Timothy Garton Ash: The File. A Personal History. NY: Vintage, 1997. No index.
Timothy Garton Ash hit pay-dirt when he went looking for his Stasi file in East Berlin. After first getting confirmation that it did indeed exist, he prepared to read it by first researching his own past as though it were a stranger’s. He realized from the start it would be a mistake to rely on memory alone once he started to comb through his old diary and personal notes, searching for reflections on the momentous events of the late 1970s and early 1980s: negotiations with the USSR over NATO, SALT II, etc. – and found nothing. He is a bit hard on himself for this. After all, back then he was merely a student at Oxford, thinking about working on a degree in history. (Topic: Berlin under the Nazis; never finished.) What deep geopolitical insights could he possibly have had? He wrote about what he knew, what concerned him at that time and place, and was right to do so.
Once he had a chance to sit down and examine the dossier itself, one of the first things he discovered is that while the Stasi was pervasive, almost omnipresent, it was far from omniscient. They had trouble figuring out foreign accents and names, which they sometimes misspelled to comical effect. They could be careless about dates and attribution (who said what). “Some of the small details are wrong. The interpretation is paranoid. Yet overall, the Stasi lives up to its reputation for being everywhere and watching everyone.” (pg. 32)
Wrestling with Anonymity
By consulting his file, Garton Ash was able to identify five Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter (IMs), members of the vast network of unofficial collaborators who were not directly employed by the Stasi but supplied them with vital information. One of the first questions he had to resolve was whether or not he would protect their anonymity. He argues that the issue is not as black and white as it might seem. First off, he makes the valid point that some people may have been listed as IMs even though they had never actually signed up and genuinely did not know that they were considered as such. The secret police do make mistakes, even the British: In MI5’s file on him, Garton Ash discovers he is said to have “assisted” them when in fact – in his own mind, at least – he had done no such thing.
When it comes to the Stasi, there was room for ambiguity. “A friend tells the story of someone who came to him, sometime in the 1980s, and said, ‘Look, they’ve asked me to inform on you and I can’t get out of it, but tell me what I can say.’ Together they worked out what he should report. But if my friend had died and the reports were found, who would ever believe the informer when he gave this explanation?” (pg. 224) Fair enough, though it is highly unlikely that such cases were common – if for no other reason than the person who had been asked to inform was putting himself completely at the mercy of the person he was supposed to inform on.
In any event, he decides against revealing some names. He does identify Litzi Friedmann, born Alice Kohlmann, Kim Philby’s first wife. After the war, “Red Lizzi,” as she was known, lived in East Berlin, where she married someone here called “Dr. Georg.” The reader doesn’t have to go to the internet, much less consult any secret files, to conclude that this is one-time Reuters managing editor Georg Honigmann, who later went on to have a long and successful career in the DDR. More on him and Litzi later.
The victims, of course, appear under their full names. One of them was the distinguished literary scholar Eberhard Haufe, who back in 1958 was prevented from earning his doctorate at the University of Leipzig for political reasons. He refused to emigrate, yet somehow managed to continue working as a freelance scholar and editor, finally getting his degree in 1964 with a dissertation on a safe topic: Ancient Mythology in Textbooks of the Hamburg Baroque Opera. He still could not find a professorship.
When Garton Ash visited in 1980, Haufe spent hours talking with him “about the Stasi’s opening letters and bugging telephone conversations, and about his own long struggles with the censors….” (pg. 102) As a parting gift, Haufe presented him with a signed copy of his edition of a neglected 19th century aphorist and essayist, Carl Gustav Jochmann. Though Haufe would never have regarded himself as a hero, he was one of the brave few who managed to find his own way in the DDR without betraying his ideals – or his colleagues, friends and family.
