The File (19 page)

So whenever an even halfway suspicious-looking Englishman came along, they immediately started investigating to see if he was a spy. They lived in hope, but were usually disappointed.

Was this because the British secret service was so clever that the Stasi never found its agents, or because it didn’t have any?

Rather the latter, thinks Kratsch.

I tell Kratsch that the way he talks one could almost forget that the Stasi was an organization of which ordinary
people were terrified. Had he never been frightened himself?

“Fear!” he exclaims, lifting both hands in the air, his huge belly shaking with indignation. Of course not! Not at all. People weren’t afraid, they were grateful for the security! “They thanked us from above and from below.” And he’ll tell me another thing: the very first people to come and congratulate them on the ministry’s annual anniversary day were the representatives of the CDU, the old Christian Democratic puppet party now incorporated into Helmut Kohl’s all-German CDU. Yet now it’s the Christian Democrats who are the first to blame everything on the Stasi! Actually, the Stasi was always subordinated to the ruling communist party. Mielke was scrupulous about this. Everything was checked with Honecker, all important decisions were approved by the Party leader.

I ask if there is anything about which he personally feels guilty. “No,” he says, “I did my job.” The familiar defense: I was only doing my job, my duty, obeying orders. No, he does not feel guilty about anything, except that he had not been more critical of the way things were going in the 1980s, of Honecker’s hubris and the lack of reforms.

“But that’s the same everywhere, in your country too, if one can believe what one reads in the papers. There’s criticism of the royal family but you don’t have the courage to act!”

G
ERHARD
K
AULFUSS
, I
READ IN THE PERSONNEL FILE,
was born February 23, 1933, in the Sudetenland. His father left for the war when he was six, and returned from a Soviet prisoner-of-war camp only in 1947, when young Gerhard was fourteen. Eight formative years without a father. School in the German-occupied Sudetenland during the war: Nazi school. Then the defeat and flight into the Soviet Occupied Zone. He originally wanted to be a shop assistant but came, via the Free German Youth, to the ministry. In time, he worked his way up to be a colonel and the head of department II/9.

Now a snapshot from family life. In 1971 a parcel is sent to his eight-year-old daughter from West Germany: two bars of chocolate, sweets, cheese, sugar, tea, a child’s toothbrush, soap. Emergency rations, as if to Biafra! Alarm bells ring. A formal disciplinary investigation is launched. How did it happen? While they were on holiday in Bulgaria, his daughter had struck up a friendship with a West German girl. “Although an attempt was made by Comrade Major Kaulfuss to prevent this contact, by changing the bathing place, further contacts nonetheless occurred between the children, during
which the daughter of Comrade Major Kaulfuss gave the West German girl their home address.” Conclusion: this contact might be exploited by Western intelligence. If another parcel arrives, it should be brought in to the department for examination, and then sent back.

The file has an old address in Karlshorst, where the Red Army headquarters used to be. In a dusty, run-down street, I find a two-story semidetached house, painted a dirty reddish brown. There is another metal fence and gate, locked with a buzzer system—and the occupant’s name. Kaulfuss. I ring. One of the net curtains in a first-floor window is pulled back. A face appears, briefly. Is it the same as the photo in the file? He opens the front door but waits at the top of the steps, twenty feet away. Yes, it’s him all right.

“Herr Kaulfuss?” I say, raising my voice.

“Yes.”

“My name is Timothy Garton Ash, I’m a contemporary historian from Oxford, and want to talk to you about the history of the MfS.” I use the official abbreviation for the ministry, not the implicitly pejorative “Stasi.”

Slowly he comes to the gate, but does not open it. Like Kratsch, he wears a tracksuit of some synthetic material, this one black and purple. He has a bitter, down-turned mouth, as in the photograph, and his eyes are bloodshot. Drinking?

Would he have time for a conversation?

“No.” He had been approached by the Insider Committee and declined. All sorts of people had come to see him, the West German security service, the West German foreign intelligence service, and even what he rather
confusedly calls the FBIA. He had turned them all down. Anyway, it’s all there in the documents.

