Mary Beth Stein
East German espionage was legendary under Markus Wolf, director of the Main Intelligence Directorate (Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung, HVA) in the Ministry for State Security (Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, MfS) of the German Democratic Republic.1 For over twenty-five years, his physical identity remained a mystery to Western intelligence agencies. Prior to his 1979 exposure by Werner Stiller, one of highest-ranking HVA officers to defect to the West, Wolf was simply dubbed “the man without a face.” This moniker became the title of his 1997 English-language autobiography coauthored with the British journalist Anne McElvoy and subtitled The Autobiography of Communism’s Greatest Spymaster. A revised and expanded German edition appeared the same year with notable differences under the title Spionagechef im geheimen Krieg: Erinnerungen (Spy boss in the secret war: Recollections).
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the fate of the MfS and HVA was unclear. Civil rights groups intervened in January 1990 to prevent the destruction of files from many departments. However, the HVA succeeded in destroying (or in some instances trading) nearly all its most sensitive files through late spring of that year.2 Top priority was given to expunging the dossiers of its full-time employees as well as compromising information about espionage operations that would expose the identity of Stasi agents in the West, known euphemistically in MfS jargon as “enlighteners” (Aufklärer) and “scouts of peace” (Kundschafter des Friedens) (Gieseke 2014, 154). Consequently, it is impossible to know how much information about foreign intelligence in general and Wolf’s lifework in particular was lost during this time. There can be little doubt, however, that the systematic purge of Stasi files laid the groundwork for later representations of the HVA by Wolf and others that are difficult to corroborate or disprove. What remains of Wolf’s thirty-four-year service record, for example, is limited to roughly one hundred pages in three separate files in the archives of the Federal Commissioner for the Records of the State Security Service of the Former German Democratic Republic (GDR), the agency that administers the surviving Stasi files.3
The man without a face might have remained the man without a trace were it not for the seemingly insatiable need to tell his life story after emerging from the shadows. Aptly described by David Childs and Richard Popplewell as a “formidable self-publicist” (1996, 113), Wolf was a frequent guest in the German media after 1989, fashioning himself in interviews and television shows as a voice for reform inside the Socialist Unity Party (SED) and as the positive face of the MfS. In addition to the two works discussed in this essay, he also authored or collaborated in three other books about himself and his lifework during his lifetime that bear his name, In Eigenem Auftrag (On my own behalf, 1991), Markus Wolf: “Ich bin kein Spion” (Markus Wolf: I am not a spy, 1992), and Die Kunst der Verstellung (The art of deception, 1998). Other books based on interviews and correspondence have appeared posthumously, including Markus Wolf: Letzte Gespräche (Markus Wolf: Last conversations; Schütt 2007) and Mischa (A. Wolf 2013).
The following analysis of Man without a Face and Spionagechef im geheimen Krieg situates the telling of his life story in the turbulent decade following the collapse of the GDR and identifies strategies of narrative self-fashioning that negotiate reader expectations of personal disclosure and honest self-reflection, on the one hand, and the author’s need for circumspection, on the other. Applying Philippe Lejeune’s notion of the “autobiographical pact” to Wolf’s works permits a reading that assumes the author’s commitment to telling the truth while recognizing the impossibility of telling the truth about the self or “constituting the self as a complete subject” (1989, 131). My approach is not to interrogate truth claims in Wolf’s autobiographies but to examine the spymaster’s story of himself as a protagonist in the world rather than as a narrative to be verified or falsified. While the paucity of archival sources corroborating or disproving Wolf’s truth claims all but necessitates such an approach, this chapter argues that the autobiographical production of high-ranking party officials after German unification offers an important site for critical readings of communist subjectivity in a postsocialist context. Before examining Wolf’s presentation of self as unrepentant Communist and successful spymaster on the losing side of the Cold War, however, it will be useful to outline in broad strokes the trajectory of his life, details of which stem from his own writings or published interviews with him unless otherwise indicated.4
The oldest son from playwright Friedrich Wolf’s second marriage, Markus Wolf was born in the small town of Hechingen in southwest Germany on January 19, 1923. His brother, Konrad, later renowned film director and president of the East German Academy of Arts, was born two years later. Friedrich Wolf was Jewish, and both he and his wife were members of the German Communist Party; consequently they feared for their lives when Hitler came to power. The Wolf family fled Nazi Germany and arrived in Moscow in 1934, where the eleven-year-old Markus attended the Karl Liebknecht School, a school for the children of German-speaking refugees. He became fluent in Russian, joined the Soviet Young Pioneers, and developed a lifelong appreciation for Russian culture and cuisine.5 Markus finished school and studied aeronautics at the Moscow Institute for Airplane Engineering from 1940 until 1942. In 1942 he was delegated to the Communist International (Comintern), where he and other youth from Nazi-occupied territories received political training and prepared for the postwar liberation of their homelands. It is here that Markus met his first wife, Emmi Stenzer, daughter of Franz Stenzer, the German Communist Party delegate to the Reichstag who was murdered in Buchenwald in 1933. Between 1943 and 1945, Markus worked as a radio commentator for the German People’s Radio (Deutscher Volkssender), the voice of the German Communist Party in the Soviet Union. He married Emmi Stenzer in 1944, returned to Berlin in May 1945, and worked under the pseudonym “Michael Storm” as a commentator and political agitator for the Communist-run Berliner Rundfunk (Berlin Radio) from 1946 until 1949. One of his assignments was to cover the Nazi war crimes trial in Nuremberg. In 1949 Wolf was appointed the first German advisor to the newly created diplomatic mission of the GDR in Moscow. He was recalled to East Berlin in 1951 and assigned to the Institute for Economic Scientific Research, the front for East Germany’s nascent intelligence agency. In 1952, at the age of twenty-nine, he was named director. Less than a year later the institute was incorporated into the MfS. Wolf became director of the HVA and deputy to the minister for state security, Erich Mielke. He attained the rank of general and remained the number two man in the MfS until his voluntary retirement at the age of sixty-three in 1986.