The Case of “Michaela”
“A delightful and rather moving visit, then,” comments Garton Ash. “But that is not how it appears in the Stasi report from ‘Michaela.’ Here I appear as a rude and unwelcome guest.” “Michaela” is the cover name of the IM who filed a report on this visit. The more one reads, the more pissed off one becomes with IMs like her, who were rewarded with travel privileges that decent people who refused to cooperate could never enjoy. True, it was the state that was ultimately responsible for first creating an artificial scarcity (hard-to-get exit visas for travel to non-socialist countries), then rewarding those who collaborated by granting them access to such items. The fact that she was an art historian also tends to exculpate her to some extent, as it was vital for her to travel and examine the paintings with her own eyes. And the only way she could get an exit visa was to inform.
It may be hard to see why the distinctly unpleasant “Michaela” (he calls her a “hand-me-down Marlene,” while Frau Haufe calls her “vulgar and selfish”) should enjoy the cloak of anonymity. But in a “Note on Names” at the beginning of the book, Garton Ash asks for restraint if “anyone might be tempted to expose the real people behind these names – which in several cases would not be difficult…” That’s the author’s decision, which should be respected. In any event, he has indeed provided sufficient detail to make her easily identifiable: She was Georg Honigmann’s last wife and director of the Weimar Art Galleries. Provided they know German, interested readers can identify her with the simplest of searches, though few will recognize her name once they find it.
The author spends a paragraph mocking her for some letters he found in her file, complaints about the service at Weimar’s famous Hotel Elephant. But here I feel compelled to defend “Michaela,” at least to some extent. As Garton Ash well knows, even top-flight restaurants behind the Iron Curtain could be abysmal. It is true that Westerners who write three-page carping letters are often spoiled. In the East, however, such letters to the Stasi were almost the only way to put pressure on anyone to improve service, which was often embarrassingly bad. Kim Philby himself complained about the awful food, disappearing waiters, and high prices when he hosted Graham Greene at a famous Georgian restaurant in Moscow. Garton Ash here lets himself be blinded a bit because he is ill-disposed towards this particular IM.
That incident aside, while he seems inclined to make excuses for others, he is legitimately indignant when it comes to “Michaela’s” betrayal. The fact that she was once caught smuggling currency out of the DDR on a trip to Hungary, but managed to avoid criminal charges, perhaps does not get enough emphasis in explaining her subsequent eagerness to cooperate. For she does appear to have been an enthusiastic tattle-tale, one who handed in page after page denouncing “friends” and subordinates and anyone else careless enough to criticize the regime in her presence.
Even relatives, once they crossed the line, were fair game. It comes as little surprise to learn that when they eventually had a chance to read their own files and discovered her betrayal, they turned on her and severed all ties. This is true of her daughter-in-law, the author Barbara Honigmann, who eventually emigrated to Vienna, followed by her (Honigmann’s) mother Litzi Friedmann; the one-time communist and wife of Kim Philby had by the end of her life become disillusioned and resolutely apolitical. (For more, see Update, October 2016, below.)
“Michaela’s” reports naturally led to a Stasi investigation of Haufe and his family, which could have had serious consequences. Luckily, nothing came of this, and in 1992, after the collapse of the DDR, Haufe was completely rehabilitated and awarded an honorary degree. Nor could she do Garton Ash any significant harm, as he was not a DDR citizen. While it is quite likely that she hurt others, German privacy laws prevented him from finding out for sure. And he can only guess as to the psychological harm she inflicted on herself by all the snitching she did.
The point, as always, is not how bad this particular IM was, or how evil the East Germans were – the point is that when average people are placed in a situation where they are totally without rights, a good number of them will become malleable, able to justify acts such as denouncing acquaintances or betraying longtime friends and even close family members. Under the right circumstances, few are immune to such pressures. That goes for the English and Americans as well as the Germans, both Eastern and Western. We may all like to imagine ourselves as heroes, but the historical record shows otherwise. Intelligence, culture, and status are no guarantees against base betrayal, as long as it seems blessed by the authority of the state – and is rewarded by significant, tangible benefits.
The Reluctant Prosecutor
Chumley: Good heavens, man! Haven’t you got any righteous indignation?!
Elwood: Oh, Doctor, I – I – (stammers) Years ago, my mother used to say to me … ‘In this world, Elwood, you must be oh, so smart or oh, so pleasant.’ Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant. And you may quote me.
