The File E-Book

Timothy Garton Ash

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE In 1978 Timothy Garton Ash went to live in Berlin to see what that divided city could teach him about tyranny and freedom. Fifteen years later, by then internationally famous for his reportage of the downfall of communism in Central Europe, he returned to look at his Stasi file which bore the code-name 'Romeo'. Compiled by the East German secret police, with the assistance of both professional spies and ordinary people turned informer, it contained a meticulous record of his earlier life in Berlin. In this memoir, he describes rediscovering his younger self through the eyes of the Stasi, and then confronting those who had informed against him. Moving from document to remembrance, from the offices of Britain's own security service to the living rooms of retired Stasi officers, The File is a personal narrative as gripping, as disquieting, and as morally provocative as any fiction by George Orwell or Graham Greene. And it is all true.

Leseprobe

The File

Timothy Garton Ash is the author of nine books including The Magic Lantern, History of the Present, Free World and Facts are Subversive. He is Professor of European Studies and Isaiah Berlin Professorial Fellow at St Antony’s College, Oxford, and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His essays appear regularly in the New York Review of Books and his weekly column for the Guardian is widely syndicated in Europe, Asia and the Americas. He has received many awards for his writing, including the Somerset Maugham Award and the George Orwell Prize.

‘An extraordinary book, a gripping, alarming, thought-provoking, often moving exploration of a period of history and a time of life.’

John Naughton, Irish Times

‘A devastating glimpse, sensitively written, of what it was like to be on the receiving end of the Stasi’s attentions. . . Fascinating and eminently readable.’

Alistair Horne, Daily Telegraph

‘Excellent and fascinating. . . Garton Ash not only comes to terms with history – with the endless, quick wickedness of the GDR – he embarks upon a journey back into memory, dragging up things long forgotten and finding they still have power to move, to distress, and to enrage. . . An inspiring book.’

Philip Hensher, Mail on Sunday

‘Garton Ash writes with unfailing elegance and clarity. . . Acutely intelligent and literate.’

George Steiner, Observer

‘Real life le Carré’

Jeremy Paxman, Sunday Times Summer Reading

‘Extraordinary. . . Much of the finest work in The File is that which describes the attempts of Garton Ash to track down those who had stalked him for years. Here the book moves into something approaching a first-rate thriller – with the bonus that it’s true.’

Richard Kent, Scotland on Sunday

‘Compelling and executed with the author’s customary precision and gift for interpretation. . . The File reminds us however much we praise memory, healing power is also derived from forgetting.’

Anne McElvoy, Sunday Telegraph

‘An eloquent, absorbing account of the disintegration of a shabby empire, by a brilliant historian who was there to chronicle its fall.’

Brian Davis, Time Out

‘A masterpiece, a personal story of universal significance. . . this book is a love story which could so easily have been a litany of hate. It has found its place on that small shelf of books I would want to rescue if my house went up in flames.’

Paul Oestreicher, Tablet

‘A thoughtful, utterly absorbing exploration of the very purpose, meaning and character of control and collaboration in an insecure dictatorial society. . . Always steering clear of vindictiveness or triumphalism, [Garton Ash] has written a rich and instructive examination of the cold war past.’

Richard Bernstein, New York Times

‘We still understand little about what makes totalitarianism tick. . . From Alexander Solzhenitsyn to Primo Levi, it is the literary chroniclers who have done the job most persuasively. Timothy Garton Ash is one such chronicler.’

Christian Caryl, Wall Street Journal

First published in Great Britain in 1997 by HarperCollins Publishers.

This revised edition published in Great Britain in 2009 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd.

Copyright © Timothy Garton Ash 1997Afterword copyright © Timothy Garton Ash 2009

The moral right of Timothy Garton Ash to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright-holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978 1 84887 088 8eISBN: 978 1 78239 784 7

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic BooksAn imprint of Grove Atlantic LtdOrmond House26–27 Boswell StreetLondonWC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

For D., T. and A.

Contents

A Note on Names

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Chapter VIII

Chapter IX

Chapter X

Chapter XI

Chapter XII

Chapter XIII

Chapter XIV

Chapter XV

Afterword (2009)

A Note on Names

The following names in the text are pseudonyms: Andrea, Claudia, Flash Harry, Frau Duncker and Frau R. Three informers are identified only by their Stasi aliases: ‘Michaela’, ‘Schuldt’ and ‘Smith’. If anyone might be tempted to expose the real people behind these names – which in several cases would not be difficult – I would ask them to refrain from doing so, for reasons that should become clear.

