Axel Hildebrandt
In August 1978 two East German citizens, Hans Detlef Alexander Tiede and Ingrid Ruske, together with Ruske’s young daughter, Sabine, planned to escape to the West by taking a ferry from Poland to West Germany with forged West German passports. They were assisted by Horst Fischer, Ruske’s West German partner, who attempted to deliver these travel documents to Poland. As the Stasi (the East German secret service) had learned about the escape plan well in advance, officers arrested Fischer on the East German–Polish border, and an East German court later convicted him. In order to prevent their arrest, the East Germans Tiede and Ruske changed their plan and instead of taking a ferry, they hijacked a Polish plane heading to East Berlin, forcing the pilot to land in West Berlin. Upon their arrival U.S. Military Police arrested them at the Tempelhof airport, but they received a lenient sentence handed down by an American judge who took over the trial proceedings.
This Cold War story involving both an illegal escape and a hijacking was the subject of intense media reporting, and speculation, on both sides of the wall at the time. In the ensuing twenty-five years, our understanding of what was surely one of the more spectacular spy stories of the era has been enriched by various versions of the events: eyewitness accounts, most notably by the presiding judge at the trial, the declassified Stasi files, and more recently a fictional television film Westflug—Entführung aus Liebe (Flying west—hijacking out of love; Jauch 2010) and a novel Tupolew 134 (2004) by Antje Rávic Strubel. All these sources contribute unique and varied perspectives on the incident. When read comparatively, their various accounts provide a rich, multiperspectival description of the incident. They can, moreover, aid our appreciation of what these different sources—rather than mere sources they are narratives in their own right—can tell us about the past and how they do so. For instance a key source about the hijacking are the personal memories of the presiding American federal judge Herbert J. Stern, who wrote about it in his memoir Judgment in Berlin (1984). Published five years after the trial, Stern’s book provides an eyewitness, legal perspective that forms an interesting complement to the many journalistic accounts of the incident. It presents, moreover, a personal, non-German perspective on the event that is framed by Cold War ideologies of the eighties. Far less well known are the various accounts captured in the Stasi archives (BStU). The Stasi files are one of the most detailed sources of information about the hijacking and offer a comprehensive but ideologically charged backstory to the event. They document the hijackers’ backgrounds, the occurrences prior to the hijacking, the course of action during the hostage taking and hijacking of the Polish airliner, and the Stasi’s investigations and findings after the fact.1 The files on each of the individuals involved (among other things) offer specific insights into the different participating agencies and individuals: the hijackers, Ingrid Ruske’s West German boyfriend Horst Fischer, the airplane crew, and the passengers. The files also document the results of the Stasi’s surveillance and investigations starting with Tiede’s denied application to leave East Berlin for the West in December 1976 (AOP 9816/82, vol. 3, 159) and ending with a general amnesty that included Ruske in November 1987 (HDAT/IR 3263/88, vol. 11, 525).
Of the two fictional accounts, the most interesting for the present study is Strubel’s Tupolew 134.2 Strubel’s novel departs from the historical narrative and fictionalizes this spy story, thereby connecting the historical events with discourses about memory, truth, and the effects of politics on disenfranchised East German citizens. As I will show in this chapter, Strubel’s fictional protagonists and their recollections contribute to a multilayered literary discussion of this incident that also engages with the varying interpretations of this event in Cold War history.
In what follows I discuss one instance of each type of account of the event—the Stasi archival sources, eyewitness memory in Stern’s Judgment in Berlin, and Strubel’s postunification fictional interpretation. The first two of these belong to “factual” or referential types of texts, and the third is an example of historical fiction. In my analysis of the Stasi files, I read them as hybrid narrative forms that “appear to straddle the divide between fact and fiction” (Lewis, Glajar, and Petrescu 2016, 9). The files were a “finely calibrated” “technology of power” (Lewis 2003, 388) compiled by the Stasi to police the population. They contain detailed “hostile biographies” (Lewis 2003, 383) about citizens suspected of illegal activity, which we can use to compose “file stories” (Glajar 2016, 57). In reading memory sources, I follow Aleida Assmann in treating personal memories as complex interactions between individual and collective frames of experience (Assmann and Frevert 1999, 50). In accordance with Dorrit Cohn’s distinction between referential genres and historical fiction (1999, 121, 153), I finally examine why a fictional account such as Strubel’s novel is not bound to an accurate representation of events and deviates from facts to provide an alternative, fictional history.
The Stasi began to collect information on Ruske and Fischer in December 1976 and continued with its investigation for several years after the flight of Ruske and Tiede took place. The sustained Stasi surveillance appears to have been an attempt to discover whether friends and family members were implicated in the planning or to ascertain the views on the event of all people involved. The collected information stems from different Stasi divisions, such as Hauptabteilung VI (border traffic), IX (investigation), XIX (traffic), and PS (personal protection). Some of the files include reports by informants (inoffizielle Mitarbeiter, IMs) and contact persons (Kontaktpersonen, KPs) whose motivations are not always clear. According to their accounts, the Stasi case officers (Führungsoffiziere) had to demonstrate that the surveilled subjects were planning to commit a crime, which in this case was Republikflucht, or “ungesetzlicher Grenzübertritt,” paragraph 213 of the Criminal Code (StGB). The Stasi files contain much duplication of information, which was the inevitable result of the Stasi’s method of continuously adding intelligence to the file in order to gain a comprehensive picture of the people involved in the hijacking and their activities. For that purpose the Stasi compiled an expansive profile of the hijackers. The surveillance report “Fähre” (Ferry) contains information on all persons involved, other compilations include sizable files on Hans Detlef Alexander Tiede, interrogation reports and court documents pertaining to Horst Fischer, and collections of newspaper reports from East and West Germany.
