Of Sport, State, and Stasi:
Socialism with an Un-Beautiful Face
Back again in the so-called Heldenstadt (city of heroes), as the faded bumper stickers on a few cars remind me. Is the word now tinged with irony? Though the city is in the middle of a construction boom, Leipzigers are the first to tell you that the city’s heroic image has been badly tarnished in the last few years.
A warm mid-September afternoon in the smoggy city center. I take a seat in one of the cafes that dot the streets near the University. Students sit inside with books in their laps, talking animatedly to one another. Across the street is the Leipzig railway station—before the war, it was the biggest in Europe—and the Gewandhaus, where the Leipzig orchestra plays. Kurt Masur, who helped negotiate with police to hold their fire against Leipzig protesters before the city’s first mass demonstration—four years ago come October 9—is still conducting at the Gewandhaus. Otherwise, everything seems to have changed—the Leipzig smog excepted.
Ute, a 23-year-old, first-year Germanistik student at the University, enters and greets me. Once an accomplished teenage ice skater in a top Sportschule—indeed, at 16, a young Privilegierte (privileged one) on her way to joining the elite traveling Sportkader—Ute is still slim and athletic. She has come to tell me about her expulsion almost a decade ago from the elect Red circle, the causes of which, she told me on the phone, “I have lately been brooding about incessantly.” She did not elaborate. I know only that the saga of her youthful rebellion against the State and her struggle to leave the DDR in 1988/89 had begun soon thereafter.
Reared in Weissenfels, a town near Leipzig, Ute was born into a family of athletes. In the 1950s, her father competed on the DDR national ice hockey team and her mother was a top handball player and member of the DDR national championship squad; Ute’s older brother, Dieter, reached the Thuringia championship soccer team. Sports was the family’s joy and preoccupation; in hindsight, Ute allows that her parents, who were unpolitical and little interested in affairs outside their immediate circle, turned to sports as a respite or even escape from Cold War agitprop and the ideological trench warfare between the early postwar DDR and Bundesrepublik.
“My parents simply wanted to live in peace,” Ute says in a tired voice. She takes out a cigarette and lights up. “They never spoke for or against the state. They were never much interested in Party pronouncements.” Ute’s father joined the LDPD, the voice of liberal democrats in the DDR bloc party system. Like the other parties outside the SED, however, its effective purpose was merely to serve Scheindemokratie; it had no real power whatsoever. Ute remembers that her father had very little to do with the LDPD. “Perhaps that’s why he was willing to enter it,” she says.
Ute’s father, who died in 1987, had led an unusual life of relative independence. Upon gaining his Abitur in the early 1950s, he could have gone on to higher education, but his own father had owned a small grocery store, and the state, after nationalizing the property, permitted the son and his wife to administer it under the auspices of the HO (Handelsorganisation, state business organization).
Ute attended the POS in Weimar and participated in after-school activities, especially sports, on the grounds of the local Pioneer House, where the Young Pioneers and older Thälmann Pioneers played after school. Strongly influenced by her father, and with his coaching, Ute’s entry into competitive skating began at the tender age of seven, first in roller skating and then in ice skating. Despite the fact that her legs were of unequal length—which necessitated inserting a special right heel to even her leg length, creating an enormous strain on her young body—Ute dominated her rivals. Along with the other skater “prospects” in her school, Ute trained every day, often traveling to special ice rinks in other cities to compete. Skating was a passion that consumed all her free time and won her wide recognition; she became her class’s “Sport Representative” in the Thälmann Pioneers and later in the FDJ.
Over the years, Ute watched, enviously, as friends left the POS for Sportschulen—potential athletic stars started professional training at different ages, depending upon the state’s determination as to when intensive practice and expert coaching was advisable. Gymnasts started in 4th grade, swimmers in 5th grade; ice skaters, whose talents usually matured somewhat later, typically did not enter Sportschule until 7th or 8th grade.