– Harvey, by Mary Chase
When it comes to righteous indignation, Garton Ash is with Elwood. This is especially so with another of the IMs he visits, a woman he identifies not by her Stasi alias but rather as “Frau R.” The stage seems set for a confrontation between the spy and the victim, but in this case our Englishman proves too polite, too much of a gentleman to engage in anything so ill-mannered. He knows the DDR and the difficulty of living there too well to work up much moral outrage. Like Elwood, he would rather be pleasant.
The result is that this and other scenes with climactic potential mostly fall flat. “It’s all not so simple,” she tells him. (pg. 143) That could almost be the motto for this book. “I now almost wish I had never confronted her. By what right, for what good purpose, did I deny an old lady, who had suffered so much, the grace of selective forgetting?” (pg. 144) He refuses even to pretend to give her and others like her a hard time, just to see how they react.
If people like Frau R. fear exposure now – if not at the hands of Garton Ash, for he is both too fastidious and too forgiving, then through someone else – I’m sorry but this is something that was part of the bargain they made when they first agreed to cooperate with the Stasi, for whatever reason, good or bad. What have they done to earn the right to expect to be left in peace? And after all, he’s not subjecting them to interrogation. He’s merely asking them if they will agree to meet him and answer his questions, which may well prove uncomfortable. If they refuse, he will leave them alone.
Dismayed though he is by what he uncovers during his investigations, he prefers working “like a detective” to thinking like a prosecutor. (pg. 171) His flaw as a would-be interrogator is, he only wants to play the good cop. Confronting these two-faced snitches with the truth, he rationalizes, might antagonize them.
While it speaks for him that he does not relish the power – at least moral – that the file gives him over collaborators, it seems to me he misunderstands his role. He tells Frau R. he has no wish to be her “judge” (pg. 143), yet whether he likes it or not, essentially he is sitting in judgment on her and the others, and the evidence of their complicity is indisputable. Does the fact that Frau R. was herself persecuted – first by the Nazis, then by the communists – excuse her collaboration? Well, even she does not claim she filed reports with the Stasi as a result of her previous mistreatment.
He hesitates to condemn her and the others because he wonders if he would have acted any differently. This strikes me as wrong-headed – we do not demand of a judge that he be beyond temptation. It suffices that he has not actually given in to it. Garton Ash is of course not a judge, but most readers nonetheless expect him to render some kind of verdict, not find excuses for those who pretended to befriend him while actually observing and writing up detailed summaries that landed in the state security files.
A professional worrier, he is never content to see a problem merely from two sides. He seems happiest when he can show that things are difficult, or not as clear as they might seem. His quotation from Nietzsche is very a propos: ” ‘I did that,’ says my memory. ‘I can’t have done that,’ says my pride and remains adamant. In the end – memory gives way.” (pg. 42f) Perhaps he is simply too fair-minded to muster much genuine outrage.
Whatever the reason, he realizes the danger of this himself: “Too much moral refinement can be crippling.” (pg. 236) Still, thinking of the various people who spied on him, he finds “less malice than human weakness… less dishonesty than our almost infinite capacity for self-deception.” (pg. 252) He seizes almost gleefully on the exculpatory circumstance that it was none other than famed West German dramatist Rolf Hochhuth who initially warned Frau R. that Garton Ash was probably a British spy.
His natural instinct is to forgive, and he is easily moved by tears and tales of hard luck. He believes the sob stories she and other IMs tell because there is little counterweight, little testimony from those they harmed. Apart from Haufe and a few others, Garton Ash himself is almost the only victim he can identify, and he was not really damaged by their accounts. The worst thing that happened to him was, he wasn’t granted entry visas for a time.
Perhaps the main reason he is so quick to forgive, if not forget, is that he is acutely aware that while he spent some months in East Berlin doing research on his thesis, he never faced the dismal prospect of living indefinitely under DDR conditions, so he cannot honestly say if he would have acted much differently. This does not exactly give him a guilty conscience, but it does put a brake on any impulse to righteousness.