As the Stasi files detail thoroughly, Ingrid Ruske was born in Berlin in 1944 and grew up in East Germany, where she went to school. She did not attend university and worked as a waitress in restaurants and bars for most of her life. In December 1976 she met the West German engineer Horst Fischer in East Berlin in Café Moskau, where she was working at the time (AOP 9816/82, vol. 1, 216). Fischer worked occasionally in the GDR and, despite being married, began a relationship with Ruske. After some time and more seriously in 1978, they began concocting a plan for Ruske and her eight-year-old daughter, Sabine, to flee to the West. They considered hiding in the trunk of a car or in the cargo area of a truck to escape across the border, but Ruske rejected these plans as too dangerous. She feared that in the probable case that East German border guards found and arrested her, she would have likely spent years in prison before being bought free by the West German government. Her daughter would have had to live in a foster home, and Ruske could probably have lost custody of her child.
Ruske and Fischer assumed correctly that the Stasi was surveilling them—which was cause for extra caution—but they were not aware of the full extent of knowledge the Stasi had about their relationship. According to their files, the Stasi already knew about the relationship and flight plans in April 1977, over a year before Ruske actually attempted to leave East Germany (AOP 9816/82, vol. 1, 216–42). Although the documents show that the Stasi had collected sufficient information to arrest Fischer and Ruske, at that time the Stasi officers decided not to arrest them, presumably preferring to catch them in the act and thus ensure a harsher sentence.
The most realistic and apparently least dangerous plan was for Ruske and her daughter to travel to Poland and take a ferry from Gdansk to Travemünde in West Germany. For that purpose the two needed West German travel documents. Horst Fischer asked a female acquaintance in West Berlin, whose appearance resembled Ruske’s, to apply for temporary ID documents and submit Ruske’s passport pictures instead of her own. She agreed and Fischer paid her 300 DM for her help (HF 21217/80, vol. 1, 391).
Furthermore, Ruske and Fischer decided to reveal their plans to a friend of Ruske’s because they needed someone to travel to Poland first in order to assess the risk at the border. This coconspirator was Hans Detlef Alexander Tiede, who was Ruske’s coworker and also wanted to escape to the West. Tiede had applied several times to leave East Germany to be able to see his child, who lived with his divorced Polish wife in West Berlin, but the GDR authorities had either rejected or ignored his applications. In order to get travel documents for Tiede, Fischer stole a passport out of the desk of a West German colleague whose physical appearance somewhat resembled Tiede’s (HF 21217/80, vol. 1, 231–35). Tiede was supposed to attempt an East German–Polish border crossing with this document before Ruske and her daughter followed to find out whether he would raise any suspicions (AOP 9816/82, vol. 2, 201). An important part of the plan was to learn how to forge the Polish entrance stamp in the passport to prevent complications when leaving Poland by ferry. To that end Fischer went to Hamburg to buy rubber materials to make a stamp, and later, when he took the train to Poland, he hid them in the sole of his shoe (AOP 9816/82, vol. 2, 126–32). He also inquired which ink color the border guards used and purchased numerous felt pens to emulate the color as closely as possible. These preparations, which are all documented in the Stasi files, underscore how meticulous their plans were and how closely the Stasi monitored their every move using informants and contact persons in East Germany. Fischer was therefore in danger of being arrested if Ruske, her daughter, Sabine, and Tiede went ahead with the escape (AOP 9816/82, vol. 1, 31–35). As the Stasi files document, these risks were real, and even Ruske’s and Tiede’s family members, who remained in East Germany and were not part of the planning, faced serious consequences. Ruske’s brother, for example, was not able to find employment in the GDR due to his sister’s flight to the West (AOP 9816/82, vol. 1, 312–17).
According to the Stasi files, Fischer planned to take the Paris–Leningrad express train from West Berlin to Gdansk and was supposed to meet Ruske, her daughter, and Tiede at the train station in Gdansk. However, Fischer never arrived at the meeting place because the Stasi had arrested him upon his arrival at the East German–Polish border (AOP 9816/82, vol. 2, 74). The Stasi found the ferry tickets from Gdansk to Travemünde, the forged travel documents, felt pens, and rubber material for making stamps that Fischer had hidden in the sole of his shoe. Besides these items the Stasi also collected documents for Ruske’s poodle that Fischer had obtained from a West Berlin veterinarian and carried with him (HF 21217/80, vol. 1, 290, 389–405). Although not all the information the Stasi received from informants and contact persons was accurate, it was sufficient for the border authorities to arrest Fischer. There was, however, one crucial piece of misinformation, which was the incorrectly reported date of the attempted flight, which might have contributed to the failure to arrest Ruske and Tiede (AOP 9816/82, vol.1, 31–32).
