The File by Timothy Garton Ash Page B

Berlin, “over Charlie.” First to the Paris Bar, then off to the Kurfürstendamm flat of a lady called Ingrid Schick and “red wineand rowdy argument from about 10 p.m. to 5.15 a.m.” From there, straight to an early breakfast at Mau Mau, an all-night café. Back across the frontier to East Berlin, getting home shortly before 7:00 A.M., “meeting on the stairs a frontier guard, just off to do his day’s work.” Two hours’ sleep. Some work in the library. A meeting with Dr. Demps, the “adviser” assigned me by the university. Then off with Werner and Joachim to that lecture on Prussia and Prussiandom. Afterward we had dinner at Stockinger again. And so to bed.
    Werner would become a dear friend. When my first child was born some years later, Werner became his godfather: Uncle Werner, behind the Wall. We have worked together on the research for this book. Shortly after unification, he met Colonel Wiegand, the senior Stasi officer responsible for the churches. Wiegand began the conversation by telling him that they had been especially interested to listen to a telephone call that Werner had made to me in Oxford from a friend’s flat in West Berlin, on one of the rare occasions when he had been allowed out. Werner had assumed that it was safe to telephone from the West, but apparently the Stasi could get a fix on any number in West Berlin. For calls between West Berlin and West Germany it had a sophisticated listening station located, suitably enough, on the Brocken mountain, scene of the fabled witches’ sabbath, or Walpurgis Night. Their equipment could be programmed to record any conversation in which a particular word or name was mentioned.
    By August 1980 I had collected enough material to start writing. After saying farewell to Andrea, I took thetrain to Italy, where I began work on the book while staying with my friends Sally and Graham Greene. I was deeply frustrated by the Western accounts of East Germany that appeared at this time, often produced by sixty-eighters revolting against what they saw as the crude anti-communism of the older generation. The word “Stasi”—or “State Security Service” or “secret police”—did not appear at all in the twenty-page index to the best general book about East Germany then published in Britain. Instead, Jonathan Steele’s
Socialism with a German Face: The State That Came in from the Cold
concluded that East Germany’s “overall social and economic system is a presentable model of the kind of authoritarian welfare states which Eastern European nations have now become.” But presentable to whom? Not, I found, to most of the East Germans I met. I had no partisan agenda: of Right against Left. My objection to these descriptions was not that they were Left but that they were wrong—inaccurate, partial, patronizing, deaf to the plain truths that the people who actually lived there could tell you. I wanted to describe it as it really was.
    This description included the Stasi. “Suspicion is everywhere,” I wrote. “It strikes in the bar, it lurks in the telephone, it travels with you in the train. Wherever two or three are gathered together, there suspicion will be.” I quoted Western estimates that there were at least one hundred thousand informers working for the secret police. I was particularly interested in the way the communist regime drew upon older German traditions and habits of obedience.
    After I had been writing for just a few days, the BBC World Service reported that an occupation strike hadbegun at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk. Italian newspapers printed grainy photographs of a mustachioed worker called Lech Walesa. I knew at once that I simply had to be there. I cut short my holiday and took the train back to Berlin. Sitting in the station buffet at Munich, I read a report in
Le Monde
of how the strikers had refused the government’s offer of a special supermarket instead of the monument they demanded to commemorate the workers killed in the