The File

by Timothy Garton Ash

  At eighteen he had to choose. He loved nature and wanted to study fishery at the university. Fishing was already his passion. But they—“they”—had other plans for him. They said, Do something for the state that has done so much for you. So he joined the ministry, working first in his local town, Pirna, then in Dresden, then in Berlin, but always on “line two”—counterintelligence.

  Looking back now, he detects in himself a process of steady political disillusionment. He had a close friend on one of the collective farms who told him how it really was down there, in the real world. He was maddened by absurd stories in the press about the production targets of the Five-Year Plan always being outdone. He saw the contradictions between theory and practice and the hypocrisy of rulers who—he quotes Heine—“in private drank wine and in public preached water.” And there were things that came up in his work. He pauses, shakes his head: “For example, there’s something I’ve never told anyone before….”

  At one of their training courses, when he was still in Dresden, the instructor read out a letter written by a woman to her husband, or perhaps he was just her boyfriend, he doesn’t remember. It was such a wonderful letter, so wise, so deep, so full of inner warmth and love. His voice again chokes with emotion: “I’ve never forgotten it.”

  But why was the letter being read out to the Stasi officers?

  “Oh, because the man was an informer, an IM.” The woman obviously suspected something, but the Stasi case officer had worked out a line with him and he had managed to keep her trust.

  “That’s how you should work” was the instructor’s message. But Klaus Risse received, in his heart, a very different message.

  He did his job. But the doubts kept growing—or so he sees it now, with the ordering power of hindsight. There were the long hours, too, and the absurd restrictions. You couldn’t marry without the ministry’s approval. If your wife’s father or even uncle had been in the SS, you would have to choose between her and the job. You couldn’t buy a house without permission. You couldn’t travel abroad without permission. Why, you weren’t even allowed to grow a beard! I think of General Kratsch, clean shaven in the photograph on his personnel card but bearded now.

  He wanted to get out, he says, “but I didn’t have the courage.” He had no other profession. He was afraid of the consequences. However, in 1989 he had already applied to come back to Dresden as what was called an “officer on special mission,” one of the growing number of such officers deployed by the Stasi in ordinary civilian jobs. Were it not for the Turn—like most people in East Germany he says “the Turn,” die Wende, to describe the end of the GDR—he would today be working as an “officer on special mission” in this very hotel.

  Instead, he looked after security at the State Bank in Dresden for a year, was fired when the West German Deutsche Bank took over, and now sells ventilation systems for restaurants. “The Western firms came looking for us,” he says. “They knew we were able, hardworking people.” But it’s a tough new world, where money determines everything and people “walk over corpses.” There are many losers, here in the East. “Some people have already jumped out of the window in my apartment block.” This Western system isn’t the answer either. But he doesn’t know what is.

  Meanwhile, his wife nearly lost her job when his name appeared on a list of Stasi officers published in the press. Even close friends had started doubting him after the sensational revelations about the Stasi in the media, stories about torture chambers, where people were made to stand up to their necks in water and so on. There were bad things, he admits it, but they were in department XX, not in his department.

  So everyone I talk to has someone else to blame. Those who worked for the state say, “It was not us, it was the Party.” Those who worked for the Party say, “It was not us, it was the Stasi.” Come to the Stasi, and those who worked for foreign intelligence say, “It was not us, it was the others.” Talk to them, and they say, “It was not our department, it was XX.” Talk to Herr Zeiseweis from department XX and he says, “But it wasn’t me.”

  When the communists seized power in Central Europe, they talked of using “salami tactics” to cut away the democratic opposition, slice by slice. Here, after communism, we have the salami tactics of denial.

  Risse helps to explain some of the details in my case. The article from the Criminal Code at the beginning of the file was, he says, a formality. However, if it came to a prosecution, then the ministry lawyers were scrupulous to a fault. They insisted on proof that would hold up in court. The ideological assessment in the opening report—“bourgeois liberal”—was important. It meant that I was somewhere in between: not “progressive” but also not “reactionary.” These were the key categories.

  How did they consult the KGB, as indicated in the plan of action? Well, a memo was sent down to Karlshorst, where “the friends” sat. So they, too, called them “the friends”? Yes, it was quite usual to write on a file “Consult with the friends” or just “Consult with the friend.” But the friends weren’t actually very friendly. “They treated us as small fry”—at best, as very junior partners; at worst, as representatives of an occupied country.

  And the working group on Solidarity in Poland? Yes, he remembers that, he was even meant to go to Poland himself, which he wasn’t at all happy about. But he doesn’t think the group was very effective.

  As for the early observation reports, before I had even moved to East Berlin: the ministry had a whole troop at the Friedrichstrasse frontier crossing, ready to pick up and follow anyone who looked at all suspect or interesting.

  The whole department, II/9, had perhaps twenty to thirty officers. His own British section, section A, had five men. Each year they ran only some five to ten Operational Person Controls (OPK) and at most two or three of the top-level Operational Cases (OV). So the ratio of watchers to watched was one to three, perhaps even one to two. How on earth did they fill five twelve-hour days a week following so few people? What did they do all day?