Her own career began at the age of 12. At the Thuringia qualifying competition for ice skating, Ute expertly turned a triple Salchow, earning one of the top scores. She and her parents were thrilled when she was invited to attend the major district Sportschule in Erfurt, even if it was 60 miles from home. The invitation’s language evinced the DDR’s determination to endow this honor with the prestige of tradition; in 1981, like a distinguished scholar “called” to a chaired professorship at a leading German university, Ute, along with a dozen other female ice skaters from her region, was “called” or “nominated” to the Max Norgler KJS (Kinder- und Jugendschule), a Sportschule named after a KPD member and athlete who had died in a Nazi concentration camp.
The Erfurt Sportschule, which trained 900 students in 8th to 10th grades for all the major Olympic sports, was essentially an elite boarding school for athletes. Faculty and staff lived “on campus.” Regular POS subjects were also taught, but these were secondary; the coaches usually doubled as teachers and considered the former role primary. Each athlete kept a health journal and received a full checkup every month at the health center on the premises—the medical care was the best that the state had to offer. Athletes trained year-round; in the off-season, Ute’s group of six skaters ran 15 km per day. Parental visits were limited to an occasional weekend; students could return home for just two weeks in the summer, during which they were also assigned workouts.
The daily regimen was strict:
Six A.M.: Reveille. (Ute still remembers with distaste the shrill female voice “brightly urging us to ‘Rise to a new day’!”—which uncannily evokes for me the morning warm-up drill instructress from Orwell’s 1984.)
Six-thirty to nine A.M.: Ice training.
Nine A.M. to one P.M.: School.
Two to six P.M.: Ice training.
Seven to ten P.M.: Study hall.
Ten P.M.: Lights out.
“I soon noticed that academics meant very little,” Ute recalls. Every athlete had to belong to the FDJ; “study hall” was often given over to FDJ meetings. Teachers, all of them Party members, would lead discussions devoted to news analysis. Topics included freedom fighting in Brüderländer such as Nicaragua, western imperialism in El Salvador, and the American invasion of Grenada.
“Sometimes I felt like disagreeing just because of the arrogant attitudes of some of the discussion leaders,” Ute says. “But I never said anything in public—it was pointless to say anything. It would just turn into a headache.” Ute judged that it was better just to keep quiet and say little—silence was usually interpreted as agreement, and that would end a meeting sooner. “Besides, nobody really cared all that much about our ideological attitudes. The school cared about sports performances; only the older athletes had to support the state publicly.” At 16, Ute couldn’t say anything against the state, she says. “But I could be more or less indifferent and not get into any trouble at all. That was my father’s approach—and my own.”
Ute says that western TV was forbidden in the Spoitschule; social activities were almost nil, limited to a film or a dance every other week in the cafeteria.
“Nobody, as far I recall, ever said, ‘I want to watch western TV like other kids,’ ” Ute says. “I don’t remember anybody ever having a western bent at all. Not that anybody ever said that Der Rote Oktober [Red October, a group that specialized in ideological rock] was their favorite group either! Their music was too political. But the Puhdys, Silly, and Pankow—I liked them, and so did many others.
“Nobody ever complained. We all knew why we were there. To become Hochleistungssportkäder [top performance athletes]. People like Katharina Witt—the ‘ice princess’—were national celebrities. We watched them on TV. The coaches knew her; they held up athletes like her as a model. ‘Socialism with a beautiful face,’ my brother Dieter and his friends called her. We knew what the rewards were. And the coaches and teachers reminded us every week that we were the Privilegierten. Even if we didn’t always feel like it, we believed that we were the elite.”
The peak moment in Ute’s athletic career came when she made the semi-finals in her age group in the 1984 German Track and Sport Tournament, the DDR youth Spartakaiad, held every other year in Leipzig. Then came the kind of injury endemic to high-performance athletes. Attending a two-week training camp in Nordhausen with other top athletes, she trained harder than ever and injured her comparatively weak right leg. But her “perspective”—the word used in DDR sports jargon for one’s Sportkader prospects—was still “good”; her coaches told her to rest. After several weeks, when her condition had still not improved, surgeons operated on her leg. The operation was successful; her hospital physician informed her that she could resume training within two months.
