The File by Timothy Garton Ash

Mark Wood, the Reuters correspondent. A loop of old-fashioned yellowing telex tape hung from a nail on the wall of the gloomy Reuters office on the Schönhauser Allee. It was an obituary of Hitler’s deputy Rudolf Hess, then the only Nazi prisoner of the wartime allies remaining in the Spandau fortress. Mark’s predecessors in this office had included the thriller writer Frederick Forsyth, who had written a famous Reuters news story. On his way back to the office, late one night in April 1964, he had seen Russian tanks rolling into the city center. He telexed to London a dramatic, urgent story—an “eight bells snap,” which, on those old-fashioned telex machines, meant that a bell actually did ring eight times at the other end—and then went out to investigate. Only when news of the impending third world war had been flashed around the world did he realize that these were just preparations for the regular May 1 parade. He was soon withdrawn from the Berlin office.
    One snowy day in January, Mark and I drove out to look at the walled and closely guarded settlement at Wandlitz, where the top Party leadership lived in villas set among special shops and extensive gardens. The young guard at the gate noted down our passport details.When, feigning innocence, we asked him what this compound was, he nervously replied, “It’s nothing.” The senior officer then informed us that it was “a military object.”
    In the file, I find a report from the head of Main Department PS (Personal Security, responsible for the security of the leadership) to the head of department XX/4. Describing the Party leaders’ self-made ghetto as “the residential object of the leading representatives,” it records that we appeared at 17.55 hours in a dark green Alfasud (dark blue, actually), asked the way to a restaurant in Wandlitz and at 18.15 hours were “banished from the object.” It also notes, unsurprisingly, that Mark was being covered by II/13 (journalists), while I was still with XX/4 (churches), in connection with the Reverend Beech-tree.
    As we sat up at 1:00 A.M., drinking in the flat next to Mark’s office, the telephone rang. Heavy breathing, then the line went dead. Half an hour later the phone rang again and a voice said, “I see you have a guest.” We guessed they were bored, or simply wanted us to go to bed. Knowing the place to be bugged, we took pleasure in loudly deploring the latest article by “Edward Marston,” my pseudonym in
The Spectator
. “Did you see Eddie Marston’s latest piece, Tim?” “Yes, terrible, wasn’t it? He must have been drunk again.” Now I ask Frau Schulz to inquire if there is a file on this enemy of the people, but alas, the central card index has no entry under Marston, Edward.
    Mark, who today is editor in chief of Reuters, was told after unification that the next-door flat had been a Stasi surveillance center, with wires from a control panelleading to a number of bugs planted in the wall of the Reuters flat, including several in the bedroom. They also had a visual observation post across the street. In technical coverage, the Stasi consistently outdid all but the wildest Western fantasies.
    My favorite place of all, and a refuge from the general grayness and conformity, was Werner Krätschell’s vicarage. A large man with a broad, strong-boned, truly Lutheran face and a deep, musical voice, Werner came from a long line of Prussian soldiers and priests. When the Wall went up, in August 1961, he was a twenty-one-year-old theology student and, illegally, on holiday in Sweden. After long discussions with his brother, he finally decided to return to the East. A group of West Berlin students, who were frantically forging identity papers for people to get out of East Germany, now rather bemusedly helped Werner to forge papers so he could get back in without being detected, since officially he was still there. Today, he says that he can only half disentangle the real mixture of motives for