Since Fischer did not arrive at their meeting place in Gdansk, Ruske and Tiede correctly presumed that something had gone wrong and feared the Stasi would arrest them as soon as they returned to East Germany. However, they were not aware that the Stasi and the Polish secret service, Ministerstwo Spraw Wewnętrznych (MSW), had been cooperating the entire time and that the Poles had monitored their activities in Gdansk (AP 9648/80, 7). It is remarkable that the Polish authorities did not arrest them, for by planning to flee to West Germany, they had already violated paragraph 213 (3) of the January 12, 1968, GDR Criminal Code (StGB). The Polish authorities likely assumed that after Fischer’s arrest there was no alternative for them except to return to East Germany, where the Stasi awaited them. Before Fischer’s arrest the Stasi officers alerted their Polish counterparts that the four people were planning to take a ferry to escape to the West, which explains the Stasi’s code name for the entire operation as “Fähre” (Ferry). Yet the Stasi did not know from which town they wanted to depart, and it entrusted the Polish secret service with their arrest before they could board a ferry in Gdansk. Since Ruske and Tiede had met a Swedish woman who was in possession of a Polish consular passport at an unspecified place in Poland, the Polish secret service also suspected that they might try to take a ferry to Sweden or Finland (AP 9648/80, 10).
Ruske and Tiede abandoned the idea of taking a ferry to West Germany and considered flying instead. To avoid attracting suspicion, Ruske had bought round-trip airline tickets from East Berlin to Gdansk for her daughter and herself. The return flight was on August 30, 1978, the planned date for the hijacking. Upon arrival in Poland, Ruske and Tiede decided to sell several personal items to have enough money to buy a ticket for Tiede as well, which enabled him to take the same return flight to East Berlin. Additionally, they were able to purchase a pistol at a market in Poland, even though hijacking a plane was not part of the original plan. After the hijacking this pistol was in the possession of the American prosecution as evidence in West Berlin, which is why the Stasi never had the opportunity to see the weapon, and the East German investigators later speculated whether it was a gas pistol or perhaps a toy gun (HA XIX 4985, 7). Stern, however, clarifies in his memoir that it was an eighty-year-old “Mondial” starter pistol, which had been used in the past at sports events but from a distance apparently looked real (1984, 282).
On the day of the hijacking, Ruske’s daughter carried the pistol in her luggage, and the Polish security officer, recognizing that it was not a real weapon, let her take it on board the airplane in her carry-on item. Even at this late point, the Polish secret service did not arrest the three at the Gdansk airport, most likely assuming that getting off the plane in Berlin-Schönefeld was the only option and their East German counterparts could arrest them there. This proved to be a serious misperception. After takeoff Tiede drank some alcohol and then took the starter pistol and walked toward the cockpit. He yanked one of the flight attendants by her hair and threatened to shoot her if the pilots refused to land at Tempelhof airport in West Berlin. According to Stasi records, the pilot and the navigation officer attempted to get a better look at the weapon. Later, during their interrogation, the pilot and the navigating officer claimed that in order not to further escalate the tense situation, they abandoned the initial plan to disarm the hijacker Tiede although he was acting aggressively and refused to leave the cockpit. When the flight mechanic tried to get close to Tiede, he made threatening gestures and claimed that he would shoot the flight attendant. Hence the members of the crew did not attempt to disarm him again (HDAT/IR 3263/88, vol. 10, 80–87, 95–99).3
The Stasi files contain the complete transcript of the conversation between the commanding officer of the airplane, Ryszard Lukomski, and the East German air-traffic controllers (HA VI 1574, 88–89). Lukomski informed the air-traffic controllers that Tiede was unwilling to negotiate, had threatened to shoot a flight attendant, and demanded that they land at Tempelhof. East German authorities at first tried to buy time, but Lukomski underscored the urgency of the situation by saying: “My terrorist does not want to wait” (HA VI 1574, 89).4 At this point the East German air-traffic controllers permitted the airplane captain to contact their Western counterparts to negotiate a landing in West Berlin, which was eventually granted. The plane was allowed to enter West Berlin air space and to land in Tempelhof, where U.S. military personnel ordered Tiede to give up the pistol, which he did, before they arrested him. Neither the hijackers nor the police used violence, which stands in stark contrast to the hijacking of a Lufthansa plane by Palestinians a year earlier and might partially explain the relatively lenient sentence in this case.
