A Socialist Defector, page 14
In 1971, at the invitation of Berlin neighbors working in Moscow who offered us a temporarily empty apartment, we four took the long, pleasant train trip in our own private compartment from Berlin to Moscow, with no meals offered but all the free tea we wanted. We spent two weeks there, enjoying especially the delicious pelmeni, ice cream and dairy and bakery goods, the speedboat trip down the Moscow River, and the preferential treatment given children, as in the Moscow subway, where adults stood up to give children a seat. In Berlin, the opposite is expected.
In 1988, Renate and I had a two-week vacation at the Black Sea near Sochi. We grew accustomed to the pebble beach, liked the good food (but not very friendly service—perhaps for guests from Germany) and rejoiced at the far friendlier dolphins jumping up and down to watch us swimming. We could not fail to notice that while neon lights celebrated Gorbachev’s “perestroika” reconstruction plan, it had evidently not had much effect. Shops and the downtown department store were miserably understocked. Without marked improvement, this could not last much longer, I concluded. On my last visit, in 2016, I found our Cassandra predictions confirmed in a now-capitalist Moscow. I noted some of the results: a cluster of modern skyscraper business buildings, gold-domed churches now seemingly everywhere, and banks and retail shops like never before, from fast-food to IKEA. But there too, luckily, the Kremlin, always impressive, and the beautiful Basilius Cathedral and Novodevichy Convent, the latter with its amazing cemetery, crowded with graves of famous people, recent or long gone. And, a still vital remaining reminder of the old days, a handsome children’s center for sports and hobbies, founded by Soviet Young Pioneers.
Behind the Kremlin were simple monuments to the major battles of 1941 to 1945, Stalingrad, Kursk, Leningrad, the Dnepr River crossing, Berlin—all so deeply inscribed in my memory and heart from my high school days that I could not restrain some tears. Also poignant for me were urns in the Kremlin wall with ashes of Harvard man John Reed, famous chronicler of the Russian Revolution, of Charles Ruthenberg, also a founder of the U.S. Communist Party in 1919, and of “Big Bill” Haywood, the leader of the IWW “Wobblies” and many tough strikes in the early twentieth century, lesser-known heroes of my homeland’s history!
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY had witnessed a giant experiment, a form of socialism with world-changing influence. Beginning in 1917, it spread new hope, and then again, in 1945, after fascism was defeated and so many in Asia and Africa sought independence. The USSR made enormous advances in industrializing, in achieving literacy, health care, and other benefits for many millions, Much of it went down the drain after 1990. Many saw this as democratic liberation; there were indeed new freedoms, recompenses, and improvements. But some like me saw the years 1989–94 as a reversion to the past, a step backwards. I assign much of the blame, along with many other factors, to the rule of Stalin, his methods, his minions and his legacy, some of which can probably be traced to age-old Russian traditions of autocracy and cruelty plus the effects of a terrible civil war and devastating invasions. I see his cruel reign as a distortion, and not inevitable. Another slice of responsibility can be attributed to heavy-handed Party boss Leonid Brezhnev (1964–82); some prefer to blame Khrushchev (1954–64) or Gorbachev (1985–91), or, often enough, the whole top-heavy system. No matter how blame is apportioned—and by no means only from the East—influences and pressures from the Kremlin closely affected GDR development, very positively in some ways, but increasingly negatively with every year.
DURING MY FIRST visit to my United States homeland in 1994 I was asked: “How could you ever live with those Russians in East Germany?” I had to smile; they certainly had many troops stationed here, but aside from a few garrison towns they were hardly visible, with almost no contact with the civilian population, no doubt to avoid problems, also of a sexual nature, negative or positive, and envy, for the standard of living averaged well above that in the USSR. Almost the only place to see Soviet soldiers in Berlin was either at the zoo (the Tierpark), where there were few linguistic difficulties, or on memorial ceremonies at the impressive monuments to those who had died. A Russian civilian from the embassy staff once kindly drove me home from some gathering; on the way he pointed to a building near the river: “That’s where the Nazis killed my best friend—in the last week of the war!”
