what he is meant to deliver: the dirt on people. I begin to see what the lieutenant meant about the limited “subjective possibilities” of Professor “Smith.” But then, in mid-1986, the record abruptly stops.

  He’s in the phone book, too. “Hello,” I say, “perhaps you may remember our meeting?”

  “Yes, vaguely.”

  Lunch?

  Fine.

  Could an Englishman look exactly like an East German man on the street? Leave it to “Smith.” Anorak, brown trousers, white socks and brown shoes. (Even Lieutenant Wendt is moved to comment in the file that “Smith” is “neatly but not fashionably dressed.”) He has a pink, freckled face and a nervous smile.

  Would he like the chicken?

  Yes, he says, “ta.”

  Now I tell him. I am reading my file. An IM “Smith” informed on me. It appears that “Smith” was he.

  “It’s possible,” he says.

  Then, without any further prompting, he gives his own account of the original approach, starting with the first telephone call from the “city council.” He was very worried. He thought it was an approach from the CIA. Then they met, as arranged, in front of the Humboldt University, found an empty lecture room inside, and “Heinz Lenz” showed his State Security pass. He was shocked; still more so when “Heinz Lenz” explained that they suspected him of being caught up with a Western secret service. He says “Lenz” laid it on pretty thick, “in James Bondish terms.” By the time “Lenz” had finished with him, he was in a state of panic. He was terrified that they would expel him—and then what would happen to his wife and child, trapped behind the Wall? He went home and discussed it with his wife. They decided that he should cooperate, to prove that he was trustworthy.

  The wrong decision, of course, but completely understandable. All my sympathy is engaged. However, he goes on to explain that he also thought of the Stasi as a channel of communication to the state. In a small way, he says, he was trying to do what the leading church official Manfred Stolpe—down in the files as IM “Secretary” but now Social Democrat prime minister of Brandenburg—had been trying to do through his contacts with the Stasi: to get a political message to the top. The trouble with a communist state like East Germany was that it had “no civil society framework.” He was making up for that lack.

  He thought then that the Stasi was a small backroom outfit, “something like MI5.” Only since 1989 has he realized what a huge empire it was. He has followed the debate in the press and finds it “incredible” what some people did: spying on their friends, helping to “put them in the jug.”

  His own “principle” was to talk to the Stasi about social and political issues, but not about people. He would like, nonetheless, to know how far he “adhered to it.” This seems the right moment to show him a copy of what he wrote about me. He is flustered as he reads, avoids my gaze for some moments afterward. Says he’s “irritated” by it. “Contrite, to put it mildly.”

  He had wondered lately if it was true what they told him, about his being found on the books of “a. Western intelligence service.” Why didn’t they say which service? He absolutely believed it at the time, but now he thinks the chances are “forty-sixty” that they invented it.

  I tell him they did.

  Then I ask about the episode in the Jade restaurant. Was it exciting? Did he see himself as James Bond?

  No, he was terrified. He thought he would get shot! Afterward, he asked them never to send him on a mission like that again. Still, at least he could spend the deutsche marks on Western books and newspapers.

  And the sketch maps of the British Council?

  Embarrassment again. He thought that was just “a little test.”

  He and the officers—there were several of them over the years—spoke much as we are speaking now. Why, then, did he make such copious handwritten notes? “Because I’ve a bad memory.” He would speak from the notes, then hand them over. The officers were a strange mixture of formality and informality. After some time, “Heinz Lenz” told him the ministry had concluded he was not a Western spy, and that, as a mark of trust, “we would like to suggest saying Du.” Call me Heinz, and keep talking.

  As for the information he supplied on individual people, he really thought these were innocent little fragments. What was important to him was the general political analysis, which he gave them at length. I point out that what was important to him was not to them. It was precisely those tiny fragments they were interested in. Afterward they put them together, like archaeologists reconstructing a Roman pot. Yes, he sees that now.

  At the end of lunch he asks nervously, “Will you use my name?” He’d rather I didn’t.

  I say I will not. I’ll leave it as “Smith.”

  A few months later I deliver a public lecture in Berlin on what to do about the
communist past. I discuss, in some detail, the opening of the Stasi files. Among the people who come up to me afterward I am surprised to see “Smith.” He gives me an envelope. Opening it back at my hotel, I find a letter saying that he has applied to see his file and that he would be glad to meet again “to consider individual points.”

  Meanwhile he attaches a three-page typescript entitled “Some thoughts on the MfS.” This makes no mention at all of his own involvement but discusses the whole problem in general terms, as one interested scholar writing to another. For example: “The material in MfS files reflects the self-image of the MfS (manner of reporting, interpretation, terminology, etc.). Anyone conversant with text analysis and the problems of perception and objectives in creating texts will appreciate the care that is needed in interpreting material of this kind.”

  The word “I” does not appear once in his text.

  VIII

  I FIRST MET FRAU R. AT A SMALL EXHIBITION ABOUT the antifascist resistance in Berlin. A white-haired lady in her sixties, she immediately stood out from those around her by her bearing and style, poised, well dressed, well spoken. In fact, she came from a wealthy and cultured German Jewish family. She had converted to communism as a teenage girl in the early 1930s and, soon after Hitler came to power, was expelled from school as a result. She left Germany, met a partner for life and followed him to Moscow. They married and had a son. Soon, like so many others, her husband was arrested in one of the Stalinist purges and spent more than ten years in Soviet camps. She herself had to serve in one of the so-called labor armies; for a time, her son was taken from her and put into an orphanage.