It is useful to interrupt this outline of Wolf’s life to point out that it was fairly uncommon for Communist functionaries to retire early, because it typically signaled dysfunction within a department or a falling out of favor (Richter and Rösler 1992, 123). While neither appears to factor in Wolf’s case, his early retirement became fodder for speculation in the West (Fricke 1987, 231) as well as in the East (Drommer 1998, 116). Wolf writes in his autobiographies that by the early 1980s he had achieved his professional goals and feared he could no longer hide his skepticism regarding “real existing socialism” (1998, 423). He raised the subject of retirement with Mielke in 1983, but was forced to wait another three years before stepping down. For Mielke the timing of his deputy’s decision to retire was most inopportune, for it coincided with a serious war scare over the stationing of middle-range missiles in East and West Germany and escalating tensions with the Soviets due to Erich Honecker’s dogged pursuit of West German recognition of the GDR. The spymaster had to know how inauspicious the moment was, which makes his early retirement all the more intriguing. The death of Wolf’s brother, Konrad, the previous year and the disheartening NATO report obtained by Rainer Rupp, an HVA mole to NATO, on the structural weaknesses of Soviet military and economic power appear to have been significant factors in his decision (M. Wolf 1997, 353–54; 1998, 425–28). The language citing reasons for his retirement provided Wolf with a strategic exit from a position of power and responsibility. Moreover, it allowed Mielke to assure the East German Politburo as well as the Soviets of an orderly transition in the MfS. The resignation letter, dated October 8, 1986, which survived the systematic destruction of Stasi files, mentions the desire to complete his brother’s “Troika” project and “the wish to creatively think through and remember the experiences of [his] life and work” (BStU KS60003/90, 59). The plan to write a memoir based on “experiences and insights of the last 35 years working as the head of foreign intelligence” that incorporates “the traditions of our precursors . . . which could be of use in conveying experiences from the struggles of the last fifty years to later generations” appealed to Mielke (BStU KS60003/90, 59) and ensured Wolf’s access to the HVA archives for his research. With retirement Wolf received a large, new apartment overlooking the Spree River, a driver, a secretary, and an office in the ministry. In return he agreed to be available in an advisory capacity to Mielke and Wolf’s successor, Werner Grossmann (M. Wolf 1997, 358), an extraordinary arrangement that undercuts Wolf’s carefully crafted self-image as someone “outside” the system in 1989, when the GDR collapsed.
Wolf had another personal reason for asking to be relieved of his duties that is not cited in the resignation letter. His marriage to his second wife, Christel, was falling apart because of his affair with Andrea Stingl, the woman who would become his third wife. Mielke, whom Wolf characterizes as an “old-fashioned puritan in sexual mores” (M. Wolf 1997, 357), was concerned about avoiding the scandal of divorce and pressured him to “remain married for the sake of appearances” (M. Wolf 1997, 357). He refused. As Wolf’s memoirs focus largely on his professional life, it is a significant admission of the entanglement of the personal and professional at this critical juncture when he writes, “With the decision to marry Andrea, I finally supplied [Mielke] the inducement to initiate my departure” (1998, 437). Moreover, the statement gives some credence to Mielke’s later claim that Wolf stepped down because of moral transgressions (M. Wolf 1998, 437). The fact is Mielke was even more concerned that a bitter ex-wife might try to blackmail the MfS or could be exploited by Western intelligence agencies intent on damaging the GDR (Colitt 1995, 214). Fearing a security risk, he went so far as to have his deputy’s telephone lines tapped (M. Wolf 1997, 358).
Continuing with Wolf’s life trajectory, in the first years of retirement Wolf devoted himself to completing Konrad Wolf’s manuscript of Die Troika (The triumvirate), which was unfinished at the time of his death. The story of three friends growing up in the Soviet Union appeared in early 1989 and became the first East German book to deal with crimes under Stalin. Although Konrad was one of the original troika, Markus benefited from the insinuation that his brother’s experiences and views corresponded closely to his own. Indeed, Die Troika can be read as Wolf’s earliest foray into autobiography, one that transformed the man without a face into a public figure capable of appealing to younger East Germans. In establishing himself as a credible historical witness to terrible repression under Communism, Wolf discovered a successful narrative strategy that he would hone in later memoirs. Around this time he assumed a more public role, through cautious support for Mikhail Gorbachev and Sputnik, the German-language magazine from the Soviet Union banned by the SED in the late 1980s (M. Wolf 1998, 441). Buoyed by the positive reception of Die Troika and confident that he could successfully pivot from SED insider to a spokesperson for reform, Wolf agreed to speak at the November 4, 1989, mass rally on East Berlin’s Alexander Square. He completely misjudged the political climate as well as the extent of his personal appeal and was booed off the stage after identifying himself as a retired general in the MfS and denouncing the scapegoating of the Stasi as the “whipping boys of the nation” (Drommer 1998, 128).6 The crowd on the Alexander Square was in no mood for lectures from a Stasi officer less than one month after mass arrests and Stasi and police violence against protestors on the fortieth anniversary of the founding the GDR. Years later, in a September 28, 2002, article of Neues Deutschland, Wolf would recall: “I felt connected to those who demanded change. But the political climate changed after November 4. In my second book, On My Own Behalf, I grapple with feelings of guilt, complicity and responsibility for the things that had happened” (cited in Jung 2007, 57).
East Germany’s peaceful revolution forced the SED from power five days after the Alexander Square rally. Mielke’s arrest in December was followed by the failure of a bill to pass in the Bundestag that would have granted amnesty to Stasi officers and agents. Wolf realized that he and others would not be able to escape their Stasi past. Fearing imminent arrest he and his wife, Andrea, left on an extended holiday to Austria just a few days before German unification. They moved from place to place “like some German Bonnie and Clyde” (M. Wolf 1997, 365) before fleeing to the Soviet Union with the aid of his KGB contacts. The Soviet Union in the turbulent years of 1990–91 was not the sanctuary where the Wolfs had hoped to find “advice and peace” (M. Wolf 1998, 13). His presence was awkward for the Kremlin and colleagues in the KGB. Direct and indirect appeals asking Gorbachev to raise the possibility of amnesty for Wolf in unification negotiations with German Chancellor Kohl went unanswered (M. Wolf 1997, 365). Wolf feared extradition and realized he could not count on the KGB or the Soviet Union for help. Following the political turmoil after the abortive coup against Gorbachev in August 1991, he and his wife left for Vienna and turned themselves in to the Austrian police after an unsuccessful bid for Austrian asylum. Wolf’s lawyer and German prosecutors arranged for an orderly arrest at the German-Austrian border. The spymaster spent much of the 1990s in the public eye, on trial defending himself in courtrooms as well as in the court of public opinion. He lived in Berlin, writing and giving interviews until his death on November 9, 2006, and was buried next to his brother in the Gedenkstätte der Sozialisten (Memorial to the Socialists) in the Berlin city district of Lichtenberg.