When she returned to the Sportschule, she began light training, hobbling around on her cast. But soon Ute’s idyll was shattered. One day the head of the ice skating department called her in to see him. Her injury, he said, and her less-than-stellar—though still strong—performances forced him, reluctantly, to an unpleasant decision: she had “no perspective any more”; she would be dropped from her skater group immediately and put in the 10th-grade exit class for six months, after which she would be released. And so, not long after the February 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo, in which the lissome 18-year-old Katharina Witt won her first Olympic gold meal in figure skating, Ute was out.
Ute was shattered. At 16, she felt she had “no perspective” anymore in life itself; all that she had worked toward, for almost a decade, had suddenly dissolved.
Why? Ute asked herself again and again. Why?! Just a few months ago, her “perspective” had appeared rosy. Why now?!
She couldn’t come up with a good answer.
But her father arrived a few days later with the probable one: Dieter, 20, already in trouble for expressing public criticism of DDR life, had officially joined the Lutheran Church, had been confirmed in the faith, and (as an act of solidarity with several friends jailed on political grounds) had applied last month to emigrate. (Both Lutheran and Catholic dioceses could sponsor a limited number of emigrants from the DDR on religious grounds.)
DDR athletes had to come from families unswervingly loyal to the state and had to be without relatives in the “KA.” Ute was being punished for her brother’s defiance.
Ute was orientierungslos (adrift). Having finished her ten years of required schooling, she thought vaguely of getting a job near her parents in Weissenfels. She also applied, however, to the Friedrich Schiller EOS in Weimar, one of the best—and “Reddest”—schools in the DDR. Under ordinary circumstances, she should have been denied admission to the Schiller EOS because of her brother; but she guesses, in hindsight, that the EOS simply failed to contact the Sportschule for her updated records after her brother applied for emigration. So, upon receiving her letter of acceptance for 11th grade, Ute decided to pursue her studies for two more years and gain her Abitur, which would improve her job prospects.
It was one of those inexplicable screw-ups so characteristic of bureaucracy—and of totalitarianism generally, where so much was being watched and recorded that accumulation far exceeded the capacity for assimilation and action: the inefficiency of paranoiac hyper-surveillance.
Even now, Ute recalls her first weeks in the EOS with anguish. Not only was she far behind her age group academically and socially, but she was having heart and circulatory problems, the result of the abrupt halt of her training regimen and a too-short tapering-off period in the exit class. Moreover, when she thought of her old athletic acquaintances, most of whose “perspectives” were still bright, Ute felt pangs of envy for what might have been. Her Erfurt group of skaters would, in the next four years, produce a Winter Olympic champion, a World Championship gold medalist, and a runner-up in the European Championships. And Ute had been at their level.
Still, she discovered—in surprise, she says—that her first, main, and enduring feeling was simply one of relief: the pressure to perform was now off; at last she had the freedom of other girls. “And the freedom to smoke a cigarette!” she adds with a satisfied smirk, exhaling a long stream of smoke. Her feeling of Glück im Unglück (lucky misfortune) began after the DDR followed the USSR’s dictates and refused to travel to Los Angeles for the 1984 Olympics. She recalls how older sports acquaintances, a few of whom were already assured a place on the DDR Olympic team, were devastated by the Soviet-led boycott.
“All that sacrifice, all that training—for what?!” Ute says. “I didn’t want that kind of restricted life any more. But it’s only in hindsight that I’ve realized what I missed by going to the Sportschule. I didn’t have a normal youth at all. I didn’t know how to relate to people outside sports, I didn’t know how to relate except as a competitor! I never had a boyfriend—I never even had a date!—until I was 17. When I was small, everyone was always saying, ‘Your school years will be the most wonderful time of your life.’ But, no, that wasn’t so for me. I had to catch up in practically everything.”
And she grew appalled as she understood better the scope and nature of the DDR drug program for athletes. She says that she herself never took them; DDR ice skaters did not receive hormones until after 10th grade. But she had noticed—without yet fully understanding—the effects of drugs on other athletes at Erfurt.
“Although we ice skaters got only vitamins, I noticed right away that something was terribly wrong with the girl swimmers,” Ute recalls. “At 14, they had shoulders as broad and muscular as adult men—and voices just as deep, which was doubtless why the coaches wouldn’t allow most of them to give interviews. Before I left Erfurt, one older girl visiting an old teacher told me about how she was taking drugs to delay or advance her periods according to scheduled competitions. Later, I heard that most of the same things were occurring with the ice skaters. One girl even told me that the discus throwers and shot putters were instructed to get pregnant several weeks before an international track meet to increase their weight and strength—and thereby their throwing capacity. And then, of course, as soon as the track meet was over, they got abortions.”
