The File (23 page)

The Authority employs more than three thousand full-time staff, from both east and west. Frau Schulz used to organize tours of West Berlin for the All-German Institute: taking people to view the Wall, that kind of thing. Her successor, Frau Duncker, used to work for the East German news agency. So the Authority is itself a microcosm of uniting Germany. While waiting to see Joachim Gauck, I am embraced in a conversation between two secretaries about the recent appearance before a parliamentary tribunal of Joachim Wiegand, the senior Stasi officer who told Werner about his telephone call to me in Oxford. Secretary (east) says indignantly that to hear that horrible little pig talk you’d think the Stasi had been a branch of the Salvation Army. Secretary (west), brightly: “Yes, but I’m told it had great entertainment value.” Two worlds clash across the computer monitors. Pastor Gauck himself, like Werner, struggles to communicate the values and experience of those who have lived in a dictatorship to a society more interested
in the entertainment value. This is Luther in the world of the television talk show. I’m not sure Luther wins.

The historians in the research department are themselves a small part of this history. One or two come from the East, with hard personal experience behind them. Others used to study East Germany at institutes in the West. Several of the leading figures, however, come from the Institute of Contemporary History in Munich, famous for its studies of Nazism. Cultured, liberal men in their thirties or forties, they are scrupulous pathologists of history, trained on the corpses of Gestapo and SS. Theirs, too, is a peculiarly German story: to spend the first half of your life professionally analyzing one German dictatorship, and the second half professionally analyzing the next, while all the time living in a peaceful, prosperous German democracy.

Everyone who works directly with the files has extraordinary knowledge. However sober-minded and responsible the people, the procedures and the whole atmosphere may be, there is still a voyeuristic thrill to knowing such intimate details of other people’s lives. My file ladies, I notice, get a slightly higher color when talking about “Michaela” or “Schuldt” or some other character in my file. Yes, they say, the work can sometimes be
very
interesting. The human interest, you know.

As I have found for myself, this knowledge is still power. Some important part of the power that a Stasi officer had is passed down to an Authority official, and thence to the individual reader, journalist or scholar, or to the employer who has requested the “gaucking” of an employee or job applicant. They in turn must decide
what use to make of it. To hire? To fire? To expose or to spare? Above all, when those two little letters “IM” appear: the black spot. Even for the larger good purpose, even when tightly constrained by law and public scrutiny, there is something sinister about this power.

With Werner, I visit Frau Trümpelmann, a handsome, intelligent woman who prepares individual files for visitors to the reading room in the old ministry complex on the Normannenstrasse. She describes the strange mixture of feelings among her colleagues. They have this sense of secret knowledge and therefore secret power, almost as if they were working for the Stasi. Yet many of them are also reluctant to tell friends or strangers where they work. Meanwhile, I discover that Frau Duncker does not want me to use her real name because a lot of former Stasi officers live in her neighborhood and she fears unpleasantness, if not worse. They are still well organized, she says.

These files change lives. One of Frau Trümpel-mann’s recent readers had been imprisoned for five years under the communist regime, for attempting to escape to the West. Now she found out, by reading her file, that it was the man she was living with who had denounced her to the Stasi. They still lived together. Only that morning he had wished her a good day in the archive. The woman collapsed into Frau Trümpelmann’s arms.

Frau Trümpelmann, who has a Church background, takes immense pains to help people through these shocks. She generally telephones beforehand to prepare them. She carefully explains about the nature of the files before settling them down in the reading room. She is at hand to comfort them as they read. But the strain on her
is great. She has trouble with her eyes and her heart. How to work with poison every day and not yourself be poisoned?

Not all the Authority staff are as sensitive. If one were doing this another time around, one might pay more attention to training staff who work directly with the victims of repression. Third time around, Germany could get its past-beating absolutely right. But then, the point of all this is that there shouldn’t be a third time.

To the end of June 1996, some 1.7 million vetting inquiries from public and private employers had been answered by the Authority. In other words, one in every ten East Germans has been “gaucked.” In the same period, more than one million individual men and women—1,145,005, to be precise—had applied to see their own files. Of these, nearly 420,000 had already read their files and just over 360,000 had learned with relief—or was it disappointment?—that no file on them could be found. The rest were still waiting for their applications to be processed. I can see no remotely scientific way to assess the impact of this extraordinary operation.

People like Vera Wollenberger, the woman from Werner’s parish who found that her husband had been informing on her, have made horrifying discoveries. Only they can say whether it is better that they know. Some whom the Stasi had down as informers have suffered media trials: irresponsible, sensationalist exposures, not pausing for a moment to consider motives or context or the possible unreliability of the sources. And you do have to be very careful. 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? The extraordinary detail of the secret-police files and the obsession with informers have also distracted attention from the Party leaders and functionaries, who were in charge of the whole system.

Ironically, the opening of the files, demanded by former dissidents from East Germany, has reinforced Western neocolonial attitudes toward the East. West Germans, who never themselves had to make the agonizing choices of those who live in a dictatorship, now sit in easy judgment, dismissing East Germany as a country of Stasi spies. In reaction, many ordinary East Germans have closed ranks around figures like Manfred Stolpe, despite or even because of his being down in the files as IM “Secretary.” My dark doppelgänger Lutz Bertram, the blind disc jockey who informed for the Stasi as IM “Romeo,” is now employed by the Party of Democratic Socialism, the direct successor to the ruling communist party. Incredibly, he is their “media representative.”