Two Russian families, with trade organizations in Berlin, lived in our building. The eight-year-old son of one of them became so fluent in Berlin German by playing with the other kids that he corrected his embarrassed Russian teacher’s grammar. The other couple, childless, sometimes invited all the kids in the house to tea and cookies and once presented them with the husband’s weekend fish catch. A neighbor got a shock one evening when she found one (a fish), alive, in the bathtub, also full of wet bread (as fodder!). But these people were civilians; Red Army uniforms were seldom seen away from the zoo. At the Leipzig Fair I was an interpreter for a businessman from Iceland. “I’ve never seen a Russian,” he said. “Are there any here? Can you point one out?” By chance we did come upon just one, a very short young lieutenant. The Icelander stared at him for a moment with obvious surprise and then asked: “Tell me, are all Russians so short?”
34—Stasi
Aside from “the Russians” and the “Berlin Wall,” the term most associated with the GDR in Western minds, especially West German ones, was certainly “Stasi,” and with it every imaginable evil. But owing to my experience in the icy Cold War United States, my judgments about the Stasi were more complex. I could never approve of their often stupid or nasty methods or their very ubiquity. But unlike most of those around me, I could compare and evaluate political smog levels in more than just one country.
For one, I perceived very well the unceasing attempts to smother the GDR child, if not in the cradle, then before it could attain durable maturity or worrisome competitiveness. The attacks were not restricted to painting and literature, or to radio and TV, but involved a wide network of people who supplied constant information on economic, military, cultural, and political matters to West German, American, and British centers in West Berlin. And every presumed freedom-seeker who succeeded in crossing to West Berlin or chose to stay in the West after a visit was thoroughly pumped on all such matters as well as for tips on others to lure or blackmail into taking the same path. Rejecting such grilling in a “reception center” meant forfeiting assistance in finding a job, a home, financial help, or even a flight from West Berlin to West Germany, and rail and road routes were checked by East German authorities.
A major force in the early years of hostile activity was the Kampfgruppe gegen Unmenschlichkeit (KgU), the Combat Group Against Inhumanity, which was linked to the espionage network of former Nazi Eastern Front expert Reinhard Gehlen and to the Senate of West Berlin, with financial aid from the Ford Foundation and the Red Cross, since it was officially described as a humanitarian organization. Its aim was to destabilize or wreck the GDR. In the 1950s this included exploding railroad and highway bridges, igniting a fire in a Leipzig department store, storing poisons to be used against Soviet soldiers, and tricks to disrupt food transports. Those actions, in any case, were planned—but stymied. By 1959 the KgU was no longer considered a match for the Stasi and was closed down, replaced by methods like encouraging and supporting attempts to burrow under or otherwise surmount the Wall, aimed at grabbing headlines just when major GDR celebrations were scheduled.
This all helps to explain the widespread network of the Ministry of State Security, known as the Stasi (short for Staats-Sicherheit). Wilhelm Zaisser, who commanded the Thirteenth International Brigade in the Spanish War (under the pseudonym General Gómez), headed it first, but after he was blamed for not foreseeing or properly coping with the revolt of June 17, 1953, he was replaced by another former hero, Ernst Wollweber, who had organized seamen internationally to support the Spanish Republic. But he too was ousted, for joining in a palace revolt against Walter Ulbricht, and was followed by Erich Mielke, also a former International Brigader, who had fled Germany in 1931 after allegedly shooting a policeman during a riot in Berlin. Sixty years later, after the demise of the GDR, he was condemned to six years in prison for the shooting and served four of them. He was eighty-eight when he was released on parole.
Mielke’s long rule as Stasi boss demonstrated how such activities can too easily fall into the hands of the kind of men who like to administer “countermeasures” in any society, some with an FBI badge or a blue uniform with Taser, nightstick, and revolver, some with a Supreme Court robe approving an execution, and some with an ID card of the NKVD or Stasi.