Yes, I say, but documents never tell us everything. Conversations with historical witnesses are invaluable for understanding the background and the motives of those involved. (Perfectly true, but also: keep him talking, don’t let the line snap, wind the old carp in gently….) And (risk it now) I have a personal reason: when I was here as a research student, in the early 1980s, your department had a file on me, an OPK.

We debate a little more.

“Ach,” he says, “come on, we’ll talk for fifteen minutes,” and the gate buzzes open.

He leads me to a rocking sofa in the garden. I smell alcohol, cigarette smoke, boredom and emptiness. He is completely unrepentant. The state was threatened by Western agents, terrorists, provocateurs, subversives. As its name suggests, the State Security Service gave ordinary people security, and they look back to it with longing now, when there’s so much insecurity: crime, unemployment, drugs. Yes, there was a minority who suffered for their political views. But that’s normal. Exactly the same thing happened in West Germany. What was that word they had for it? I suggest:
Berufsverbot?
Yes, that’s it! It was
exactly
the same!

But I thought your system was supposed to be better?

“Na ja
…” He laughs bitterly. Anyway, most people did appreciate the security, and they didn’t mind giving up a little liberty in exchange.

Was he at all disillusioned near the end? No, he had
a sense of quiet satisfaction. After all, this state had achieved something: in every year of the history of East Germany there was real growth in the Gross Domestic Product. In West Germany it was the other way around. There it shrank every year. I express some mild incredulity. He explains that the
workers’ share
had shrunk. But West Germany had still got richer, hadn’t it? Yes, but most people can’t afford what’s on sale.

Had he actually been to the West?

Well, not before unification, of course. But now he had, to the North Sea coast and to West Berlin. But he was not impressed. No. One time his granddaughter had asked him for a cuckoo clock. So he went across to the Kaufhaus des Westens, the big department store in West Berlin. He was
disgusted
. All those goods that ordinary people can’t afford.
And
they didn’t have the cuckoo clock.

No, he doesn’t like going to West Berlin, after working against it all his life. But one time, shortly after unification, he couldn’t resist going across on a little private tour of the Western secret service headquarters that he knew only from photographs, the CIA “objects” in Dahlem and so on. They looked very much as in the photos.

He has relaxed, so the time seems right to ask about my file. But he clams up again.

No, he’s warned me, he won’t talk about his work.

No, he doesn’t remember Lieutenant Wendt.

No, he doesn’t remember my case.

Were there so many Operational Person Controls?

Well, no, not in his department anyway. It was something …

Fifteen minutes have become fifty. But now his wife is calling. She needs to be rocked on the garden sofa. She has not been well, you understand.

As we walk back to the rusty gate, I ask if his department caught many spies.

Oh yes, and of course they were sent to prison for long sentences. But he doesn’t want to talk about that. What he wants me to understand is that things can’t go on like this: the crime, the unemployment, the inequality. People are angry.

I take my leave, but as he retreats from the gate he raises his voice: “It can’t go on like this, I tell you, and when the call comes for us to take to the streets, we’ll be there….” Heroic, pathetic defiance.

Then
creak, creak
, goes the garden sofa.

N
OW
FOR
C
OLONEL
F
RITZ
, K
AULFUSS’S SUCCESSOR AS
head of department II/9 and the man who signed off my file in 1982. Unlike his predecessor, Alfred Fritz is still a busy man. At the gate of their neat gray semidetached house, also in Karlshorst, his wife tells me that he’s out from early morning to late at night: “You know how it is, in the insurance business.”

I leave my card and she suggests that I telephone at ten in the evening. When I phone, and start explaining once again that I’m a historian working on the Stasi files, he says, “Didn’t we have something to do with you during my time in the service?” I tell him about the file. After some dithering, he finally agrees to meet—“if you think it’ll be any use”—at half past seven in the morning.