The best that can be said is that his restraint has led him to write a wise, humane book that, if it errs, errs on the side of too much readiness to absolve. Should I ever be put on trial, I can only hope he is my judge.
Cat and Mouse
The author is well aware that he was not in any serious sense a victim. Until the Poles and East Germans denied him a visa (a result of the articles he published, not their surveillance of him), all they did was keep tabs on his comings and goings.
Rather naively, he still seems to take it as given that back when he was a student, his efforts at subterfuge were successful. These included filing a story under the clever cover name of “Mark Brandenburg.” His measures to avoid detection – “I crept through the woods to evade the police” (pg. 209) – were no doubt sincere, but would hardly have thrown anyone professional off the scent. Stasi officers will read such passages with a smile, or perhaps a smirk. When he travelled through Schönefeld airport, they surreptitiously opened his checked luggage and photographed his papers. Probably his bad handwriting – which he on occasion deliberately exaggerated – was his most effective security measure.
In the end it was not simply paranoia on the Stasi’s part to regard him with suspicion – as already noted, he had explored joining the SIS in the late 70’s, then decided against it before heading to Berlin to gather material for his dissertation. Many years later, when he was invited to collaborate (he does not at first make clear whether by MI5 or MI6), he politely declined over tea at a London hotel. Because he takes his scruples seriously, I believe him. I doubt the Stasi did.
The Professionals
If Garton Ash is forgiving of the collaborators, when it comes to the Stasi officers themselves, the ones who actually ran the IMs, things are somewhat different. First off, he decides that they should not go unnamed, in part after listening to advice from East German friends who had themselves been the victims of state security. As it turned out, though, none of the officers he talked with requested anonymity. Only one, the youngest, refused to meet with him at all, as he still had a career ahead of him. In the end, he succeeded in getting the other men who worked his case to open up, at least for a bit – much to the chagrin of their wives, it must be said, who were far less willing to chat about the old days with the former foe, far more willing to maintain their ingrained habit of watchful suspicion.
Some former officers denied all responsibility, and only grudgingly admitted what could not be avoided. He calls this the “salami tactics of denial,” adding: “Everyone I talk to has someone else to blame.” (pg. 197) This is also known as the SOD defense: “Some Other Dude” did it.
In other cases, though, far from feeling morally superior, Garton Ash positively admires these professionals who acted out of a sense of duty rather than opportunism. When he thinks back to his conversation with one of those who worked on his case, he concludes: “Klaus Risse is a good man.” (pg. 199) No such sentiment is expressed about any of the IMs.
A few of the older ones, like Kurt Zeiseweis, were more than happy to share their views, which remain completely unreconstructed. They consider themselves skilled experts who were committed to a just cause, and retain their suspicion of Westerners in general, whose talk of morality is just a façade. For them, anyone who believes in “democracy” is a fool; probably they continue to suspect Garton Ash is a foreign agent even now.
The 68ers
The experience of life first-hand in the DDR does not make the author more favorably disposed to the old Federal Republic. I share his attitude towards many members of the ’68 generation he encountered in West Berlin, one I would characterize as mild contempt. He writes about the students who chose to live there so as to avoid service in the Bundeswehr: “For them, the Wall, which encircled West Berlin, seemed to be nothing but a huge mirror in which they could contemplate themselves and their own ‘relationships.’ ” (pg. 41) Born in 1955, he arrived too late to be a 68er himself. And he, like many visitors from the UK, the US, France, and certainly Turkey, had greater curiosity about and personal interest in East Berlin than did the students from Heidelberg and Munich who flocked to West Berlin.
Whenever I crossed the border from West to East and back, I could not help but notice that life seemed more real in the DDR, the problems there more immediate. People behind the wall did not blather on about relationship issues. When I mentioned in Prenzlauer Berg that many of my West Berlin friends and acquaintances – all with successful careers – were regularly seeing psychiatrists, people were genuinely amazed. They thought my circle must be made up of the mentally unstable. To explain this strange imbalance, I developed the hypothesis that human beings have some innate need for problems and obstacles to overcome. In the East, these were provided in abundance by the state. In the West, the state largely abdicated this role, so people had to nurture their own difficulties themselves, which they found by navel-gazing.