Mielke was generally ridiculed or despised, and certainly does not seem to have been sympathetic in any way. But despite that, I find it a purposeful and deliberate lie to equate even the Stasi’s worst activities with the tens of thousands of cases of Nazi torture, hanging, and execution—over 16,000 by guillotine—mostly Communists and other leftists, even before their killers stormed through Europe and began mass annihilation. Was this false equation propagated in part to distract from the great numbers of SS and Gestapo killers hired by equivalent West German institutions, often for leadership positions?
This distorted “Stasi-Nazi” campaign, especially after the death of the GDR, was reflected in many films, and never more cleverly than in an excellently written, directed, and acted but exceedingly deceitful 2006 German Oscar-winner, The Lives of Others. Its main villain is a sinister, lecherous, and brutal Minister of Culture. How many of its audience knew anything about the six men who held that GDR position? The first one, Johannes R. Becher, a prominent poet and writer during the pre-Hitler years, also wrote the moving text of the GDR national anthem. Another, a Parisian exile, helped compile the famous Brown Book indictment of Hitler in 1933 and led anti-fascist activity among German ex-patriots in wartime Mexico. A third, after studies at the Sorbonne and Oxford, fought Hitler in the underground. He later became the first and only Jewish ambassador to Italy and Vatican City (for the GDR). A fourth escaped to England in the last transport of Jewish children in 1939. All six were highly educated, cultivated men, absolute opposites of the type shown in the film.
The film shows how a meticulous Stasi examination of the keyboard letters of a typewriter enables them to nab the film’s hero after he secretly sent exposés about the GDR to a West German magazine. The same exact study of typewriter letters was at the center of the Washington trial in 1949 of the U.S. diplomat Alger Hiss. Richard Nixon, gaining his first fame as a Communist hunter, used the keyboard letters to convict Hess, a leading architect of the United Nations, as a Soviet spy. I cannot believe this similarity was coincidental, but surmise that the film’s author, in turning this scene on its head politically, felt confident that few if any would recall the original story.
This film, like those not so well made, gave a baleful picture of the GDR and especially the Stasi. It was no pleasant organization, certainly, and snooped into all aspects of public and private life. In the very first postwar years, people did indeed avoid critical jokes, at least in public—and wisely so. And till the end, for anyone involved in organized dissent, or planning a break over or under the Berlin Wall, it could indeed be threatening. But the vast majority of GDR citizens, not involved in such activities, knew about the Stasi but did not take it so terribly seriously. In fact, it was frequently, and certainly fearlessly, joked about. In our building, with twenty-four families, most neighbors assumed that two men worked for the Stasi, one a taciturn fellow whom nobody liked or saw much of, the other a friendly fellow who joined in activities of house inhabitants, like our biannual clean-ups of lawns and shrubbery around the house. Neither ever asked prying or otherwise dubious questions.
The widespread network of paid and unpaid agents within the GDR aimed not only at keeping tabs on all activities seen as subversive, but also was tasked at closely and objectively observing the thinking trends and general atmosphere within the population. It now seems clear that their reports were not sufficiently believed or not effectively acted upon by the men—or man—at the top.
As elsewhere in the world, every method was seen as legitimate if considered necessary to save the system. Organized opposition, especially, was to be nipped in the bud as quickly as possible, or, if that was difficult, then closely observed and controlled. Such buds ripened apace in the small, disadvantaged GDR, so greatly overshadowed by its wealthy next-door neighbor. A vicious circle ensued; the greater the perceived danger, the bigger the control apparatus, which made it more disliked, leading to growing dissent and to further Stasi expansion.