‘GUTEN TAG,’ says bustling Frau Schulz, ‘you have a very interesting file.’ And there it is, a buff-coloured binder, some two inches thick, rubber-stamped on the front cover: OPK-Akte, MfS, XV2889/81. Underneath is written, in a neat, clerical hand: „Romeo”.

Romeo?

‘Yes, that was your code-name’, says Frau Schulz, and giggles.

I SIT DOWN at a small plastic-wood table in Frau Schulz’s cramped room in the Federal Authority for the Records of the State Security Service of the former German Democratic Republic: the ministry of the files. As I open the binder, I find myself thinking of an odd moment in my East German life.

One night in 1980, when I was living as a student in East Berlin, I came back with a girlfriend to my room in a crumbling Wilhelmine tenement house in the borough of Prenzlauer Berg. This was a room with a view – a view into it. Large french windows gave directly on to a balcony and, were it not for the net curtains, people living across the street could look straight in.

As we embraced on the narrow bed, Andrea suddenly pulled away, finished undressing, went over to the window and threw open the net curtains. She turned on the glaring main light and then came back to me. Had this been, say, Oxford, I might have been a little surprised about the bright light and the open curtains. But this was Berlin, so I thought no more about it.

Until, that is, I learned about the file. Then I remembered this moment and started wondering whether Andrea had been working for the Stasi, and whether she had opened the curtains so we could be photographed from the other side of the street.

Perhaps those photographs are lurking in this binder, which Frau Schulz has already inspected. What was it she said? ‘You have a very interesting file.’

Hastily turning the pages, I’m relieved to find that there are no such photographs here and that Andrea does not appear as an informer. But there are other things that touch me.

Here, for example, is an observation report describing a visit I apparently paid to East Berlin on 06.10.79 from 16.07 hours to 23.55 hours. The alias given me by the Stasi at this date was, less romantically, ‘246816’.

16.07 hours

‘246816’ was taken up for observation after leaving the Bahnhof Friedrichstrasse frontier crossing. The person to be observed went to the newspaper stand in the upper station concourse and bought a ‘Freie Welt’, a ‘Neues Deutschland’ and a ‘Berliner Zeitung’. Then the object [that’s me] walked questingly around the station.

16.15 hours

in the upper station concourse ‘246816’ greeted a female person with handshake and kiss on the cheek. This female person received the code-name ‘Beret’. ‘Beret’ carried a dark brown shoulder bag. Both left the station and went, conversing, to the Berliner Ensemble on Brechtplatz.

16.25 hours

both entered the restaurant

Ganymed

Berlin-Mitte

Am Schiffbauerdamm

After c. 2 minutes the persons to be observed left the restaurant and went via Friedrichstrasse and Unter den Linden to the Operncafé.

16.52 hours

‘246816’ and ‘Beret’ entered the restaurant

Operncafé

Berlin-Mitte

Unter den Linden

They took seats in the café and drank coffee.

18.45 hours

they left the café and went to Bebelplatz. In the time from

18.45 hours

until

20.40 hours

they both watched with interest the torchlit procession to honour the 30th anniversary of the GDR. Thereafter ‘246816’ and ‘Beret’ went along the street Unter den Linden [and] Friedrichstrasse to the street Am Schiffbauerdamm.

21.10 hours

they entered there the restaurant Ganymed. In the restaurant they were not under observation.

23.50 hours

both left the gastronomic establishment and proceeded directly to the departure hall of the Bahnhof Friedrichstrasse frontier crossing, which they

23.55 hours

entered. ‘Beret’ was passed on to Main Department VI for documentation. The surveillance was terminated.

Person-description of object ‘246816’

SEX: male

AGE: 20–25 years

HEIGHT: c. 1.75m

BUILD: slim

HAIR: dark blondshort

DRESS: green jacketblue polo-neck pulloverbrown cord trousers

Person-description of connection ‘Beret’

SEX: female

AGE: 30–35 years

HEIGHT: 1.75m-1.78m

BUILD: slim

HAIR: medium blondecurly

DRESS: dark blue cloth coatred beretblue jeansblack boots

ACCESSORIES: dark brown handbag

I sit there, at the plastic-wood table, marvelling at this minutely detailed reconstruction of a day in my life and at the style that recalls a school exercise: never a sentence without a verb, the pretentious variation of ‘gastronomic establishment’. I remember the slovenly gilt-and-red Ganymed, the plush Operncafé and the blue-shirted, pimpled youths in the thirtieth anniversary march-past, their paraffin-soaked torches trailing sparks in the misty night air. I smell again that peculiar East Berlin smell, a compound of the smoke from old-fashioned domestic boilers burning compressed coal-dust briquettes, exhaust fumes from the two-stroke engines of the little Trabant cars, cheap East European cigarettes, damp boots and sweat. But one thing I simply can’t remember: who was she, my little red riding-hood? Or not so little: 1.75 – 1.78 metres, nearly my height. Slim, medium blonde, curly hair, 30–35, black boots? I sit there, under Frau Schulz’s inquisitive eye, sensing an awful disloyalty to my own past.