  “A good question,” says Risse—and one he finds difficult to answer. There were a lot of meetings, of course. The work on the OPK and OV files was minutely detailed, as I have seen for myself. The business of running informers, and winning new ones, was very time-consuming.

  I ask him, as I have asked the others, whether they caught any agents. No, not in his time. “Fritz, Alfred”—he refers to him like an index card—may have told me about that one lady diplomat they nearly turned.

  Didn’t he have any scruples about blackmail based on details of a woman’s private life picked up by hidden microphones?

  Yes, he did have scruples, but “every secret service does it”—he uses exactly the same phrase as Fritz.

  Coming back to the claimed idealism of his postwar generation, I ask if it was different among his younger colleagues. What about Lieutenant Wendt, for example?

  “Ah, Wendt, Henning,” he exclaims, smiling. Wendt, Henning, was hardworking, careful, spoke well, a good desk officer. But he was not good at recruiting new agents because he was overcautious and “contact-shy.”

  I say that I have some experience of this, since Wendt is proving most reluctant to meet me.

  “Ah yes, that’s him all right! But perhaps his wife doesn’t want him to. You know, my wife didn’t want me to. When she came back last night she said, ‘You’re crazy to talk to him. You shouldn’t go….’”

  Was she right? I think not. For I take away from this conversation the impression of an intelligent, fundamentally decent man who came, all too understandably from that childhood, to serve his country in an evil place. A man who did not have the courage to get out but who has truly learned from his mistakes. As I walk back to my hotel room to write up my notes, after saying good-bye and wishing him well, there forms in my mind a startling sentence: “Klaus Risse is a good man.” Not just a man with a carefully separated sphere of private decency, like the concentration-camp officer who murdered people during the day, then went home to listen to Ba
ch and play with his children. Not just a better-quality Zeiseweis. I mean a man with a real goodness of heart and a conscience that is not switched off at the office door.

  I have seen him only once, as he is now, not as he was then, in uniform, inspiring fear. Perhaps then his face really was as ugly as it looks in the photograph on the personnel card. There may well be things that he did or was involved in, horrible things, that he has not told me, or has preferred to forget, or has simply forgotten. Had I really been a victim of the Stasi, let alone a direct victim of his actions, I might feel very differently. But unless I find other evidence, I think it so.

  HEINZ-JOACHIM WENDT: BORN AUGUST 16, 1952, IN the village of Bad Kleinen. When he is still a baby, the family moves to the nearby Baltic port of Wismar, where both his parents work in the state fishery business. While attending the Gerhart Hauptmann elementary school he proves especially good at sports, so at thirteen he is sent to a boarding school in Rostock that specializes in developing young athletes. (This was part of the highly organized system of state support that contributed to East Germany’s winning so many Olympic medals.) At fifteen he has to transfer to the ordinary local day school “because of a serious sports injury,” as his handwritten curriculum vitae notes. In 1969 he becomes secretary of the Free German Youth group in his class.

  In the spring of that year he is recruited by the Stasi as a “social collaborator for security.” He writes and signs a short declaration, presumably dictated to him, in which he promises to “support the Ministry for State Security so far as I am able” and confirms that he has been instructed “that I may not talk to anyone about my connection with the MfS.” He is sixteen.

  When he has passed the age of consent, two years later, they propose to turn him into an IM. The five-page proposal starts by reviewing his background and Stasi career to date: “He delivered written reports on problems and people and appeared punctually for the scheduled meetings.” For the recruitment interview the candidate should be told how “the enemy attempts to have a negative influence on youth with the aid of political-ideological diversion.” The officer should explain that the ministry tries to prevent this, but “as we cannot do this on our own and according to the constitution of the GDR every GDR citizen is co-responsible for the defense of our state we turn to him and need his support.” If, as they assume, he agrees, he will receive the code name “Dieter Fischer.” Recruitment will take place on February 23, 1971, at 1900 hours in the conspiratorial flat of “Chef.”

  A handwritten pledge is in the file. It concludes: “I may not speak with anyone about the form of cooperation [i.e., with the ministry], also not with my closest relatives.”

  His regular informer’s file contains a few reports on teachers and schoolmates, but a year and a half later this file is closed because, at the age of nineteen, Heinz-Joachim Wendt commits himself to serve for at least ten years as a professional soldier in the Ministry for State Security. This was an alternative to the usual military service. Now he writes out in neat longhand a four-page pledge to “conduct the struggle against the enemies of the German Democratic Republic and of the socialist world-camp with all firmness.” He swears to “behave according to the commandments of socialist ethics and morality” and to be always watchful for “the criminal methods of the imperialist espionage- and agent-centers.” He agrees that neither he nor any of his close family should travel to, or have any contacts with, people from West Berlin, West Germany or other capitalist countries.

  This is 1971. An assessment of November 1973 reads: “He is open and honest. In the past he was easily influenced. After several discussions he turned off this weakness of character.” Just turned it off, like an electric light inside the glass person at the German Hygiene Museum.