In considering why the “man without a face” would abandon a lifelong habitus built around secrecy to write and rewrite the self over the course of a decade, it is important to recall the exigencies of the moment of his writing. The dramatic collapse of the East German state constituted a traumatic rupture for SED party leaders and a significant challenge to their political self-understanding. What followed was a period of existential uncertainty as many faced public condemnation and criminal prosecution. The first to be put on trial, paradoxically, were not SED party elites responsible for abuses of power in the GDR but border guards who had been involved in shootings at the Berlin Wall and along the German-German border. In the most high-profile of the wall trials, General Secretary Erich Honecker and five other high-ranking party members were indicted in 1992 for “indirect complicity” in manslaughter (McAdams 2001, 35). By the time Wolf went on trial for the first time in 1993, German public opinion was sharply divided over the ability of the West German legal system to redress GDR-era injustice. This polarized political context had a profound impact on how high-ranking party officials remembered and narrated Communist experience. Indeed, Wolf spoke for many East Germans, and not just former SED elites, at his own trial when he protested, “Not everything in the forty-year history of the GDR was bad and worthy of erasure, and not everything in the West good and just. This period of historical upheaval cannot be dealt with adequately through the clichés of a ‘just state’ on the one hand, and an ‘unjust state’ on the other” (M. Wolf 1997, 379).
The fusion of personal story and political history was a common feature of Communist autobiography in GDR times, and this way of seeing oneself in the world persisted for many after the Wende (the period leading up to and including the fall of the Berlin Wall). After 1989 some SED elites turned to life writing as a way of coming to terms with the collapse of the GDR and entering into public debates about the East German past. Life writing became a vehicle for defending oneself against accusation and preserving a usable Communist past. According to historian Martin Sabrow, the belief that the Communist past “could be narrated,” that is, had not been discredited by war and genocide, explains the remarkable propensity for Communist autobiography after 1989. In contrast to Nazi party leaders after 1945, former SED elites believed that despite the GDR’s spectacular collapse, their lives could be defended as an “upright life lived in error” (Sabrow 2014, 96). The first spate of Communist autobiographies after 1989, as publisher Christoph Links notes, were penned by second-tier officials and published with leftist publishers in the former GDR. These paved the way for the memoirs by high-ranking party officials who were actually responsible for the policies of the regime (Links 2007, 226). Spionagechef im geheimen Krieg is an example of the latter that appeared with a formerly West German publisher.
Although Wolf’s 1986 resignation letter attests to literary ambitions predating the collapse of the GDR, his prolific autobiographical production after 1989 is inextricably linked to the political and legal fallout he faced following the collapse of the East German state. He began work on Spionagechef im geheimen Krieg while in Russian exile for the second time in his life, with the prospect of criminal prosecution and the criminalization of the HVA weighing heavily on him. “What followed then was the criminal prosecution, the confrontation with the victor. I felt obligated to convey not only my own position, but also speak for my colleagues, the ‘scouts’ [of peace] who were in prison. This had a determining influence on the content of later books, including my memoir, Spionagechef im geheimen Krieg” (cited in Jung 2007, 57)
As the preceding excerpt illustrates, Wolf’s autobiographical writing begins first and foremost as a defense for himself as well as colleagues and agents of the HVA facing prosecution. Man without a Face and Spionagechef im geheimen Krieg appeared in 1997 while Wolf was a defendant in the second of two highly publicized trials in Düsseldorf. The 1993 trial for treason, espionage, and bribery began under intense media scrutiny and concluded after seven months with a guilty verdict and a six-year sentence. The Federal Constitutional Court overturned the verdict two years later, arguing that former East Germans could not be guilty of treason against the Federal Republic. Wolf was convicted again in 1997 on charges of kidnapping, bodily injury, and coercion in the 1950s and 1960s, crimes that occurred in the GDR and were punishable under East German law. He received a suspended two-year sentence. As a defendant Wolf denounced the trials as a farce and an example of Siegerjustiz (victor’s justice), that is, politically motivated (in)justice exacted by the winners from the losers of a struggle. His autobiographies continue this line of reasoning, for example, when declaring that West German courts are primarily interested in “the settling of accounts to ensure that only one version of history prevails” (M. Wolf 1997, xii). Written for different audiences and with slightly different emphases, the German and English-language autobiographies analyzed in this essay constitute, as I argue, part of Wolf’s public relations campaign for personal exoneration and a more positive assessment of East German Communism in the intensely politicized climate of postunification Germany. His memoirs are intended as a counter-history to the prevailing discourse about the end of the Cold War, out of the belief, as he writes in the preface to Man without a Face, that “any history worthy of the name cannot be written only by the victors” (1997, xii).
Like most Communist autobiographers before and after 1989, Wolf aligns his life story with the history of the GDR and invokes the antifascist founding myth that was the cornerstone of East Germany’s claim of legitimacy (Nothnagle 1999). The rejection of Nazism and political socialization during Soviet exile inform his lifework and give it meaning: “The Second World War was the crucial event in the lives of millions of people, and it was a war that thankfully ended the Third Reich. How could anyone who fought against Hitler’s barbarians have considered himself a traitor to Germany? My own contribution, and that of my family, to the fight may have been small, but I am proud of it nonetheless” (M. Wolf 1997, 386). Reprising his defense at the 1993 trial, this statement deftly equates persecution of Communists under the Nazis with the criminalization of SED officials after 1989. For Wolf combatting the revival of fascism justifies his foreign intelligence work during the Cold War. In Man without a Face he writes, “Hitler’s long shadow was one of the reasons I agreed to the idea of working for a secret service. This was not treason” (1997, 386). Although the HVA continued the GDR’s fight against fascism after 1945 “on a less exalted level” than those who resisted Hitler (382), he is proud of his part in “maintaining the status quo in Europe, a status quo that may have been tense and chilly, but which ultimately avoided the unthinkable—but not always improbable—endgame of nuclear war” (1997, 386–87). This line of reasoning echoes East German claims that the Berlin Wall prevented a third world war (Nothnagle 1999, 112) and saved the peace in Europe.