I do not wish to prettify the picture of the organization; it could certainly be obnoxious. But in the case of the three men I knew who were employed by the Stasi, I am convinced they were motivated by an allegiance to the progressive aims of the GDR and a repudiation of Western efforts to undermine it. My one-semester roommate at Leipzig was one of them (as I learned later, which led me to wonder if his connection may have been why he happened to be my roommate). When we met by chance years after the end of the GDR, he spoke about his former job, taken on in gratitude for the good treatment and career chances offered him, a forlorn war orphan from East Prussia. With many, no doubt, regardless of motivation—like those who join the U.S. police, FBI, or CIA because of patriotism, perhaps to unearth Nazi wartime spies—power often corrupts. This certainly was true of the Stasi’s last, longest, and most abhorrent boss. I might add, without generalizing, that the one active dissident I knew personally who was imprisoned by the Stasi (before he was expelled against his will to West Germany) said that the only torture he knew of, based on conduct judged cooperative or stubborn, was a corresponding increase or decrease in the number of allotted cigarettes. But I cannot generalize.
A few years ago, Der Spiegel quoted a historian, recently employed by the Stasi Investigation Authority, who insisted that the publicized numbers on Stasi employees and informers had been extremely exaggerated, counting many people twice, including over ten thousand who worked for the GDR in West Germany or elsewhere but never spied on GDR citizens, and falsely listing many thousands who never did any spying or informing. (Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk, “Die schlanke Stasi,” SpiegelOnline, February 21, 2013.) Another exposé in the same magazine reveals that in September 1960 Chancellor Konrad Adenauer assigned Reinhard Gehlen, the same superspy of Hitler who organized the BND, the offshoot of the CIA in West Germany, to spy on his political rival Willy Brandt and check on his activities as an anti-fascist exile during the Nazi years. How many GDR lives after the demise of the GDR were wrecked or driven to suicide for doing far less snooping—or none at all? (Klaus Wiegriefe, “Adenauer Has Gehlen Spy on Willy Brandt,” SpiegelOnline, April 7, 2017.)
The East German equivalent of the BND, the “external division” of the State Security Ministry working outside the GDR, was headed by Markus Wolf, a son of the writer Friedrich and brother of the film director Konrad Wolf. He was famous for its amazing success, largely thanks to relationships based on his political conviction that West Germany and its ally in Washington endangered the cause of world peace. Its one calamity was Willy Brandt’s retirement as chancellor after his close collaborator was discovered to be working with Markus Wolf. Its biggest success was Rainer Rupp, who under the alias “Topaz” reached a high-level position in the NATO military planning structure. During a NATO Europe-wide war exercise called Able Archer, in November 1983, which simulated an atomic war, Rupp assured the Soviets that the maneuver was not, as they feared, a preparation for an actual attack, and that may have saved the world from atomic war. After unification, Rupp was sentenced to a ten-year prison term.
I too was approached by the Stasi with requests for assistance. After the United States set up its embassy and consulate in East Berlin in 1974, the latter asked me to visit to “clarify my status and that of my sons.” I telephoned the local police to ask if I need have any fears about going there. No, I was assured. But a little later I got a visit from two gentlemen who asked if I would help them by going to film evenings now being offered by the embassy and “make friends there.” I responded very honestly that I felt nervous just going near that location with its two big Marine guards, and they wrote me off, as they did on two other occasions when I was able to convince them, always very politely, that I was of no use to them.
Of course, being one of a very few Americans in the GDR, it was not surprising that I, too, was observed. As I later learned, world-famous anti-Nazis like Thomas Mann and Bertolt Brecht, being German, were always observed in wartime United States, not to mention the plight of even the most loyal Japanese Americans. The exhaustive checks on me by the FBI were, after all, in a country never really threatened, neither from Canada nor Mexico, and with two big oceans to the east and west, while the GDR faced a very explicit foe right next door, not one yard away, which was able to win out in the end.
Among the Stasi reports on me that I have read were also a few odd notes, for example that I spoke fluent English, German, French, and Russian (unfortunately, only the first two are correct). The files, probably incomplete, were less interesting than the FBI files.
For most people in the GDR, I think, the Stasi, though certainly unloved and by many despised, was hardly the ghastly monster so often portrayed in today’s media. Common causes of laughter (or ridicule) were the duos of casually dressed men, about 100 or 200 yards apart who tried to look nonchalant as they lined the routes of visiting state dignitaries.