The U.S. Military Police then asked all other passengers to leave the plane and strongly encouraged all East German citizens on the plane to consider staying permanently in the West. For Cold War propaganda purposes, the Americans were very keen on persuading the East German passengers to stay in the West. In fact they did not allow the passengers to return right away but instead took them on a long sightseeing bus tour through West Berlin to show them how attractive living in the West would be (AP 9648/80, 29). This attempt to introduce them to the West was superfluous, however, since most East Germans were able to access illicitly West German TV and radio stations and were already familiar with life on the other side of the wall. Despite the Americans’ efforts, only six out of sixty-two passengers decided to stay in West Berlin, and the East German government later tried actively to persuade the six to return. For this purpose the Stasi questioned their neighbors and coworkers to determine what might motivate them to come back to East Germany. The Stasi even permitted one woman’s father to travel to West Berlin to convince his daughter to return (see Laske 2008).
After the sightseeing tour, the passengers willing to return to the GDR arrived by bus at the Schönefeld airport, where East German officials were expecting them. Upon their arrival in East Berlin, reporters interviewed and photographed the passengers. The Stasi then questioned and released them after all passengers provided handwritten reports with their recollections of the hijacking. Some passengers identified how near or far they had sat in relation to the pilot’s cabin; their position on the plane explains discrepancies and omissions in their descriptions, particularly those who sat farther back and did not notice much of the hijacking. However, some passengers who were closer to the cockpit provided comprehensive accounts of Tiede’s actions (HDAT 3263/88, vol. 10, 120–27).
The hijacking of this Polish airplane by East Germans caused major diplomatic and judicial problems in the West. This was in part because it occurred one year after the so-called German Autumn of 1977, when four Palestinians hijacked the airliner Landshut on its way from Palma de Mallorca to Frankfurt/Main. The hijackers wanted to force the government of Chancellor Helmut Schmidt to release leading Red Army Faction (RAF) members who were incarcerated in Stammheim prison. These hijackers used real pistols, hand grenades, and explosives and even shot the pilot in Mogadishu, Somalia, before West German GSG 9 special forces freed the hostages and killed three of the four hijackers.
After the Landshut hijacking, both Eastern and Western Bloc countries signed a treaty that stipulated that hijackers be returned to their native countries and prosecuted harshly to deter future attempts. Countries that failed to comply with this treaty would be excluded from the international flight system. Thus the governments of the GDR and Poland, and the Soviet ambassador to the GDR, Piotr Abrassimov, demanded in 1978 that Tiede and Ruske along with her daughter be extradited to East Germany (AP 9648/80, 32). Chancellor Schmidt faced a quandary. On the one hand, he could ill afford not to adhere to the treaty and not send Tiede and Ruske back to the East, especially since his government claimed to be taking a tough stand on terrorism. On the other hand, West Germany had a long track record of accepting East German refugees, or Übersiedler, and under different circumstances it would have welcomed Tiede and Ruske with open arms. To circumvent this dilemma, the West German government asked the United States to take the lead in dealing with the hijackers because the Americans were technically still an occupying force. The U.S. Department of State agreed to take over the proceedings by installing a U.S. court in West Berlin. Such a court had not existed before this hijacking, and the West German government agreed to pay all costs of the trial, even though the Americans would be prosecuting East Germans (Stern 1984, 31).
The American judge Herbert J. Stern addresses the historic context of the hijacking and trial in his memoir, although his is not the only account of the trial, since the Stasi gathered information about it as well, some through the West German media but also by gathering court documents that illustrate the complicated situation. In this context the confrontation between East and West Germany extended to the GDR’s Eastern allies as well. As mentioned above, the East German and Polish secret service agencies had cooperated to observe Tiede and Ruske and to arrest Fischer. During the West Berlin trial, according to Stern, it transpired that Polish state officials attempted to influence the statements of the Polish airplane crew to achieve a more severe sentence for Tiede (1984, 273–75). Stern, however, claimed that throughout the trial, it became evident that there had been no real danger to passengers and crew, despite the fact that Polish government officials had instructed the airplane personnel to overstate the threat (1984, 259). According to the West German defense lawyers, Tiede had shown the crew pictures of his children, had a smoke with them, and engaged in casual conversations in Polish (Stern 1984, 266–79).
Stern, who had come to West Berlin from Newark, New Jersey, describes the trial thoroughly in his book Judgment in Berlin. His memoir adds a distinct American legal perspective to the events. As specified in court documents, the prosecution accused the defendant Tiede of severe crimes, including the hijacking of an aircraft, taking of hostages, deprivation of liberty, physical mistreatment of another, and carrying of a pistol without a license.5 These charges were serious and comparable, as mentioned above, to those of the Landshut hijacking one year earlier. The U.S. Department of State and Walter J. Stoessel Jr., the U.S. ambassador to West Germany, attempted to put pressure on the newly appointed Stern, demanding a harsh sentence to comply with the new international treaty to punish airplane hijackers severely. This reaction was partially a response to demands from Poland and the GDR through their proxy, the Soviet Union (Stern 1984, 190). Stern, for his part, was concerned about what he considered undue influence from the U.S. Department of State. According to him such demands would have deprived the defendants of any basic judicial rights due to the special status of the Americans as an occupying force in their sector of Berlin after World War II (1984, 44). To prevent a potentially unjust trial, Stern came up with a highly unconventional solution: he decided to install an U.S.-style jury that consisted of West Berlin citizens, even though Germany had abolished the jury system in 1924 (Moritz 1987, 28).6 Instead of following the German model with a judge, a prosecutor, and a defender, at this trial not only did a jury of West Berlin citizens decide the case, but the accused East German Tiede also had a West German and an American defense lawyer (Stern 1984, 119). The hijacker Tiede furthermore hoped to be able to stay in the West and possibly also expected to become famous for his actions. After the trial according to conversations Tiede had with his mother, whose phone was tapped by the Stasi, he had tried to sell the story rights to the media (AOP 9816/82, vol. 5, 131–38).