  He goes on to make a fine career. In 1974 he moves to Berlin, to join the expanding department II/9. He’s a desk officer in section A, the British section. The ministry approves his marriage, although on certain conditions (which, however, clearly belong to the “protection-worthy interests” identified by the law on the Stasi files). In 1984 he becomes section head, as successor to Risse, and in 1986 he is promoted to deputy head of the whole department. At the same time, he takes a degree at the Juridical Higher School in Potsdam, the Stasi’s university. According to his diploma, his studies in Marxist-Leninist Philosophy, Scientific Communism, Criminal Tactics and Imperialist Media Policy are all “good,” but those in International Legal Relations only “satisfactory.”

  His salary and rank rise accordingly: sergeant, sub-lieutenant, lieutenant, senior lieutenant, captain. An assessment in March 1989 is very favorable, although suggesting the need for “a more understanding approach to the constraints and limited room for maneuver of the higher leadership levels.” He heads the department Party propaganda group, and his free time is spent on “political and literary reading and visiting sporting and cultural events.” In April he is proposed for promotion to major. This is formally confirmed by ministerial order on October 7, 1989, the fortieth anniversary of the state. A major at thirty-seven: time for celebration. But within a few weeks the whole state has collapsed. What a fall it must have been for him.

  Wendt is the most elusive of all. First, the Insider Committee tells me he is dead. Then the Gauck Authority comes up with the wrong Wendt. When they find the right file, and therefore his first name, I look in the Berlin telephone book: there are two pages of Wendts, none of them Heinz-Joachim. Directory inquiries cannot help. I drive out to the old address given on his personnel card. This is in Hohenschönhausen, an outlying district of East Berlin that was heavily populated by the Stasi. I find a nondescript apartment block that used to be a Stasi house but is now a hostel for asylum seekers.

  On further inquiry, the Insider Committee thinks he may have moved back to his family in Wismar. Driving to the Baltic fishing port, pausing only to admire its redbrick Gothic church and market square, I find his parents in a new flat. As soon as I ask for him through the intercom, his mother sounds alarmed and defensive. In the time it takes me to climb the stairs to their flat, she has telephoned her son. A red-cheeked, angry fishwife confronts me at the door with the news that Heinz-Joachim does not want to talk to me. “He’s not interested.” Through the half-open door, I glimpse a distraught old man. As I drive back to Berlin I imagine the distress of parents whose son’s life has gone wrong: a distress I have just reawakened.

  I then write to his parents, apologize for the intrusion, and enclose a letter to Wendt explaining why I would like to hear his side of the story. He replies, from his parents’ address, with a courteous, carefully worded letter.

  “Of course I can remember you and some of your publications,” he writes, and “I have for some time thought that you would one day address this subject.” However, he cannot help me in my work. His reasons are of a “purely private nature,” not political or professional. He thinks that even without a conversation I should be able to assess the facts in the file “reasonably objectively.” “The distance of time brings different ways of seeing. At least in my case, since I see various things with other eyes today than I did fifteen years ago or in the so-called Wendezeit [the “time of the Turn,” that is, 1989–90].” He asks me to respect the seriousness of his motives and to refrain from “further contact-attempts”—a sudden lapse into Stasi-speak. He wishes me “much success” with the project.

  Meanwhile I have inquired at the Residents Registration Offices in both Wismar and Berlin, and finally been given a computer printout with an address in Berlin. Writing to him again at that address, I ask whether he could at least explain in a few sentences what he means by “see[ing] various things with other eyes today.” I repeat what I said in my first letter, that as things stand I will have to write about his work only on the basis of the files, and “for the historian that is always very unsatisfactory, since the files only tell us a part of the truth. For a really fair description one also needs the viewpoint of the historical actor.” I add: “Also in the s
pirit of fairness, I would like to ask you directly: would the use of your name have possible professional or personal consequences for you or your family, which in the present situation I cannot assess?’ (It sounds less awkward in German.)

  In fact, I discuss with East German friends whether I should give all the Stasi officers the benefit of anonymity. On the whole, they think not. Certainly it would be absurd in the case of General Kratsch, one of the top men in the ministry. Kaulfuss, Fritz and Risse were senior officers—all colonels by the end—and are now either retired or near the end of their working lives. Their children are grown up. They did not request anonymity when we talked. But Wendt, now in his mid-forties, still has half a working life ahead of him. If a colleague or superior were to read the German edition of this book, he or his wife might have difficulties at work, as Risse’s wife did after his name was published in the newspaper. Above all, perhaps Wendt has young children, who might be teased or taunted as a result. I simply don’t know. The atmosphere now prevailing in East Germany is less hysterical and better informed about the Stasi than in the early 1990s, but I must give him the chance.

  Three weeks later, after I have sent him another letter to check that he received mine, he replies: “So as not to appear impolite I hereby confirm receipt of your letters of September 10 and 26.” But he reaffirms that “for whatever reasons, I will not help you. I hope that you do not feel personally offended on this account. As the conversations with my former colleagues show, this probably does not happen to you often.” He hopes that I will accept his answer as final “and will refrain from further contact-attempts.” He concludes: “As things look at present, I cannot see the necessity for special personal, familial or professional caution [about being named]. Please proceed with the completion of your research work as you consider right and appropriate.” I reply saying that I regret but must respect his decision, and will send him a copy of the book.