Certainly this operation has not torn East German society apart in the way that some feared it would. In an agony of despair at being exposed as a Stasi collaborator, one Professor Heinz Brandt reportedly smashed to pieces his unique collection of garden gnomes, including, we are told, the only known specimen of a female gnome. Somehow a perfect image for the end of East Germany. There are cases where people have been rather unfairly dismissed from their jobs after “gaucking” or have signed early-retirement papers in panic
rather than making the legal appeal to which they were entitled. However, even in the public sector many of those who came up “gauck-positive” still retain their jobs. And not a few of those dismissed have subsequently been reinstated, or at least paid compensation, on the order of the labor courts. There have been agonizing confrontations; friendships broken, divorces; the odd brick through a window, doubtless a few blows. Worst of all, a number of suicides probably resulted, at least in part, from a negative gaucking or media exposure, known in German as “outing.”

Against this you have to put the many, many cases where reading the files has brought people relief, enhanced understanding and a more solid footing for their present lives. When there was a public debate in Germany about closing the files again, a flood of new applications poured in to the Gauck Authority, about a thousand each day. Frau Trümpelmann, who has now handled some five hundred cases, says emphatically that in her experience most readers come away with a sense that this was helpful. An old man told her: “At last I can make my will. I thought my son-in-law had been informing on me. And I said to myself, ‘I’m damned if I’ll leave my house to him!’ But now I can.” “At least now I know” is the common refrain. That is also my impression: there is catharsis, and a better foundation for going forward. But this can only be a personal impression.

Two schools of old wisdom face each other across the valley of the files. On one side, there is the old wisdom of the Jewish tradition: To remember is the secret of redemption. And that of George Santayana, so often quoted in relation to Nazism: Those who forget the past
are condemned to repeat it. On the other side, there is the profound insight of the historian Ernest Renan that every nation is a community both of shared memory and of shared forgetting. “Forgetting,” writes Renan, “and I would say even historical error, is an essential factor in the history of a nation.” And there is the everyday human experience that links “forgive and forget” in a single phrase. Historically, the advocates of forgetting are many and impressive. They range from Cicero in 44
B.C.,
demanding just two days after Caesar’s murder that the memory of past discord be consigned to “eternal oblivion,” to Churchill in his Zurich speech two thousand years later, recalling Gladstone’s appeal for “a blessed act of oblivion” between former enemies.

There is real wisdom on both sides, and the two wisdoms cannot easily be combined. The closest I can come to it is a prescription staged through time: Find out—record—reflect—but then move on. That is the least bad formula I know for truth
and
reconciliation: between peoples (Poles and Germans, English and Irish), of a people with itself (South Africans and South Africans, Salvadorans and Salvadorans), between individual men and women, and of each of us with ourselves. Of us with them, us with us, him with her—and me with myself.

It must be right that the Germans, and not just the Germans, should really understand how in the second half of the twentieth century there was again built, on German soil, a totalitarian police state, less brutal than the Third Reich, to be sure, far less damaging to its neighbors, and not genocidal, but more quietly all-pervasive in its domestic control. How this state exploited some of the very same mental habits, social
disciplines and cultural appeals on which Nazism had drawn, and those same fateful “secondary virtues”—duty, loyalty, punctuality, cleanliness, hard work. How all this could go on for so long with so many Germans being so little aware that it was going on. How the German language, that glorious but all-too-powerful instrument, once again lent itself to disguising evil as good. In short, how Germany still walked in the shadow of the Goethe Oak.

S
TEPHEN
V
IZINCZEY’S NOVEL
IN PRAISE OF OLDER WOMEN
has an unforgettable scene where people fleeing from Hungary after the Soviet invasion in 1956 find, in the market square of a small village just across the border in Austria, a line of brand-new silver buses with yellow hand-painted signs proclaiming their destinations: Switzerland, USA, Sweden, England, Australia. “Where to spend the rest of one’s life? A couple with a small baby, who had already boarded the bus for Belgium, got off and rushed to the vehicle marked New Zealand.”

The choices in most lives are not so stark. Yet looking back we can all see moments at which our whole lives might have followed a quite different path:

Each choice in your career. Each girlfriend who might have become your wife. For General Kratsch, the head of Stasi counterintelligence, it was that advertisement in
The Ironmonger
. If only he had become an ironmonger’s
assistant in South Africa! For me there were, I suppose, several buses: one to becoming a diplomat, another to being a conventional academic historian, a third to being a regular foreign correspondent, and, hidden around the corner, that unmarked bus for the officially nonexistent service.

Instead, I chronicled as an eyewitness the gradual emancipation and final liberation of Central Europe from Soviet domination. When the Cold War ended, I set out to use more traditional methods of historical scholarship to study the events through which I had just lived, devouring piles of printed matter and spending long, weary hours in the archives, reading Politburo papers that until yesterday had been top secret. Would these documents, the historian’s traditional sources, lead me closer to Ranke’s “how it really was”? Meanwhile I came across my own Stasi file and started thinking about this other path to exploring the recent past, researching history by researching myself. Here, perhaps, was a third way to approach the great question: What can we know?

For most of this time I thought hardly at all about our own British secret world. I saw from the newspapers that our secret intelligence and security services, MI6 and MI5, seemed to be stepping gingerly out of the shadows. With the end of the Cold War, blanket official secrecy became even more difficult to justify, and these organizations had to make a new case for their continued importance—and budgets. So I read about the first public naming of the heads of both services, acts of Parliament giving them a clear legal basis for the first time, the first-ever public lecture by a director-general of MI5 and the establishment of a parliamentary intelligence and security
committee. I also saw that MI6 had moved into new headquarters. You could hardly miss that large, showy green-glass office block on the south bank of the Thames. Nothing could be less secret. But I don’t think I even knew that MI5 had also moved into new head-quarters on the other bank of the river: an imposing, white, neocolonial building called Thames House, just down the road from the Houses of Parliament. I must have passed it many times without knowing what it housed.