The outcome of the trial provoked controversy in both East and West. Ruske did not face serious charges because she had not been directly involved in the hijacking. She and her daughter had stayed in their seats in the airplane during the incident, and neither had carried any real weapons. Ruske had also not threatened the crew or other passengers and was also not offered a public defender after leaving the airplane. This Cold War story culminated in her acquittal and a very light sentence of nine months for Tiede, for having taken hostages only. Because Tiede had been required to stay at the airport throughout the nine-month-long trial, which counted as time served, he was permitted to leave the airport immediately after his sentence was passed (Stern 1984, 370). Typically, the minimum sentence for hijacking an airplane was three years. For this reason both the East German and the Polish television and print media reacted harshly. Reporters described Tiede’s sentence as too lenient and Ruske’s acquittal as a provocation to the GDR, declaring the U.S. court to be an accomplice of the hijackers (HA IX 3910, 110).
The Stasi diligently collected West German newspaper articles about the trial (HA IX 3910, 100). West German publications that were sympathetic to the East German perspective, such as Wahrheit, the newspaper of the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Westberlins (Socialist Unity Party of West Berlin), followed the eastern Communist line of argumentation. Those newspapers and magazines that were not allied with East Germany focused mainly on the fact that it was a highly unusual procedure for the court and an attempt to prevent a case that could set a precedent for prosecuting potential future hijackings (HA IX 3910, 101–2, 105).
In East Germany plans for an official reaction to the trial began shortly before the sentencing, which makes it likely that the authorities were prepared for the verdict and not particularly surprised by it (ZAIG 11454, 367–69). In retaliation for the lenient sentence, the East German media released private details about Tiede and Ruske. For example the GDR media described Tiede as an “antisocial alcoholic” and Ruske as “promiscuous” and also supplied other sordid details about their personal lives in East Germany (HA IX 3910, 110). In the West the press focused on attempting to prevent this case from setting a legal precedent for future hijackings that might lead to lenient sentences. It is quite apparent that Cold War propaganda played a role on both sides, both in the Stasi files and in the West and East German media. The Stasi’s collection of articles about the case includes, for example, one published in the West German Berliner Morgenpost on May 31, 1979, that had appeared right next to short articles about alleged child labor and food shortages in East Germany, which exemplifies the Cold War tensions that existed at the time (HA IX 3910, 105). This compilation of articles emphasizes the differing interpretations of this Cold War event by the media in general, and this particular incident became part of the larger confrontation between the East and the West that was fought not only in court.
The legal and political responses of the East to the outcome of the Ruske and Tiede trials came just one day after the end of the trial against Tiede in West Berlin. Fischer, Ruske’s West German boyfriend, was sentenced to eight years in prison in East Germany for participating in organized crime and forging official travel documents (AOP 9816/82, vol. 2, 453). This harsh sentence was apparently a direct response to the lenient outcome of the trial in West Berlin. However, Fischer only served about one year in prison before he was pardoned and allowed to return to West Berlin. There is no evidence in Fischer’s Stasi file or in media reports about his case revealing whether the West German government, as it had done in many cases, paid to have him released before the end of his sentence or if other considerations played a role (HF 21217/80, vol. 7, 184).
Before Fischer’s trial started, he was interrogated for several months, and he asked repeatedly to see employees of the West German consulate because his health was declining rapidly in jail (HF 21217/80, vol. 7, 45). Yet the influence of the West German government and diplomats on his case before and during the trial was marginal at best because they were not in regular contact with Fischer (HF 21217/80, vol. 6, f4). The Stasi files demonstrate not only the lack of support from the West German government but also the secret service’s concrete interrogation plan that included questions to ask Fischer and anticipated potential responses. Apparently, the strategy of the Stasi to repeatedly ask the same questions worked to some extent because Fischer revealed after several interrogations the names of people who had not been involved in the planning of Ruske’s and Tiede’s flight but were acquaintances the Stasi was not aware of before (HF 21217/80, vol. 2, 555–56). The Stasi was also interested in Fischer’s political activities and connections after it learned that he had been a member of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and active at the local level in the 1970s, even though, according to his statements, he had not played a significant role in it and was no longer an active member (AOP 9816/82, 224).
Although numerous interrogations revealed the entire escape plan of his friends, it appears as if Fischer tried to avoid pulling unrelated people into the plot. He mentioned almost exclusively people who were already in the West, such as Tiede and Ruske, and just few of their friends of whom the Stasi was not already aware. Stasi officers tried to catch Fischer’s attempts to reveal as little as possible by asking him repeatedly to clarify or complete his previous statements at the beginning of several interrogations. Apparently, the officers tried to learn more about some people or events in order to fill existing gaps and thereby solidify their knowledge of the events preceding the hijacking. Whenever the officers suspected that Fischer was concealing information, they told him during the interrogations that they did not believe his statements or asked the exact same question on subsequent days, expecting Fischer to contradict himself (HF 21217/80, vol. 1, 271–74).