Ute falls silent. She stubs out her cigarette. She shakes her head.
“Unimaginable, isn’t it? And I never heard—either at Erfurt or afterwards—of any athlete refusing the drugs or other coaching orders,” she says. “I’m glad I didn’t have to face that. At 16, I wanted to win just as badly as anyone else. According to the swimmers, the coaches told you it was necessary for top perfor mance. Whether it was vitamins or hormones, you took them. You didn’t question anything at that age—or even later. The coaches and doctors were prescribing it, the Olympic stars were doing it. They were our mentors and our models.”
Complicating Ute’s adjustment to a normal life, however, was her concern for Dieter, who had emigrated to West Berlin in late spring 1984, just before Ute left the Sportschule. Even though she was no longer in training, the school would not allow her to see him off at the Weimar railway station.
“Suddenly he was gone,” Ute says. “I cried for weeks—I had hardly seen him since I was 13—and now, just as I was coming home and starting a new life, I thought I might never see him again.”
She and her family did, but only in the face of strong opposition from the state—and even their own relatives. One of her father’s cousins was a Leipzig city councilman and a leading regional Party man; he warned them to cut off all contact with “that black sheep” in West Berlin. Another cousin, who taught history in a Dresden college, said the same. Both families broke off all contact with Ute’s family.
And only via elaborate subterfuges did she and her parents manage to visit Dieter, stratagems which, as their Stasi file would later show, did not go unnoticed by the authorities. As it turned out, they were right to suspect that their incoming mail from the West was periodically read by Stasi agents. And even if their business phone was not closely monitored, they, like all DDR callers, had to register to phone West Berlin, and the wait often took a full day.
The conditions were difficult. Dieter could not return to the DDR—nor, of course, could his family visit him in West Berlin. But working through Czech acquaintances, Ute’s parents arranged family get-togethers in Karlovy Vary—still known to Germans as Karlsbad of the Sudetenland—a famous Bohemian health spa town of 25,000 in the corner of Czechoslovakia closest to the DDR, about two hours by car from Weissenfels. On the pretense that they were “taking a cure” or visiting friends taking one, many DDR emigrants would rendezvous with their families in this region; the local Czechs specialized in discreet German-German contacts—and turned a tidy profit at it.
“Every spring and fall—and on a few other occasions—we would drive to Karlsbad, or nearby, to meet with Dieter,” Ute says. “Our border police were mean—they knew what was going on over there, even if they couldn’t get the Czechs to do much about it and didn’t know in each case when DDR families were meeting secretly. Police supervision at the border was draconian—I would always sit up front and flirt with them. Sometimes it worked. But sometimes it didn’t—and, on those occasions, they would turn the car inside out, often for an hour or two, searching every nook and cranny, even our clothing. And searching for what? Nothing! And remember—we weren’t even traveling to the West those times. Our destination was another ‘socialist Brotherland.’ They knew that they couldn’t prevent us from traveling to Czechoslovakia. But they could make it so unpleasant that we’d think twice about going again.
“Then, once we got there, the Czechs milked us good—DM 20 per day just for the rooms. You had to pay DM. My brother always brought the money and paid for all of us. We only stayed two or three days, Friday to Sunday—we didn’t want to attract undue attention. My father had to be back to open the store and I had school or work. A few times, though, given his schedule, we could only see my brother on a weekend that conflicted with my round of duty in the FDJ harvest campaign, when my group had to gather potatoes or beets or something. But I skipped it and saw him—though if the FDJ had known why I was absent, there would have been consequences.”
A whole new world opened for Ute through her infrequent contacts with her brother. He enlightened her about western music. He spoke authoritatively about western books and dismissed most DDR literature as “Party trash.” Although he had once been an excellent athlete himself, he now condemned DDR sports as blatant military education—though he did not defend NATO missiles or western capitalism. Ute had never met anyone who was “against the state” before. For her, Dieter became a rebel hero.