Nor is the author overly enamored of the amorality displayed by the West German media (particularly Der Spiegel). When he first tried to sell them his story about repression behind the Iron Curtain, their unenthusiastic response was: “Blood must flow properly, so we have a good cover story…” (pg. 152) Or, more colloquially, “If it bleeds, it leads.”
Still, for an author not lacking in self-awareness, there is one connection he fails to make. When Garton Ash dithers over precisely how guilty the IMs were, then questions his own morality, culminating in the discovery of “disconcerting affinities” between his work as a journalist and the work a spy does for any government, he comes close to sounding just like those he claims to despise most of all – the West German 68ers. For page after page he indulges in hand-wringing over how compromised he himself may be. What are these moral dilemmas he conjures up, himself in the center, but a variant of their navel-gazing?
Personal Reflections
I read and liked this book when I first came across it some fifteen years ago. Re-reading it now, it has only gotten better. To start with, it reawakens old memories, some of them sensory. “I smell again that peculiar East Berlin smell,” he writes. (pg. 10) It’s a smell that comes back to me now whenever I ride a train in Russia, where the fuel for brewing tea is still provided by burning coal briquettes. I too thought of life behind the wall as one of “enforced simplicity.” (pg. 70) I too comforted myself in the late ’70s and early ’80s by listening to cassettes of Fischer-Dieskau singing Schubert.
It may be that I suffer from the condition he calls “file envy,” for in the end I was not as lucky – or perhaps as unlucky – as Garton Ash. It was somewhat disappointing to discover that the Stasi never considered me worthy of observation, even though I too had crossed the border at Checkpoint Charlie and – more often – Friedrichstrasse many an evening between midnight and 1:00 a.m. My visits to the Stasi headquarters in the Normannenstrasse soon after the wall came down, like my follow-up inquiries, turned up nothing related to me personally. At SED party headquarters, I did come away with some empty Leitz binders that, according to the handwritten notes on the spine, had once held honors and medals presented to Wilhelm Pieck, first president of the DDR. These binders I discovered in a dumpster out on the curb, where they had been unceremoniously tossed. I rescued them and used them to hold my own research. And around that same time I too stooped to pick up a painted fragment of the wall that was being chipped away.
Back when the city was still divided, I certainly overlapped with the author, both in terms of chronology and the haunts we shared in East Berlin. I have no recollection of ever seeing him, but it would be odd if our paths had not crossed, at least fleetingly, as every locale he mentions in the opening pages is quite familiar, from Ganymed Restaurant to the Berliner Ensemble on Brechtplatz (the sheer athleticism of Ekkehard Schall as Arturo Ui remains unforgettable), to the Operncafé.
By chance, it was near that café that in the last days of the DDR I witnessed the final changing of the guard at the memorial to the Unknown Soldier. My thoughts were just turning to Heinrich Böll’s semi-serious proposal to erect a statue to the Unknown Deserter when I was swiftly brought back to reality – my companion, a true DDR patriot, was sitting on the sidewalk, head in hands, feet in the gutter, when she burst into tears because her state, the German Democratic Republic, had just come to an end. The DJ at the Operncafé across the street didn’t have the decency to let this moment pass with some dignity – no, the guy gleefully cranked up the volume of some wretched Europop tune to drown out one of the last officially sanctioned performances ever of the DDR national hymn. While personally I felt no sorrow at the passing of this state, it’s worth remembering that there were decent, honest people who were its true patriots, for whom this moment was bitter.