Because Fischer had been arrested before the hijacking took place and had no access to media reports while in jail, he had no concrete knowledge about the hijacking of the Polish airliner. When the Stasi questioned him about it, he stated that he would have never agreed to it had he known about Tiede’s plans. The Stasi files contain a personal statement by Fischer to this effect, in which he also wrote that he considered the hijacking an act of terrorism and an appalling crime, stating that he could never live with “such a person who could have committed such a crime,” obviously referring to Ruske (HF 21217/80, vol. 1, 566). The files do not reveal whether Fischer was coerced into writing this statement, but one might assume that he hoped for a more lenient sentence by doing so.
As stated above Fischer’s trial in East Berlin began right after Ruske’s and Tiede’s trial ended in West Berlin in 1979, and the West German government asked for permission to have observers in the courtroom (HF 21217/80, vol. 6, 4). Fischer’s defense lawyer was the well-known East German Wolfgang Vogel, who was also under contract with the West German government and defended thousands of East Germans who were incarcerated in the GDR. Vogel secured their release, and West Germany paid the East German government for allowing them to move to the West (Wölbern 2014, 130). After Fischer was sentenced to eight years in prison, Vogel appealed the verdict (HF 21217/80, vol. 6, 69–72), but the court denied the request (HF 21217/80, vol. 6, 78). Fischer wrote to the West German consulate stating that he hoped for an appeal in cassation because he considered his trial a perversion of the course of justice and his sentence a deterrent rather than a fair punishment (HF 21217/80, vol. 7, 45). This letter never reached the West German consulate. It remained instead in Fischer’s Stasi file, including a note from a Stasi officer declaring that the content of the letter was hostile toward East Germany and that the accusation about the trial was not justified because, as per this note, unjust trials did not exist in the GDR (HF 21217/80, vol. 7, 42). Fischer was pardoned on September 17, 1980, and allowed to return to West Germany on October 2, 1980 (HF 21217/80, vol. 7, 184). Contrary to the statement that he had written in jail rejecting Ruske for her criminal actions, after his release Fischer moved into an apartment with Ruske in West Berlin and married her soon thereafter.
Despite Ruske’s exculpation in West Berlin, the East German prosecution continued to investigate her until she was granted amnesty on November 4, 1987 (IR 3263/88, vol. 11, 525). The Stasi also surveilled Ruske while she lived in West Berlin and even obtained a sketch of her apartment to gain a more complete understanding of her living situation (AOP 9816/82, vol. 1, 273). In East Berlin the Stasi tapped her family’s phone to get more information on Ruske. The wiretapped phone conversations allowed the Stasi to learn about Ruske’s living conditions in the West and her opinions about East Germany. One transcription points out, for example, that Ruske called the GDR “the largest ghetto.” Ruske also stressed that she would never return, regardless of how bad her life in the West might become (AOP 9816/82, vol. 4, 307).
In 2010 Ruske, who still lives in the western part of Berlin, gave an interview to the magazine Der Spiegel in which she sounded dispassionate. Ruske declared that her former life in East Berlin had been happier than her life in the West; this is presumably partially due to the fact that she had left her family and friends behind. Whether Ruske really had been more content in East Berlin and held this opinion the entire time she lived in the West is doubtful. Not only did she go through with her plan to leave the East, but in conversations after the flight, as mentioned above, she called the GDR a “ghetto” to which she would never consider returning.
In her novel Tupolew 134, Strubel contributes to the narratives of this hijacking by introducing the investigation of a fictitious journalist who attempts to reconstruct the events decades later. Her novel is a hybrid escape and spy story that presents a complex tale of an illegal attempt to leave East Germany and the subsequent surveillance of the Stasi to prevent the escape. It offers a literary perspective on the East German society, based on a selection of historical and memory sources. The narrative revolves around the question of how the airplane hijacking can illuminate the larger picture of life in East Germany in the 1970s and how Strubel’s portrayal of East and West German history over a time span of three decades fits into Cold War history.
Strubel consulted various media sources, as the news media reported widely on the hijacking and trial, in both East and West Germany after the event. For example the novel begins with a quote from a Spiegel article published on May 21, 1979.7 Strubel also drew on eyewitnesses’ recollections of the event, most notably that of Stern. In fact Strubel has stated that she first learned about the airplane hijacking of Polish Airlines flight LOT 165 through Stern’s book.8 Strubel relied on Stern’s memoir for information about the planning, hijacking, and trial, all of which serve as points of departure in her attempt to highlight the interaction between historic events and the (un)reliability of memory.