After gaining her Abitur from the EOS in 1986, Ute moved with a girlfriend to Leipzig and applied to study to become an ice-skating coach at the renowned German College of Physical Culture, the leading center for sports research in Eastern Europe and the only state university in the world exclusively devoted to physical education and sports medicine. Although she performed excellently on the entrance exams, she was refused admission—even though a fellow EOS applicant with lower scores and no Sportschule background was admitted.
“That was it. That time I had no doubt that the reason was my brother,” Ute says. “Before that, I was still willing to compromise with the state. That experience was my breakthrough—and the beginning of my break.”
The combination of the meetings with Dieter and this latest rejection quickly radicalized Ute. At first her rebellion chiefly took aesthetic form. By day, she worked in a “dead-end job” as a waitress near the University; on the weekends and at night she drew stares on the street, and sometimes hostile treatment from Leipzig Vopos, for dressing in black with a fiery orange punk haircut: In the DDR of the mid-1980s, such a gesture was understood by everyone as not just a cultural statement, but a protest against the state. That was especially the case in Ute’s circle, which included members of a subversive youth group that dubbed itself the Geschwister Scholl (Scholl Siblings), named after the dissenting Munich University students, led by a brother and sister later executed by the Nazis.
By 1988, at 20, Ute had decided: She too would emigrate, even though success would mean—as in the case of her brother—never seeing her friends and parents again—except on brief, furtive visits to Czechoslovakia. She planned to expedite her emigration application via the same route that Dieter had taken: she too would cultivate church “sponsorship” to emigrate. But she—like her brother—had no interest in Christianity as a religion; she had never had any contact with it: the Sportschule generally prohibited Christians, and few Christians were accepted to the EOS. Although the ideology of M-L hadn’t sunk in deeply, atheism had.
As had a pragmatic political sense: Ute saw that the churches had some “free space”—and she realized that they were the way out. So she began attending discussion meetings at the St. Nicholas Church in Leipzig, and also the “Monday Circle” meetings during her visits to Weimar, both of which were devoted to nonreligious topics such as disarmament, ecology, and conscientious objection to military service; both of which were attended by many nonbelievers. She expressed an interest in being confirmed in Weimar, as her brother had been.
To Ute’s surprise, Dieter discouraged her, convinced that the maneuver wouldn’t work a second time. Doubtless the Stasi kept some kind of tabs on him; the state, if not the church, would balk this second time around. So Ute decided in late 1988 to pursue a different route to freedom, the only other way out short of going to jail and hoping that you would be freigekauft by the West Germans. An old EOS classmate of hers had met and fallen in love with a West German visitor and had been allowed to emigrate; Ute now determined to do the same.
Waitressing at the restaurant, Ute relates with a grin, she would chat up West German visitors who were male and unmarried—she was careful to ascertain their status—and explore whether her “rescuer” was truly “emigration material.” The state generally assumed that sudden, grand East German–West German romances were bogus; Ute would have to meet a man willing to court her, write and telephone her often, visit Leipzig regularly, and marry her. The longer and better documented the courtship, the better the odds of state approval for emigration. To leave the DDR by this route, Ute would have to fill out a lengthy questionnaire about the origin and course of their relationship, complete with detailed written proof of its authenticity (love letters, logs of phone calls, etc.). It was an invasive procedure that invited the state into one’s innermost private affairs, a bureaucratic nightmare designed to intimidate and to discourage the very thought of emigration. Ute would have to expose everything to the state—which she knew she could do only if the relationship were a theatrical fabrication. Ute was resolved. Belatedly, Dieter offered to find a partner among his West Berlin circle, but Ute declined the favor: She would conduct her “man hunt” herself.
And almost right away, she did meet her “rescuer”: Heinz. Indeed the circumstances of the courtship surprised her—and tempered her growing cynicism about life.
Heinz was a Germanistik student in Göttingen. He lived just across the border in West Germany and was able to visit every month. She found herself, at the end of their first lengthy conversation, telling him the truth. She didn’t want to share her life with him, she just wanted to emigrate.