Garton Ash also mentions the shirt worn by all members of the FDJ (Free German Youth). Purely by chance, I was wearing a shirt of almost exactly the same dark blue hue when I crossed over to East Berlin some 40 years ago (1976, if I am not mistaken), to witness the May Day parade. Naturally my shirt had no FDJ rising-sun insignia on it, so when after the parade I went for lunch to the Rathauskeller on Alexanderplatz and was shown to what was literally the last spot available, the East Berliners I was seated with thought I must have torn it off as a courageous act of dissent. Of course, I had nothing of the sort in mind, it was just a favorite shirt, and the circumstance that it was virtually identical in color was sheer coincidence. But wearing that shirt, and being seated that day at that table, changed my life in ways that would take too long to detail here. (For more, see my review of Stefan Heym, 5 Days in June, elsewhere at this site.)
Garton Ash and I not only worked in some of the same archives, we were both questioned and subjected to searches while crossing the border. In his case, the police noticed his diary and asked him about its contents. Now if I had happened to meet him in those days, I know exactly what I should have said: “You fool! If you must keep a diary, leave it in the West, or even in the East, but don’t take it with you across the border. How could you think it would not be found and read?”
I speak from experience. While I didn’t have a diary, once I naively attempted to carry a copy of Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy with me through the Friedrichstrasse checkpoint. Usually I passed through without incident, but on this occasion I recall being led away to a small, bare room lit with a single bulb, just like something you see in the movies. There I was subjected to an examination by an officer who flipped through a few pages of the book and asked, “Do you know who Nietzsche was?” Obviously I could have answered with some harmless blah-blah to the effect that he was a 19th century German philosopher, but that would not have cut it; as I well knew, the only acceptable answer in this exam was, “He was a forerunner of Fascism.” Figuring I could not regurgitate this response with any credibility, I attempted to evade the question by saying I only had the volume with me because I had to read it for homework; as he could see, I had checked it out of a West German university library.
This tactic worked, as he fingered the library slip and went on to ask me which authors I preferred. Here I was able to provide an answer that was both truthful and to his satisfaction: “Lessing and Schiller.” With that, he said he would allow me to cross into East Berlin but would hold back the volume, which I could pick up when I returned to the West. And that is pretty much what happened. I retrieved the book on my exit, hastily stuffed it into my pants and turned around to cross right back to the East again. After going through Friedrichstrasse again, this time without being carefully checked, I was soon able to pass it around for my East Berlin friends to examine. Never having held a book by this author before, they handled it gingerly, flipped through a few pages and finally asked, “Do you know who Nietzsche was?” The volume is now safely back on the shelf of the university library in Göttingen.
If Garton Ash had successful techniques for smuggling diaries or money or documents, he doesn’t reveal them. Just as I shall not reveal mine, outdated though they may be. The books I remember bringing across, aside from Nietzsche for 24 hours, were Orwell’s Animal Farm and Rudolf Bahro’s Die Alternative, its cover removed for ease of concealment. It may be that they are sitting on someone’s bookshelf in the East even today, the adventure of how they got there perhaps unknown, perhaps forgotten.
Unfortunately The File is not illustrated. The author describes a covert picture of him taken by the Stasi, which is reproduced on the cover in the Vintage paperback edition (1998).
Oddly enough, the German cover (published by Hanser) shows a much clearer picture taken perhaps a second later. There you see Garton Ash in the middle. The title is Die Akte “Romeo” – the Stasi’s name for him was “Romeo,” presumably because of the car he drove, an Alpha Romeo.
Update
More on Litzi Friedmann can be found in Phillip Knightley: Philby K.G.B. Masterspy (2003): “Today, even as a grandmother of seventy-eight she retains her youthful attractions – sharp intelligence, a love of life, and a sparkling vivaciousness…. Her daughter had married a German working in East Berlin at the Academy of Science [Peter Honigmann] and he had later moved to Strasbourg to do research work on the explorer-scientist Friedrich Humboldt [better known as Alexander von Humboldt]. Litzi missed her daughter and her grandchildren and moved to Austria in 1984 to be closer to her family. But she also told friends that she had become frustrated with the slowness of reform in East Germany and decided to leave. As she told me, ‘I had a permit to visit Austria for one week and simply did not return.’ ” (pg. 244]
See also my review of Garton Ash’s The Magic Lantern elsewhere on this site.
© Hamilton Beck
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