Wolf employs a narrative strategy that burnishes his reputation and that of his “scouts,” on the one hand, while normalizing and justifying East German espionage, on the other. The successful spymaster, who built an extensive spy network that infiltrated the inner circles of West German political parties and the upper echelons of industry, the military, and technology in the Federal Republic, depicts the HVA as a “dedicated and elite corps serving an honorable cause” (Dennis 2003, 86). He praises the political idealism and resourcefulness of his scouts and reflects with pride on the work of his top spies, Gabriele Gast in West Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service (Bundesnachrichtendienst), Günter Guillaume in the Brandt administration, and Rainer Rupp in NATO’s Brussels headquarters. While attributing the success of the HVA to a “strong sense of belonging” (M. Wolf 1997, 228) that he cultivated among his scouts, Wolf acknowledges that it also inadvertently led to the exposure and arrest of Günter Guillaume, when a telegram reading “Congratulations on the Second Man” on the occasion of Guillaume’s son’s birth caught the attention of West German counterintelligence.
Wolf depicts himself as a compassionate spymaster, personally committed to his agents and concerned about their welfare, when he writes, “I never forgot that behind every case was a human being who had put his trust in us and his life on the line” (1997, 144). He describes the arrest and conviction of Gabriele Gast as a particularly hard blow in “a period rich in personal disappointments and defeats” (1997, 372) and wonders whether espionage is worth the human toll when confronted with the poor health of former moles and agents of his who were forced to testify at his trial. However, when it comes to victims of the HVA’s particular methods of psychological manipulation, he has little regret about the “active measures” that damaged political reputations in the West and feels no guilt over seducing, intimidating, or blackmailing people into spying for the GDR.
In justifying East German espionage, Wolf wants readers to believe that the HVA was like other foreign intelligence agencies and better than many. In the preface to Man without a Face he acknowledges, “Our sins and mistakes were those of every other intelligence agency” (1997, xi) and asserts that “crimes were committed on both sides in the global struggle” (xii). East German foreign intelligence bore greatest similarity to the Soviet Union’s KGB, on which it was modeled and from which its operatives received training in the early years (M. Wolf 1997, 230). The HVA was predicated on the same “chekist” principles and was integrated into the MfS following a similar arrangement in the Soviet Union. According to Wolf, however, it also operated like intelligence agencies in the West. For example he argues that disinformation campaigns designed to discredit the West through the German People’s Radio had parallels in the CIA-backed Radio Free Europe. The HVA appears more professional and scrupulous in Wolf’s account than others because he claims to have guarded it against the “operational excesses” (1997, 232) of some Eastern Bloc intelligence agencies that resulted in “wet jobs,” a euphemism for “illegal, unauthorized killings in espionage [that] did and still do occur” (1997, 217). While acknowledging that espionage had become a “rough game,” Wolf claims to have eschewed the use of nerve toxins and deadly skin poisons developed and disseminated to Eastern Bloc intelligence agencies by the KGB (1997, 236).
As head of foreign espionage, Wolf’s primary responsibility was for the operational area of the Federal Republic of Germany, but as Jens Gieseke and Mike Dennis argue, this does not mean the HVA was completely removed from domestic surveillance and political repression in the GDR (Dennis 2003, 170; Gieseke 2014, 155). Nonetheless, that is precisely the impression Wolf creates when he writes, “I considered my own work in foreign intelligence to be a separate and more defensible sphere of activity” (1997, 357). Both the German and the English-language editions gloss over the degree of collaboration between the HVA and other departments in the MfS. Omitting or downplaying episodes in which the HVA participated in political repression at home allows Wolf to represent himself as he would most like to be known, the indefatigable adversary of the West during the Cold War, who was deeply committed to defending the East German state. He recounts how the HVA recruited West German businessmen and politicians, pressing them into cooperation through extortion, probing them for critical information about West German economic and political policies, and passing this information along to the KGB. He regrets that Guillaume’s exposure brought down “the most farsighted of modern German statesmen, Willy Brandt” (1997, xii) but believes Guillaume was the pretext for rather than the cause of Brandt’s downfall (1997, 186). Indeed, he maintains that intelligence verifying Brandt’s genuine commitment to Ostpolitik contributed to a climate of détente because it reduced KGB and MfS fears of West Germany. Whether or not this was the case, such an argument has the effect of trivializing the harm done to the West by the HVA without diminishing Wolf’s mystique as Communism’s successful spymaster.
Wolf is comparatively silent, however, about HVA participation in domestic surveillance and political repression in the GDR. Structural overlap is blamed for information sharing and collaboration between the HVA and other departments of the MfS. He does not disavow knowledge of the harsh methods of counterintelligence but provides little detail on the exact nature or extent of the HVA’s involvement other than to state, “I am not going to claim I had nothing to do with [domestic] repression, but the relatively strict compartmentalization of the ministry meant that my service was explicitly not supposed to engage in internal counterintelligence activities” (1997, 233). Vague denials or tacit admissions of the kind in the preceding quote do little to shed light on the blurred boundaries between defense of the East German state from the incursions of the West and repression of East German citizens who wanted to reform socialism in the GDR or immigrate to the West. Lacking in specificity, they allow Wolf to obfuscate his awareness of, responsibility for, and role in political repression in general.
In addition to drawing a bright line between foreign intelligence and domestic surveillance, Wolf draws sharp contrasts between himself and Erich Mielke. Described by Leslie Colitt as “exact opposites in almost every way” (1995, 63), the HVA chief was cultured, well connected, and came from the ranks of the party intelligentsia, whereas Mielke rose from proletarian street brawler and German Communist Party member in the Third Reich to the upper echelons of power in East Germany as a member of the SED’s Central Committee. Wolf depicts his boss as a volatile but shrewd political operator who was envious of his deputy and regarded him as a potential rival. The level of distrust between the two men in Wolf’s account strains credulity at times, for example, when Wolf claims he resisted his boss’s demand for total control and was able to effectively insulate the HVA’s central registration system. Another implausible claim is that Mielke kept the HVA chief out of the loop about plans to build the Berlin Wall in 1961. Even “at the risk of damaging [his] reputation as the man who really knew what was going on in East Germany” (1997, 113), Wolf claims that he first heard the news about the border closing on the radio like everyone else. Jens Gieseke also questions the veracity of this statement, as there was greater overlap in areas of responsibility and more coordination between departments of the MfS than Wolf admits. By recounting their personal differences and moments in their contentious work relationship, Wolf creates the impression that struggles with Mielke contributed to the decision to retire early. His belief that Mielke would have blocked his candidacy for election to the Central Committee and the Politburo (1997, 352) is essentially unprovable, but it allows him to appear as the victim of political intrigue and power struggles within the MfS. His long tenure as head of the HVA is attributed to deep personal connections to the “highest levels of the KGB” (1997, 302), which protected him from Mielke’s paranoia and lust for power.