“He was just so good,” she recalls. “He said, ‘I understand your situation. I just want to help you.’ I loved him—and still love him—for that. He said he had met ex-DDR students in Göttingen. He was willing to phone and visit me every month—for years, if it meant that. We never slept together—he did it simply out of human feeling.”
At first, Ute says, she held back a great deal from Heinz—even worrying that he might be a spy. But she soon came to think of him as a “second brother.” His charity and power of empathy, Ute acknowledges, was one of those “kleine Heldentaten” (small heroic acts) that eventually brought down the DDR regime.
As it turned out, the regime fell before the scheme of Ute and Heinz was put to the test. The couple had agreed to “date” at least a year before Ute submitted the emigration application. But before the year elapsed, indeed just as Ute was starting to collect all the materials for the application, candles began to light up the Leipzig night, as thousands of marchers took control of the Leipzig streets. And on October 9, 1989, Ute, along with some acquaintances from St. Nicholas Church with whom she had stayed in touch even after dropping her plans for confirmation, fell in among their ranks.
And then—still an unexpected development just days earlier—the Wall fell.
Ute was free at last. But now that she could visit her brother, and even live in the west, she decided—perhaps paradoxically—to stay put after all. Now that she was free to travel, she didn’t need to emigrate. Thousands of East Germans, including many of her friends and coworkers, were now migrating westward and enrolling in overcrowded western German universities. Along with two close friends, however, Ute applied to study Germanistik in Leipzig, rented a student apartment, and matriculated in September to the Karl-Marx Universität.
“Maybe it’s all been for the best,” Ute says. “Now I can read and study any writer I want. If I had gone to university in the DDR days, it would have been so limiting. As a Germanistik student, I could have studied German classicism and remained somewhat outside politics, or I could have pursued socialist realism: there was nothing outside or between them.”
A long pause. We smile together. The end of Ute’s cigarette glows in the twilight. As she starts to speak, a waitress places a small candle stand on our table.
“But it’s not entirely a ‘Happy End,’ ” Ute says abruptly, sharply accenting the English phrase. Her lips turn downward. She takes out a single piece of paper and turns it face down. Just this month, her brother—who now lives in eastern Berlin—received his Stasi file, which ran to more than 200 pages. She has brought a page of it to show me. Even though her family had always assumed that the Stasi kept tabs on Dieter, they’d had no idea of the extent of the surveillance. But now they know. Friends and classmates had spied on Dieter; even the family next door in Weissenfels had reported on her family to the Stasi. Ute, of course, is also mentioned frequently in Dieter’s file.
“They knew everything about Dieter’s life in West Berlin!” Ute says angrily. “Everything! Our ‘friends’ told them about his whereabouts at every turn! They regarded him as a Verbindungsmann (go-between), a poisonous influence infecting the family back home with ‘western’ values and attitudes.”
Ute hands me the page. Peppered with grammatical and spelling errors, it is written in what Ute calls “proper socialist Deutsch.” The file refers repeatedly to Dieter as “der E.” I bend over the page and read silently:
Der E. was in Amsterdam last week with two of his mates. They met up with a couple of other expellees from the Republik. . . . Der E. is still working parttime in the [old age] home and at the theater. According to Stück [a cover name], der E. has broken off with Anke and now often spends nights with an actress named Gisela. She is 25, a student at the FU. According to Stück, . . .
Ute takes a deep breath and exhales. “We know who ‘Stück’ [drama, play] is,” she says in an even voice. “A buddy of my brother from school in Weimar, a ganz labiler Mensch [quite unstable fellow] who had psychological problems after his release from prison. We’ve known him for ten years. And he was just one of their informants.”
At least 50, possibly up to 100, friends and acquaintances—including members of the church groups in which she and Dieter discussed sensitive political issues—informed on Ute’s family over a seven-year period, she says. Some of them are easy to identify: they are listed by name in Dieter’s Stasi file. Those listed by name were not, technically speaking, Stasi informants. They did not sign contracts; they merely reported occasionally to Stasi agents and received token payments or favors. Professional informants, i.e., the actual IM—such as ‘Stück’—received cover names, signed contracts specifying their services and responsibilities, and were well-compensated. The Stasi employed more than 200,000 collaborators, who carried various titles, known (according to status and function) by acronyms such as FIM (the IM supervisors)—and compensated accordingly.