According to his service record, the colonel is now sixty-five. I expect another aged, paunchy, slow-moving figure, like Kaulfuss and Kratsch. But the man who greets me, with an ingratiating grin, looks a youthful fifty-something. He has blow-dried bouffant hair and wears black jeans, a shirt with a lurid pattern of pink and gray triangles and a matching wide tie held in place by a large tiepin. His shirtsleeves are neatly rolled halfway up
the forearms. He looks every inch the West German insurance salesman in his new—what? disguise? uniform? identity?

I thank him for making the time in a busy day. Yes, that’s the trouble, he’s never been so hard-pressed.

Worse than in the ministry?

“No. You know what it’s like in that job, the evening meetings with agents and so on….” And he looks at me expectantly.

“You know what it’s like” … what does he mean?

Lifting my visiting card from the table and looking at it with a smile, he says: “Well, there are all sorts of cover, aren’t there? ‘Contemporary historian,’ for example. Historian or SIS, it’s all the same to me. There were several here already. I have no inhibitions.”

I assure him that I really am a historian. He seems a little disappointed. Perhaps he had looked forward to comparing notes with an old sparring partner. Or perhaps he just doesn’t believe me. Still, he’s ready to talk.

In the beginning was the war. The war had been a formative experience for him, as for Kaulfuss and Kratsch. His elder brother was killed at the front.

And your father?

“I never knew my father. I was what they call an illegitimate child.” He keeps smiling, but I can hear the tension in his voice and feel the old pain.

In the early 1950s he was working in the finance department of the local government in Schwerin. He was a candidate member of the Party. When he was approached by a man from the ministry he felt it was “an honor” to defend East Germany against the foreign spies who were infiltrating the country en masse.

“You must remember what it was like then. This was the time of the ‘trashcan kids.’ The CIA would pay youths from West Berlin a few pennies to come over and search the trash outside Red Army headquarters, here in Karlshorst.” Most of them were caught.

These were exciting years. He felt he was doing an important job. And in the 1950s they still had public support. They even went and explained what they were doing in factories, and people applauded them. (Does it not occur to him, even now, that people might have applauded out of fear?)

Things changed for the worse in the 1970s. There was less idealism, more simple careerism inside the ministry.

Would that be true of young Lieutenant Wendt?

He doesn’t know. Wendt was always very reticent.

And Major Risse?

“I think Risse meant it honestly, like me.”

There was also a sense of things going wrong in the country. Privately, he and his colleagues identified two main problems, the Car Problem and the Travel Problem. The Car Problem was that there were simply no decent cars available. People could only get a puttering little Trabant or Wartburg, and they had to wait ten years even for that. The Travel Problem was that most people weren’t allowed to travel anywhere, except to a limited number of countries in the Soviet bloc.

Did they ever discuss the Freedom Problem?

“No!” Pause for thought. “Although the Travel Problem was somehow related to it.”

Also, they found they were being called upon to do more and more different jobs. I quote to him a remark
that Colonel Eichner of the HVA had made to me: “We had a state. Then we had the Party to try to make the state work. Then we had the State Security to try to make the Party and state work. And still it didn’t work!”

“That’s about it,” says Fritz.

The men from his department would even have to go and stand guard at soccer matches. It was ridiculous. Their proper job was to look for Western spies, although now they concentrated on what they called “espionage from legal positions”: diplomats, accredited correspondents, visiting academics and so on. His department, which covered all West European countries, ran perhaps thirty Operational Person Controls a year.

Did they actually catch any spies?

Yes, a few. Westerners were usually held in custody for a month or two, then expelled; in a serious case, they might be tried and convicted, but then they were probably expelled too. If they were East Germans, however, they received long prison sentences.

In his time they didn’t have much success with the French or the British, who were their main concern. There was one diplomat they nearly got to work for them: a woman who had a love affair that they found out about by “B measures.” (“B measures” meant bugging, as opposed to “A measures,” which meant wiretapping.)

Of course they tried to use this information to recruit her. She was married, you know.

“You mean, you tried to blackmail her?”

“Yes, every secret service does it.” But this time it didn’t work out. The guy she had an affair with was an Englishman, who later went back to England. Then, sneering slightly, he asks, “That wasn’t you, was it?”