The spymaster had the good fortune to retire before the collapse of East German Communism. This gives him some credibility when assuming a critical stance regarding the GDR past. In his autobiographies he distances himself not only from his boss but also from an SED leadership resistant to reform. He employs the pejorative term “concrete heads” (1997, 354) for the octogenarian SED leaders of a “moribund” (361) regime and recounts trying to battle against Erich Honecker’s recalcitrance in a private meeting in which the general secretary vowed he would never allow perestroika and glasnost in the GDR (360). However, Wolf’s support for Gorbachev was not as unqualified as he would have readers think. In a March 1989 interview with the West German news agency ARD, Wolf equivocated when asked about the suitability of Perestroika and Glasnost for the GDR, saying, “Here [in the GDR] we must do what we consider to be right and necessary for us” (Drommer 1998, 104). In the same interview, he confined his support for Gorbachev to, “I am cheerful and happy that he is there” (Drommer 1998, 105; Wolf 1997, 361). “There” presumably refers to the Soviet Union. Another possible translation for das es ihn gibt might be “that he is alive.” Either way the comments reveal a reluctance to fully embrace Gorbachev’s reforms and openly break with the policies of the Honecker regime.
In recalling how he was reprimanded for his public support of Gorbachev’s perestroika, Wolf casts himself as an uncomfortable outsider at odds with the party he did not abandon while intellectually drawn to dissident groups that did not embrace him. Claiming that some regarded him in the late 1980s as a “reformer inside the party” (M. Wolf 1997, 356), he acknowledges that he and others in the party “waited in vain for a redeemer to emerge as a successor to Honecker from within the system and set a new course” (357). While self-critical admissions like this implicate him in the inertia of a regime incapable of adjusting to new realities, they also illustrate how Wolf attempts to understand his mistakes and his role in maintaining the East German state.
Although Wolf understands his autobiography to be the “subjective testimony of a time full of contradictions” (1998, 11), he also recognizes the need to establish his credibility as the narrator and protagonist of his life story. He uses statements of purpose and disclaimers in the prefaces to control his image and manage reader expectations. Subtle differences in the German and American editions suggest keen audience awareness and offer insights into how he wants his life story to be read. Man without a Face, he writes in the preface, is “not a confessional bid for personal redemption,” and its author seeks “neither moral justification nor forgiveness” (1997, xii). Recognizing that readers may question his version of events, he nonetheless remains adamantly unapologetic about his political convictions and his lifework, writing, “I seek no pardon as a representative of the losers” (1997, xii). Similarly defiant in tone, the introduction to Spionagechef im geheimen Krieg includes a disclaimer about omissions and limits to his self-disclosure. Citing a moral responsibility toward agents who worked for him, he asks for the reader’s indulgence, when he doesn’t “name names, exercise restraint in some instances and in others is completely silent” (1998, 10). His caution is understandable because West Germans who worked for the MfS and had not been exposed after unification could still be subject to prosecution under German law. Addressing necessary omissions allows him to appear transparent and to superficially satisfy his end of the autobiographical pact with his German readers, namely, the commitment to truthfulness, without violating his professional and moral obligation to individuals who spied for the GDR.
Both the English-language and the German introductions exhibit concern about what readers will believe or understand. In Spionagechef im geheimen Krieg, Wolf begins with an acknowledgment of the high expectations of his readers and that writing such a book is a “gamble” (Wagnis) (1998, 9), because touting the success of East German espionage after the spectacular dissolution of the GDR “may appear arrogant” to many (1998, 10). However, he insists on his right “to recount and examine in detail the successes and failures of [his] career” (1997, xii) as well as his hope that “the story of the period as [he] lived it can also be understood on the other side of the Iron Curtain that has disappeared” (10). As a citizen of postunification Germany and a defendant in German courts at the time of his writing, it is hardly surprising that the German edition adopts a more conciliatory tone in explaining the imperatives of East German espionage.
One strategy for establishing narrator credibility evident in Wolf’s autobiographies is the anticipation of reader skepticism, for example, when he writes, “One of the occupational hazards for a spymaster is that one usually isn’t believed, even when telling the truth” (1998, 274) or when seeking to establish the veracity of his account by providing material proof to substantiate claims about his political views in the form of diary entries in the appendices to the German edition. Indeed no life story can be perceived as credible unless the writer admits to mistakes over the course of his or her life from which lessons can be drawn. Admitting to false thinking and personal failings, Wolf accepts that he must learn to take responsibility “for activities of [his] ministry and those aspects of the system [he] had served and perpetuated, even though they lay outside [his] own experience, knowledge or consent” (1997, 362). At the time of the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961, for example, he was convinced of the necessity of intelligence work and deeply committed to it. Thirteen years later, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the GDR, he questions the value of intelligence work in a diary entry. Substantiating his claim that such doubts predated his retirement from the MfS and the collapse of the GDR is the transcribed diary entry in an appendix to the German edition (1998, 497). In a curious oversight, however, this particular entry is not among the facsimiles of handwritten diary entries, leaving the reader to trust he actually held these views in the 1970s.