The female protagonist Katja Siems, who resembles Ingrid Ruske, works in a large truck factory in Ludwigsfelde, south of Berlin, where she gets to know the West German engineer Hans Meerkopf, the literary equivalent of Horst Fischer, who has business dealings with a branch of his company in East Germany. Unlike Ruske Siems does not have a daughter, but like Ruske she begins a relationship with Meerkopf, which leads her to consider fleeing to the West to be with him. As in the real case, Meerkopf does not arrive at their arranged meeting point in Poland to deliver the West German travel documents. Lutz Schaper, who represents Tiede, and Siems presume that he has most likely been taken into custody by the East German or Polish authorities. While the Stasi is informed about their plan, readers do not learn whether the Stasi learned about the flight attempt on its own through informants or if acquaintances might have known the plan and betrayed the coconspirators to the secret service. In the novel Strubel suggests that Siems’s friend Verona may have denounced Meerkopf to the East German secret service because she knew that the Stasi was spying on Siems. It is also likely that Siems’s companion, Schaper, might have reported Meerkopf to the East German authorities (2004, 30–32). These insinuations demonstrate real and persistent suspicions and mistrust toward friends, family members, and colleagues in East German society. Although surveillance was expected in Strubel’s novel, it does not play a central role. The author chooses to focus instead on the monotonous life in East Germany at the time of the escape and the protagonists’ recollections many years later.
As in the actual hijacking, Schaper and Siems follow through on their amateurish plan to hijack a Polish airplane and use an eighty-year-old blank-cartridge pistol. But in the novel, the flight attendants and the pilot instruct Schaper on how to successfully hijack the plane so that the crew can land at the West Berlin airport Tempelhof instead of at Schönefeld in East Berlin (Strubel 2004, 141–47). The hijacking is not described as a particularly dramatic act, emphasizing the notion that Schaper was not a violent and aggressive person, which resonates to some degree with Judge Stern’s recollections in his memoir—a source that, as mentioned above, Strubel had consulted.
In contrast to the bureaucratic account of the Stasi files, the novel introduces each chapter with one of the spatial levels “oben” (up), designating events taking place in 2003, “unten” (down), describing the period of the flight 1978–79 and “ganz unten” (far down), depicting the time prior to 1978, as well as the term Schacht (manhole, pit) which connects the three other levels and depicted memories. Strubel also introduces a narrative frame projected twenty-five years after the escape took place. This narrative voice tries to bring to light the seemingly historically impenetrable situation by means of the conversations with the young journalist who tries to reconstruct the occurrences around the hijacking after German unification. Strubel’s novel exemplifies that history and memory are an open and ongoing process and that fiction writers do not have to offer historical accuracy in terms of time, place, and character. By the form of narration she uses, Strubel emphasizes that memories are not necessarily linear, and the novel cannot provide a complete description of the events. Strubel’s narrative style provides overlapping versions of the hijacking event but does not favor any of the protagonists’ recollections. This rather fragmented depiction resembles the production of collective memories that are often shaped by the news media to discuss and alter personal and collective memories (Erll 2005, 251).
Strubel emphasizes early in her text how unreliable personal memories are when Siems meets with a young journalist in 2003 who is unfamiliar with living conditions in the GDR and who had wanted to write about the hijacking twenty-five years earlier. Siems invites the journalist to consider different versions of past events in the course of their conversations and encourages her to switch seamlessly between them at any time. Siems reminds the journalist to trust neither Siems’s memories nor those of other eyewitnesses with whom she intends to speak. Not only does she consider their memories unreliable, but she also asserts that the protagonists themselves still do not completely understand what happened: “They go up and down and very far down and up, and on each floor stand those who don’t know where to go. They stare from all three levels of time. They guard memory. The future is a root that springs from memory. You should not trust me. You might feel betrayed in your pursuit of truth / Truth” (Strubel 2004, 12–13). The novel does not reveal an absolute truth but rather expresses the complicated relationship between history and memory. The author downplays the value of truth demonstratively in her fictional work and favors ambiguous forms of cultural memories (Assmann and Frevert 1999, 50).
Metahistorical texts question the linearity of history and show the construction of memory, identity, and history through the literary structure itself (Nünning 1999, 28–29). By using this self-reflexive structure in Tupolew 134, which calls into question the retroactive construction of meaning, Strubel is able to show multiple perspectives on the events, both temporal and spatial. As her text focuses on before, during, and after the hijacking of LOT 165 and the spatial levels mentioned above, it allows for various interpretations of the events that question the official GDR version of this hijacking. On the other hand, readers might also question the intentions of the fictional West German who offers Siems a means to a less restricted existence, although Siems concisely and rather dispassionately expresses her views on life in East Germany: “I don’t enjoy living like this anymore” (Strubel 2004, 36, 85). The protagonist’s statement seems to express general resentment, rather than grievances referring to political suppression or lack of freedom to travel, as one would expect in a novel on the GDR.9
By avoiding overly strong binary differences between East and West, Strubel shows a new and creative way to write about the German past (Norman 2012, 69). As her text does not favor Siems’s perspective over those of other characters, Strubel goes beyond Paul Cooke’s notion of “writing back,” which describes the way many East German authors purportedly respond to the West German majority discourse by insisting on a distinct East German identity after German unification (2005, 14). The author does not simply deny differences between East and West German society; instead, she emphasizes that even if people share similar experiences, one cannot presume that they will share the same interpretation of past events, as is the case of the hijacking event. It is therefore difficult to determine why some past occurrences become part of this collective memory and other, equally important events do not (Kansteiner 2002, 192). Strubel’s novel addresses the East and West German justice systems and the recording and processing of memories from the 1970s to the present by underscoring the “constructedness” of history and presenting the formation of and relationship between collective and cultural memory. This turns out to be an effective and creative approach to dealing with and writing about the German past as well as to critiquing discourses on the formation of memories on a personal and societal level that does not rely on Stasi archival files.
