The File by Timothy Garton Ash Page A

his extraordinary decision to go back, but one motive was a sense that “he would be needed there” more than in the West.
    He was certainly needed there. As a parish priest he offered pastoral care in a society that needed it at least as much as any other, despite the state’s ideological claim to provide total welfare from cradle to grave. Later, as dean of Pankow, he was increasingly called to look after those who sought out the church as a space of freedom where you could speak a few truths, rather than as a place of Faith in revealed Truth.
    Over coffee or a glass of wine, Werner would tell me, in his rich, slightly old-fashioned German, about hisefforts to negotiate with officials of the party-state. Steeped in the tradition of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the anti-Nazi Confessing Church during the Third Reich, he still believed that a dialogue with the communists could bear fruit. Yet he also told me about the repression and the costs that his own family bore. Like many clergymen’s children, his eldest son, Joachim, was not even allowed a normal secondary education.
    I treasured these conversations and the warm, tranquil atmosphere of the old vicarage. Occasionally we would go out together for a meal or a lecture, or to drive through the Brandenburg countryside, with Fontane’s
Travels around the Mark Brandenburg
as our guidebook. So little had changed in a hundred years!
    Several of my meetings with Werner are described in observation reports: some now in my file, some in his, some in both. The shortest of these is on October 17, 1979, when a Stasi shadow picked me up at Friedrichstrasse at 18.35 but lost me by 18.45. According to my diary, I was off to a reading by the communist writer Stephan Hermlin.
    For February 27, 1980, they record a visit paid by “Romeo,” “Beech-tree” and his son to the City Library: “17.40 hours ‘Beech-tree’ parked his Wartburg in front of the building. The three persons then entered the City Library. They checked their coats into the cloakroom and proceeded to the lecture room on the second floor. Here they listened to a lecture on Prussian history and Prussiandom.” Some might say that this report was itself another small page in the history of Prussiandom, although Werner, with his romantic attachment to the Prussian heritage, is still reluctant to accept this.
    In Werner’s own file I find the same report but also, carefully preserved in a buff envelope, some black-and-white photographs of us as we were entering the City Library—presumably taken with a concealed camera. There is Werner, with his large frame and broad, strong features. He was forty then, the age I am now. There is young Joachim, a little figure with curly side-locks, looking uncannily like one of the small Jewish boys in Roman Vishniac’s haunting photographs of the vanished world of East European Jewry before 1939. Joachim was twelve years old then, the age my eldest son is now. And there am I, aged twenty-four, fresh-faced, still clean-shaven, hair short and parted almost in the center, tweed jacket, with a silk handkerchief in the top pocket, cord trousers and doubtless those Oxford shoes.
    My diary records the previous thirty-six hours in the life of this earlier self, this me/not me. A Polish lesson in the morning. Then a call at the Albanian embassy: “Albanian raki and conversation,” the diary says cryptically. Drop in to the British embassy to collect my mail, which was delivered there, as for several British people living in East Germany, because it seemed likely to be quicker and safer. A few hours’ reading. Dinner at Stockinger, a restaurant on the Schönhauser Allee, with Ursula von Kardorff, a hugely spirited survivor of wartime Berlin who was working on a new guidebook to the city. Turning aside from the diary, I take the Kardorff guidebook down from my bookshelf and read
“Stockinger
… typical GDR-style rusticity with pretentious cuisine.”
    Later in the evening, across to West