Many of his admissions of culpability are vague, such as, “I do not claim ignorance of the brutalities of life within our own country” (1997, 236) and “While I did not abet terrorists as such, we certainly did train people in methods that were later abused” (1997, 279). Tacit admissions of this kind beg the question of actual knowledge and complicity. Wolf also employs the first-person plural, whether as the pluralis majestatis or a collective “we” in the way East Germans were socialized to think of themselves as part of a whole, for statements of generalized accountability, such as “we erred, we did many things wrong and were too late in recognizing the mistakes and their causes” (1998, 484), and “we didn’t realize that the impetus [for reform] had to come from us” (1998, 432). Christoph Jung, Ute Hirsekorn, and Martin Sabrow have identified similar patterns of argumentation in the autobiographies of other former SED officials after 1989. Not all of Wolf’s admissions of error are written in the first-person plural; however, the sudden switch from first-person singular to plural in the following example illustrates his tendency to assign guilt or failure to many: “When the long-expected reforms finally came with Mikhail Gorbachev’s ascension to power, no one was more enthusiastic for our future than me. But we did not foresee that the change had come too late” (1997, 387). In this passage Wolf, the individual, is enthusiastic about Gorbachev’s ideas and uses the first-person singular to align himself with Gorbachev, but Wolf, the party official, is one of many SED elites who failed to see that “glasnost was not going to really solve any of [their] problems” (1997, 387–88). Thinking in terms of “we” and depicting himself as part of a system provide Wolf with legal and moral cover when taking stock of his lifework. He accepts blanket responsibility for his part in a failed system and country that had a “good beginning” in antifascism but fell short of its ideals.
Since the truthful stocktaking of his lifework in East German foreign intelligence necessitates a frank assessment of the GDR and its leaders, he must balance both the positive and the negative sides of the East German history:
As much as I would prefer to stress its anti-fascist origins, I would never allow myself to pass lightly over the dark side of [GDR] history. I know that there was a great deal wrong with the GDR, including a terrible amount of repression. I am perfectly aware of my own share in the responsibility for this. I was part of the system, and if people attack me (as they often do) as if I had been head of state, as if I had had total control over everything that happened in the GDR, then that is something I will have to bear. (M. Wolf 1997, 387)
A closer examination of this passage reveals a rhetorical strategy of differentiating himself from the SED leadership and casting himself as the victim of unjust criticism. The “as if” statements allow him to downplay his actual importance in the SED state and function to deflect responsibility for political repression in East Germany. Reminding his readers that he was neither head of state nor in a position of (absolute) power shifts culpability to other high-ranking party officials.
In Wolf’s autobiographies the SED abuse of power is often depicted as something beyond his knowledge or control. He is a Stasi general who never saw the inside of a Stasi prison but will have to “learn to bear responsibility for activities of [his] ministry and those aspects of the system [he] served and perpetuated, even though they lay outside of [his] own experience, knowledge, or consent” (1997, 362). Use of the passive voice in the following statement allows him to imply that he is the victim of theses abuses: “My own entanglement in the secret side of the Cold War and the experience of the abuse of power done in the name of socialism are deep wounds in my biography” (1998, 474). Words like “entanglement” imply powerlessness, even helplessness, and abuses done in the name of socialism is a passive construction that conceals the identity of the decision makers while tacitly justifying excesses that may have occurred as mistakes committed for a “good cause.” Admitting to feelings of shame for the misdeeds of the SED or another section of the MfS does not directly discredit him or his lifework.
Expressions of remorse and shame are comparatively few, however, and similarly impersonal in Wolf’s autobiographies. A man who compares political conviction to setting oneself on a course and not deviating from it “no matter what terrible things you may see along the way” (1997, 102) is unlikely to express profound regrets about actions done in the name of those beliefs. Moreover, Wolf frequently cites the Cold War in explaining why the ends justify the means. One of the more “personal” examples of an impersonal expression of remorse is when he recites from “Apologies for Being Human,” a poem by his father, Friedrich Wolf, at his retirement party in 1986. It is unclear what he is apologetic about; however, the moral transgressions rumored as reason for Wolf’s dismissal may have been one reason for reciting this particular poem, the second stanza of which reads: “And if I hated too much and loved too wild, too free. Forgive me for being human, sainthood was not for me” (1997, 359). The quoted text is evidently not impersonal since it is part of his father’s oeuvre, but it is odd that Wolf felt it necessary to apologize through the voice of his father on this particular occasion. The quoted stanza, moreover, creates a straw-man apology; he apologizes for ordinary human passions and for not being a saint, as if sainthood were expected of Communists like him or his father.
The uncertainty of his fate at the time of writing the autobiographies might explain why the discourse of victimization occasionally creeps into Wolf’s account of his life. Although a well-connected and powerful party member, he appears resigned and lacking agency in the last years of the GDR. Characterizing the Leipzig Monday Demonstrations, which precipitated the peaceful revolution in East Germany, as a “catastrophe” allows him to represent himself and the SED as “victims of historical processes” beyond their control (Zahlmann 2009, 277). On the eve of German unification, Wolf once again felt like a “hostage to historical events” (1998, 13), inviting comparisons between the exile of Communists under the Nazis and the ostracism of East German Communist leaders after 1989. He acknowledges “great bitterness among [their] officers toward the Soviets” (1997, 370), who were disappointed in the Soviet Union for abandoning the HVA in its time of need, but is reticent about his own views regarding East Germany’s ally. The arrest and imprisonment of his scouts are also a source of bitterness for Wolf. Victor’s justice at the end of the Cold War, according to him, means that “the spies of one state go unpunished . . . whereas those who worked for the other state are sentenced to long prison terms and hefty fines” (1997, 335). He blames “the distorting prism of the highly unsympathetic German media” (1997, 372) for stirring up popular hatred of the Stasi and functionaries of the GDR, “regardless of the positions a particular individual held” (1998, 14), and resents being branded as a symbol of the East German regime when he writes, “My reputation as source of hope, as a supporter of Gorbachev wasn’t worth a damn” (1998, 13).
The “man without a face” was allegedly a fan of spy fiction and flattered by rumors that he was the model for the Soviet spymaster Karla in the novels of John Le Carré (Colitt 1995, 89). Although Le Carré repeatedly refuted the connection and denied intentional parallels between Wolf and the German Jewish character Fiedler in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963), the rumors persisted and added to Wolf’s mystique. While neither fanning nor refuting rumors about himself, Wolf employs a narrative strategy that alternately invokes and dismisses similarities between the real-world HVA and the fictional world of spies. On the one hand, he distances himself and his lifework from clichéd literary tropes, emphasizing the banality of spy work. Comments such as “vast stretches of this work were very boring” (1997, 110) function to de-romanticize popular impressions of spycraft and explain the unorthodox decision to run a dozen agents himself. Dramatic stories of HVA operations are often prefaced with disclaimers such as, “What then happened, sounds more like a spy thriller than sober reality” (1998, 155).