The Stasi files describing the hijacking of LOT 165, Stern’s memoir, and Strubel’s novel allow detailed multifaceted insights into the life of East German citizens, as well as the oppressive surveillance they had to endure during the Cold War. All these accounts of the escape and hijacking story illustrate the degree of difficulty and danger East Germans faced when trying to emigrate to the West—whether through legal or illegal means. The Stasi files and media reports included in this discussion of German history as background for the novel Tupolew 134 underscore how easily people could be branded as disloyal and treated as potential enemies of the state if they attempted to leave. The state perceived opinions that differed from the official doctrine as opposition to the government, as they betrayed the ideals of a socialist society that one was expected to consider more just than any other existing system. There was but little space for public debate or difference of opinion. The opportunities for freedom of speech and travel significantly decreased after the Berlin Wall was built in 1961. Furthermore, the presence of the Stasi emphasized the mistrust of the East German government toward its citizens. In the case of Ruske, Fischer, and Tiede, the Stasi collected an immense amount of data, processed it, and had it readily available should the opportunity arise. Yet looking back at all those resources employed in the scrutiny of this event and of East German citizens in general, the Stasi appears to be part of the failure of an oppressive regime that could not fulfill the needs of its own citizens. Instead of allowing open debate and the freedom to travel, the East German government established an extensive surveillance system to create intimidation and suspicion. The constant concern that the Stasi might spy on individuals’ everyday activities undermined the coherence of East German society. This partially explains why the Stasi became a prominent target for East German citizens who demonstrated against the government and its institutions in the fall of 1989, and it is remarkable that the formerly powerful Stasi was disbanded without significant resistance within a few months in early 1990.
1. This chapter is part of a larger study on the surveillance the Stasi conducted on this airplane hijacking.
2. For other depictions of this event, see also Leo Penn’s feature film Judgment in Berlin (1988).
3. The commanding officer Lukomski stated after the hijacking: “After crossing the border, the flight mechanic approached me to inform me that we had a hijacker on board who held the stewardess at gunpoint and demanded to land in West Berlin. The hijacker threatened that if this demand were not met, he would shoot the stewardess. After receiving this information, I gave the flight mechanic a sign with my hand to move because he blocked my view of the kitchen area and then I saw Ewa Przybysz sitting on the floor. Above her stood a man who had grabbed her hair with one hand; in the other hand I noticed a metal object that was pointed at her head. . . . In this situation I made a hand gesture that he should come to the cockpit in order to see what kind of weapon the hijacker had and [I] also considered disarming him, but he shook his head to let me know that he would not move” (HDAT/IR 3263/88, vol. 10, 82–83). All translations from German to English are mine.
4. Later, during the interrogation, Lukomski no longer used the term “terrorist” and described Tiede as a hijacker.
5. Complete copies of Tiede’s and Ruske’s American arrest warrants and complaints for violation are included in the Stasi files (HA IX 3910, 37–39).
6. Stern later mentioned that it would have been ironic if a Jewish American judge like himself, whose family had been forced to flee Germany in the 1930s, had treated defendants more than thirty years after the end of World War II not unlike the Nazi judicial system did during the Third Reich (1984, 95–96). On the thirtieth anniversary of the hijacking in 2008, Deutsche Welle interviewed Stern about his recollections and role in the trial. During this interview he expressed his strong discontent with the circumstances of the trial and compared the defendants’ situation to that of prisoners in Guantanamo after September 11, 2001 (Fong 2008).
7. See, for example, “Hören und sehen” 1979.
8. The author revealed this information during a discussion I had with her at the Women in German Conference in Shawnee, Pennsylvania, October 27, 2012.
9. Strubel stated in an interview that Siems’s desire to leave East Germany in the novel is less motivated by a lack of freedom but rather is due to her monotonous experience of everyday life there (Strubel in Lorenzen 2005).
BStU, MfS, AOP 9816/82, 5 vols. (Referenced as AOP.)
BStU, MfS, AP 9648/80. (Referenced as AP.)
BStU, MfS, AU 3263/88, 11 vols. (Referenced as HDAT/IR.)
BStU, MfS, AU 21217/80, 7 vols. (Referenced as HF.)
BStU, MfS, HA VI 1574. (Referenced as HA VI.)
BStU, MfS, HA IX 3910. (Referenced as HA IX.)
BStU, MfS, HA XIX 4985. (Referenced as HA XIX.)
BStU, MfS, ZAIG 2859. (Referenced as ZAIG.)
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