The File by Timothy Garton Ash Read Free Book Online Page A

took a close interest in the case. I was interviewed at length by the local security service. I was given a minute medical examination by one Dr. Spengler, at a morgue. The Viking Youths were identified and arrested. We gave evidence at their trial in the forbidding court building of Moabit—Berlin’s Old Bailey—and they were convicted.
    James did not, however, share my special interest in East Germany, although my diary records one earnest conversation in which he appears to have said that the possibility of development within socialist societies was the most important political question for leftists like himself. What has happened to the Left since 1989 suggests that this was ultimately true. At the time, though, it was a very hard truth for Western leftists to accept, especially for those who in 1968 had been confronted on the streets of West Berlin by horrible old women wavingtheir umbrellas and screeching, “Go over there!”—meaning, to the East.
    The sixty-eighters coped with this awkwardness in several awkward ways. Some now bent over backwards—or was it forwards?—to see all the good and progressive elements in East Germany: social security, full employment, equal opportunities for women, kindergarten for all. As scholars or journalists they wrote idealized accounts of East Germany that added up to a comprehensive misunderstanding of their own country. Theirs was a revolt against the crude Cold War anti-communism of their parents—less pro-communism than anti-anti-communism. It was also a hope against hope that the whole millennial project of socialism was not being discredited by the “socialism” being practiced in the East.
    A few, like Bernd, became out-and-out defenders of the Eastern system, Wall and all. A few went further still. All the Stasi foreign intelligence officers I have now talked to, including Markus Wolf himself, tell me that the sixty-eighters provided a rich field for the recruitment of agents. Numerically, of course, these agents were an insignificantly tiny part of that generation, but so were the terrorists. However, most of this political generation took none of these paths. Instead, they simply looked away. From West Germany, they looked and traveled west, south, north but never east. Even in West Berlin they somehow managed this, although the East was all around them.
    In James’s case, I don’t think ideological worries contributed much to his relative lack of interest in the East. When we talk about it again today, he reminds me that
The Guardian
had an Eastern Europe correspondent whoprotected her territory more jealously than Leonid Brezhnev. East Germany was part of her patch. If James had tried to cross the Wall she would probably have shot to kill.
    Born in 1949, James was an English sixty-eighter. I, six years younger, was not. The ideological evaluation in my Stasi opening report—“bourgeois-liberal”—was just about right. I cared passionately for what I saw, with a rather simplistic romantic patriotism, as the British heritage of individual liberty. And I wanted this liberty for other people. My intellectual heroes were Macaulay, George Orwell and Isaiah Berlin.
“Ich bin ein Berliner,”
I used to say, meaning an Isaiah Berliner. With these personal politics, I was never likely to take a sympathetic view of East Germany. But liberal anti-communism was not the primary source of my fascination with the East. I was fascinated because here, in East Germany, people were actually
living
those endlessly difficult choices between collaboration with and resistance to a dictatorship. Here I could pursue the Stauffenberg/Speer question in, as it were, real time.
    Here too I found that intimate proximity of high European culture and systematic inhumanity that George Steiner identified in his
In Bluebeard’s Castle
, a book that made a great impression on me when I read it at the age of seventeen. In my diary I called this phenomenon Goethe Oak, after the ancient oak