Only when I get home, right home, to Oxford, do I find out who she was – by reading my own diary from that time. In fact, I discover the whole record of a short, intense, unhappy romance: of days and nights, of telephone calls and letters. Why, here at the back of the diary are two of her letters, carefully kept in their envelopes, with a postmark that says ‘Post – so you keep in touch’. Folded inside one of the letters is a black-and-white photograph that she sent me when it was all over, to remember her by. Tousled hair, high cheekbones, a rather tense smile. How could I have forgotten?

My diary for that day in October 1979 has Claudia ‘cheeky in red beret and blue uniform raincoat’. ‘Over Friedrichstrasse,’ it says, ‘searched down to the soles of my shoes (Duckers. Officer very impressed.)’ Now I remember how, at the underground checkpoint beneath the Friedrichstrasse railway station, a grey-uniformed officer took me into a curtained cubicle, made me empty the contents of my pockets on to a small table, examined each item minutely and even questioned me about individual entries in my pocket diary. He then ordered me to take off my heavy brown leather shoes, from Ducker & Son of Turl Street. Peering inside and then weighing them in his hand he said: ‘Very good shoes.’

‘Arm-in-arm, cheek-to-cheek w. Claudia to Operncafé’, the diary goes on:

Becoming yet more intimate . . . The torchlit procession. The cold, cold east wind. Our warmth. The maze – encircled. Slipping through the columns, evading the policemen. Finally to ‘Ganymed’. Tolerable dinner. C. re. her ‘Jobben’. Her political activity. We cross back via Friedrichstr. To Diener’s . . . c.0300 at Uhlandstr. Daniel, desperate and pale-faced before the flat door – locked out!

Daniel Johnson, son of the writer Paul Johnson, is today an established figure on The Times. He was then a fiercely intellectual Cambridge postgraduate, working on a doctorate about the history of German pessimism – of which he was always delighted to discover another specimen. We shared a spacious late nineteenth-century flat in the borough of Wilmersdorf, Uhlandstrasse 127. Daniel had forgotten his keys.

The ‘maze’ and ‘columns’ were, I presume, those of the regimented torch-bearing marchers of the Free German Youth, the gloriously misnamed communist youth organization. As for ‘her political activity’, Claudia belonged to the instantly recognizable generation of 1968. That evening she told me how they used to chant at the riot police a jingle which neatly captures the ’68 mixture of political and sexual protest. In free translation it goes: ‘Out here they are pigs/In bed they are figs.’

I last caught a glimpse of her, some time later, in the graveyard of the Berlin-Dahlem village church, at the funeral of the student leader Rudi Dutschke. She was still wearing her red beret. Or have I just imagined that final detail?

The Stasi’s observation report, my diary entry: two versions of one day in a life. The ‘object’ described with the cold outward eye of the secret policeman and my own subjective, allusive, emotional self-description. But what a gift to memory is a Stasi file. Far better than Proust’s madeleine.

I

THE ‘OPK’ ON THE FRONT COVER stands for Operative Personenkontrolle, Operational Person Control. According to the 1985 edition of the Dictionary of Political-Operational Work, prepared by the Juridical Higher School of the Ministry for State Security, an Operational Person Control was to identify anyone who might have committed an offence according to the Criminal Code, or who might have a ‘hostile-negative attitude’, or who might be exploited for hostile purposes by the enemy. The central purpose of an OPK, the dictionary explains, is to answer the question ‘who’s who?’ Each file begins with an ‘opening report’ and a ‘plan of action’.

My opening report dates from March 1981. Prepared by one Lieutenant Wendt, it gives my personal details, notes that I have been studying in West Berlin since 1978, and lived from January to June 1980 – actually it was October – in ‘the capital of the GDR’. (The authorities of the German Democratic Republic always insisted on using this formula for East Berlin.) I travel frequently from West Berlin to East Germany and Poland. I have repeatedly ‘made contact with operationally interesting persons’. Consequently, ‘there are grounds for suspecting that G. [for Garton Ash, otherwise ‘the object’ or ‘Romeo’] has deliberately exploited his official functions as research student and/or journalist to pursue intelligence activities’.