Ute has applied for her own file, which may take months to receive. She has no doubt that it includes reports from her Sportschule and EOS classmates and teachers. She talks about the terrible feelings of anger and rage that grip her and her brother, who confided in friends, only to be deceived and betrayed by them.
Can you possibly forgive them? I ask.
“I don’t know, I really don’t know,” Ute says in a low voice. She falls silent. The candle flame dances brightly as a soft breeze sweeps by.
She is lucky compared to some people, Ute says. We talk of Stasi victims such as dissident Heinz Eggert, a Lutheran minister spied on by his friends, falsely accused of child molestation, committed to mental asylums, and then pumped with drugs by a trusted doctor to disable his will. Perhaps even more unfortunate was peace activist Vera Wollenberger, imprisoned and then exiled from the DDR, and now a member of the Green Party in the Bundestag, who found out that her own husband had reported on her to the Stasi for more than a decade.
“I think I’d kill myself if I discovered something like that,” Ute whispers.
And we talk of the newly discovered collaborators, among them leading political and literary figures such as former DDR premier Lothar de Mazière, now retired; Brandenburg Prime Minister Manfred Stolpe, still in office; avant-garde poet Sascha Anderson, now in disgrace; embattled playwright Heiner Müller; and writer Christa Wolf.
The news about Wolf has hit Ute hardest. Wolf, a graduate of Karl-Marx Universitat in the 1950s, had been one of Ute’s heroines—until January of this year, when Wolf admitted her work as IM “Margarete” during 1959–63 and then exiled herself to sunny Santa Monica as a guest of that wonderful socialist institution, the Getty Foundation.
Ute had defended Wolf against critics until recently, she said. Now Ute feels confused. Her contempt is mingled with pity: the Stasi had also spied throughout the 1970s on Wolf and her husband, referring to the couple as “Forked Tongue.” Does that even the scale? Ute feels embarrassed for having spoken so passionately about Wolf’s integrity, and has trouble even reading her anymore. Having always valued Wolf’s “authenticity” (Wolf’s signature term) and approached her as a mor alist and critic of Party orthodoxy, Ute now finds that knowledge of Wolf’s early IM years acts like “a dirty filter that discolors everything I’ve read by her.”
I mention the problem of how to conduct “de-Stasification.” Ute sighs. She has no solutions—or even suggestions, she says.
“What good does revenge do?” She can only speak personally, she says. “It’s hard to trust, it’s hard to believe anymore. Even now, I don’t know how many—if any—of the friends with whom I’m still in touch betrayed me.”
Ute pauses. She picks up the piece of paper and folds it gently.
“ ‘The past is not dead; it is not even past.’ ” Ute is quoting—the sentence, she says, is the first line of Patterns of Childhood, Christa Wolf’s 1976 novel about her upbringing in Nazi Germany and her agonized struggle to work through it.
“Often I find myself speculating, spinning conspiracy theories out of innocent remarks,” Ute says. “Or are they innocent? . . . I try to understand, but. . . .”
Ute’s voice trails off. “Take the example of my family’s next-door neighbors in Weissenfels. I haven’t seen them since we got the Stasi file. But my mother, who had been trying to hold it all inside, had an argument with the wife one day last month. She got so mad that she finally told the woman off and called her a ‘slimy Stasi weasel.’ The woman denied it indignantly. My mother went straight upstairs and came back down and showed the woman several pages of Dieter’s file that cited her by name. The woman turned white. She and my mother haven’t spoken since then. They catch each other’s eye on the street occasionally and quickly look away.
“I don’t know how I’ll react when I see this woman. Her husband drinks, she has no children, she is utterly alone. I think she used to gossip with my mother for hours partly out of loneliness, not just to report to the Stasi. I think she wanted attention and recognition. That may be why she was open to the Stasi’s overtures. She wasn’t a Party member—she wasn’t political at all. It was exciting and flattering for her to meet young Stasi men, have them taking down her words, and giving her little favors in return.”
Ute looks away. The candle on our table flickers faintly in the dark.
“At my best,” she says, “that’s how I try to imagine it.”