On the other hand, his account treads familiar territory for readers of spy fiction. His life story makes for fascinating reading and has no shortage of political intrigue, dangerous missions, secret signals, couriers, double agents, and deadly outcomes. Amused when real-world intelligence imitates art, with some of their “madcap schemes and daring ruses” striking him as something of a “spy thriller cliché” (1998, 19), he does not disavow “how rough the game had become” (1997, 236), but writes: “The clichés established by espionage movies and novels notwithstanding, physical violence was the exception, not the rule” (1997, 232). Wolf recalls being “painfully aware” of his own recourse to the clichéd discourse of fictional characters when the CIA attempted to recruit him after 1989. Even though his future was far from certain at this time, he brazenly rejects the offer, suggesting that the weather in Siberia would be just as agreeable to him as the weather in California. He notes wryly the bizarre way in which “real conversations in espionage can sometimes imitate the style of spy novels” (1997, 11).
Tall, handsome, and urbane, Wolf cut a dashing figure and drew obvious comparisons to the most famous character of spy fiction, James Bond. In another example of life imitating art, the real-life spymaster was reputed to be a ladies’ man like Bond. He was known to give special personal attention to certain female agents, and both his first and second marriage ended as a result of affairs. He formed a particularly close bond with HVA supermole Gabriele Gast and notes that he gave her “personal attention” because she “needed to feel wanted by him” (1997, 160). Womanizing is a trait the spymaster apparently shared with his father as well, and while acknowledging his mother’s pain over her husband’s philandering, he is largely silent on the subject of his own dalliances and their toll on his personal life. Leslie Colitt describes in much greater detail, for instance, the messy divorce from his second wife, Christel, whose best friend, Andrea, became the third Mrs. Wolf well after their adulterous affair had become public knowledge.
Anticipating that some readers will expect “something like a James Bond film or espionage thriller” (1998, 9), Wolf writes, “I would be failing to give a truthful picture, however, if I did not reveal in detail some of the more exotic and tragic operations in which my men took part” (1997, 149). Such disclaimers allow him to appear candid while satisfying reader interest in the more colorful and intriguing aspects of espionage. Even when demurring that “not every agent is a born James Bond” (1997, 137), he invokes reader associations with the literary genre: “To outsiders, the world of secret services must sometimes appear absurd, their activities at best a senseless game, at worst immoral” (1997, 384). Rather than romanticize Cold War espionage the way spy novels do, he admits that “people suffered. Life was hard. . . . Crimes were committed by both sides in the global struggle. Like most people in this world, [he felt] remorse” (1997, xii).
The use of Romeo agents, who seduced single West German women in important administrative positions in government and industry, was one of the most sensational and controversial chapters in East German espionage. Striking a rare note of false modesty, Wolf writes, “If I go down in espionage history, it may well be for perfecting the use of sex in spying” (1997, 135) a practice he dates back to biblical times. Protesting that the “link between sex and spying is no invention of mine” (1997, 135), he nonetheless acknowledges that his reputation and some of the more spectacular successes of the HVA can be traced back to the work of his Romeos. The chapter “Spying for Love” both normalizes and romanticizes the deployment of Romeo agents, arguing that other intelligence agencies engaged in similar practices although without as much success, and that it was “natural” for single male agents operating in the Federal Republic to fall in love while on the job. Eager to stress that genuine romantic relationships often resulted, he omits how Romeos were trained and set upon single women to exploit their need for love and draw them into the operational plans of the HVA. Indeed, he is more amused by the caper than remorseful about the deceit perpetrated on one of his “Juliets” (women who aided Romeos and sometimes became spies for the GDR) when he describes the elaborate efforts to create a “Potemkin” wedding ceremony with an HVA officer posing as a priest for a strict Catholic West German woman who felt guilty about living in sin with her Romeo. Rather than lose an asset, Wolf devised a ruse to assuage her guilt and keep the intelligence pouring in. There is little remorse for such deceptions because he was “running an intelligence agency, not a ‘lonely-hearts club’” (1997, 165). In the final analysis, whenever Wolf poses the question to himself about HVA methods and dubious outcomes, he concludes that the ends justified the means (1997, 152).
Man without a Face is not a “tell-all” book, as Craig R. Whitney notes in the foreword (M. Wolf 1997, xxv). Neither is Spionagechef im geheimen Krieg. The consummate spymaster, while wanting to appear straightforward with his readers, reserves his right to silence. He is cautious in what he reveals and how much he tells. The spy stories he commits to paper are already a matter of public record; the agents he writes about have been exposed, arrested, and prosecuted. Indeed, he admits at one point that he had hoped to write the story of his lifework without mentioning certain agents who are included in the book only because their cover was blown. Wolf is similarly careful in expressions of personal culpability, to avoid opening himself to additional legal problems.
Like other former SED elites, Wolf found himself in an unenviable situation after the East German state collapsed. In writing several memoirs and making numerous public appearances, the man who had spent a lifetime in the shadows threw himself into the limelight and in the crosshairs of contentious debates about the Stasi and the East German past. His autobiographies are marked by the ambiguous space of postunification Germany as he attempts to navigate in the shifting terrains of political discourses. In contrast to other high-ranking officials whose autobiographies have been analyzed by Hirsekorn and Jung, Wolf was neither a Politburo member nor the head of a ministry. He nonetheless wielded considerable power, had access to the inner circles of East German leadership, and enjoyed a privileged lifestyle available to only the highest party officials. His autobiographies, however, tell a different story, one that puts him at odds with his boss and party and, most importantly, not in a position of power when the wall fell. Although politically encumbered by his decades of service, his voluntary retirement three years earlier and his belated, half-hearted engagement for reform allow him to exploit the ambiguity of his status as former power holder and potential change agent in his autobiographies.
Both the German publisher of Spionagechef im geheimen Krieg and the American publisher of Man without a Face represent the ambiguity and uncertainty of Wolf’s situation at the time of publication in fascinating ways. The front covers to both editions visually reinforce his reputation as a man without a face, the spook renowned for being unknown for most of his career. The color palette is dark, and Wolf’s face is obscured. The front cover of Man without a Face is a medium shot by the East German photographer Sibylle Bergemann of Wolf standing on a dark Berlin street, his head framed by a gun’s sight. The bull’s-eye is fixed on the pixilated face, rendering it unrecognizable.7 The gun sight dramatizes the precarious situation of the successful spymaster and performs Wolf’s claim—explicitly stated only in the English-language edition—that he was a “wanted man” in unified Germany. The back cover has the same shot as the front—minus the gun sight and with everything other than Wolf’s face pixilated, as if its protagonist had emerged from the shadows through the process of writing the autobiography. The evolution from faceless spook to visible figure performs one part of Lejeune’s “autobiographical pact,” the sincere effort of the author to write about his life in a way that makes it understandable to himself and the reader.
The front cover of Spionagechef im geheimen Krieg uses what appears to be the same photo. It is a high-contrast close-up headshot of Wolf with half his face obscured in shadow, the other half in light. The last photograph in the German edition is of Wolf in front of the Marx-Engels monument in Berlin in 1993. He stands literally with the founders of Communism. On the opposite page are the words that best summarize how he has defended himself in court and in his autobiographies: “Not far from my apartment in the center of Berlin young people sprayed the words ‘We are not guilty’ on the Marx-Engels Memorial. They are right. The Cold War is over, a model of socialism that began with great hope, has failed, but I have not lost my ideals” (1998, 488). However, the image on the opposite page undermines his claim of innocence, for his body blocks part of the graffiti so that it actually reads “we guilty.” Although almost certainly unintentional, the contradiction between text and image introduces a level of ambiguity for the reader’s consideration.
Markus Wolf’s life story intersects with and is informed by the political conditions and social forces that defined German and European history in the twentieth century. As a young boy, he fled Nazi Germany with his family for the Soviet Union; he returned to Germany in 1945 to build up East German foreign intelligence and defend the East German state during the Cold War and was put on trial twice as an ex-Stasi general in reunited Germany. His entire professional life coincided with the Cold War, which also informed it: the Soviet-trained political agitator working for the Berliner Rundfunk in postwar Germany; the advisor to East Germany’s diplomatic mission in Moscow, whose very person and career embodies the East German ideal of German-Soviet friendship; the Stasi general who cooperated so closely with the KGB that he was considered “Moscow’s Man in Europe” (1997, 226); and the supporter of Gorbachev’s perestroika in a reform-resistant GDR, disillusioned with intelligence work in later years.
His life writing, by contrast, is entirely the product of a post-GDR era, a radically changed political context from the one that formed the identity of the writing self. Altered social and political circumstances as well as criminal proceedings forced Wolf to reassess the values he lived by and the state he supported. While ultimately reaffirming his political convictions, the trajectory and meaning of his life were profoundly shaped by the time of his writing. Throughout the 1990s he fashioned and refashioned his life story, telling it in multiples venues, to different audiences, and with different emphases. He wrote out of a perceived moral obligation, both personally as well as politically, to defend the GDR, the HVA, and his life from defamation.
An inscription in the copy of Man without a Face purchased by the author of this chapter in a used bookstore in Berlin is from the late German television producer Thomas Wilkening to German film director Wolfgang Petersen. It reads: “Dear Wolfgang Petersen, even though this biography of Markus Wolf conceals more than it reveals (so typical of secret service), it is instructive in many regards. In my opinion Wolf certainly offers a highly interesting prototype for a strong filmic character.” Wilkening’s dedication recognizes two important aspects of Wolf’s autobiography that have been argued in this chapter. Wolf’s autobiographies, while informative, are strategic in their self-fashioning. They do not reveal too much and are careful to omit information that would be damaging to the spymaster or the agents who worked for him. Discretion is the habitus typical of the secret service, and the HVA chief proves the master of discretion as narrator of his life story. He also presents himself as a strong leading man in his own life story, which has a narrative arc common to many spy thrillers.
Wolf prefers to see his lifework, however, in the tradition of antifascist and Communist heroes like Harro Schulze-Boysen and Richard Sorge, whom he claims as his role models in antifascist agitation and intelligence work. Recalling their martyrdom allows Wolf to compare his lifework with their heroic sacrifice (much as he conflated parts of his own biography with his brother’s in Die Troika), and to suggest that, like them, he too has been a victim of anti-Communist vilification. In this way both Man without a Face and Spionagechef im geheimen Krieg contribute to a specific subset of Communist autobiography known in the HVA as the “preservation of tradition” (Traditionspflege) (M. Wolf 1997, 227) that is designed to cultivate a strong sense of pride in the history of East German espionage. While acknowledging errors and false thinking that led to the collapse of the East German state, Wolf’s autobiographies mount a strong defense for the honor of the HVA and the political conviction and professionalism of his agents. Unrepentant in his political convictions and with undiminished pride in directing the “most successful espionage agency in Europe” (M. Wolf 1997, 375), Wolf makes no apologies for being on the losing side of the Cold War.
1. Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung has also been translated as the Main Administration for Reconnaissance.
2. The self-dissolution of the HVA had the “tacit approval of the citizens’ committees and the Central Round Table” (Gieseke 2014, 177).
3. In German der Bundesbeauftragte für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen Deutschen Demokratischen Republik (BStU). The largest of Wolf’s files is his personnel file (KS60003/90), which contains Lebensläufe (vitae) from 1951 to 1954, performance evaluations, recommendations for promotion, and the conferral of more than twenty honors and medals. Another file (HA IX/11 SV 258/87) contains documentation of the Wolf family’s status as victims of Nazi persecution: copies of the 1937 revocation by the Gestapo of their German citizenship, an application to the Verein der Verfolgten des Naziregimes (Association of the Victims of the Nazi Regime, VVN) and their VVN certificate. A third file (MfS-BCD) contains notes on service revolvers issued to Wolf after leaving the MfS.
4. All translations from German-language primary and secondary sources are my own unless otherwise indicated.
5. The title, Geheimnisse der russischen Küche (Secrets of the Russian kitchen), underscores the running theme of secrecy in his life.
6. The full text of Wolf’s speech is reprinted in Die Kunst der Verstellung (The art of deception), including paratextual information on applause and boos.
7. Cover design by Alexander Knowlton.
BStU (Bundesbeauftragter für die Unterlagen der Staatssicherheitsdienst der ehemaligen Deutschen Demokratischen Republik [Federal Commissioner for the Records of the State Security Service of the Former German Democratic Republic]). Markus Wolf File KS60003/90.
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