مصر كانت دوما في دائرة الهدف الصهيوني, وضابط موساد سابق مسؤول عن تجنيد العملاء في مصر قتل مساعده مقابل 15 ألف دولار
The zionist hebrew newspapers Yediot Aharonot and Maariv published on February 13 2013 brief reports about a number of famous spying elements who were arrested secretly in Israel. The story has been widely published in print and online. The fact of their arrests was banned from publication for several years. The Hebrew reports were released following the latest scandal exposed by the Australian media about the israeli Mossad agent Ben Zygier, (זיגייר) an Australian jew who was conveniently “found dead” in his cell at the israeli prison of “Ayalon” in December of 2010, less than a year after the assassination of Palestinian Hamas figure Mahmoud al-Mabhouh (מחמוד אל מבחוח) in Dubai in January 2010.
Ben Zygier was a member of the assassination team of Al-Mabhouh. He contacted the authorities of the Emirate of Dubai and told them what had happened in the assassination of Al-Mabhouh and gave them the names of the whole team, images and full details of the operation, and in return he supposedly received protection.
The mossad was able to find the hiding place of Ben Zygier. They kidnapped, imprisoned and lastly killed him on charges of treason. All this happened under cover of secrecy and amid tight wraps; even his guards at did not known the true identity of Ben Zygier. He was ONLY known as “Prisoner X” in his cell in Israel.
Ben Zygier was the son of one of the leaders of the Melbourne zionist community, Geoffrey Zygier, who is also executive director of the “B’nai B’rith” (translates as “sons of the cut”), the oldest jewish zionist organization in the world and which is one of the main instigators of crimes which are perpetrated by ill-advised jews around the world under the excuse of “security and continuity of the jewish people and the state of israel”.
Ben Zygier changed his name three times: first to “Ben Alon”, then to “Ben Allen” and lastly to “Benjamin Ben Burrows”. His passports were suspected of having been used for espionage purposes in Iran, Syria and Lebanon.
Ben Zygier was an Australian citizen. He went to Israel 10 years ago and was recruited by Mossad where he worked in unit 131, a network of mossad death squads operating throughout the Arab countries. Before the Al-Mabhouh murder he had already carried out a number of criminal tasks in several Arab countries. Officially he worked as a lawyer and toured in the Gulf States.
When Ben Zygier died, the israeli Prime Minister’s Office called for a meeting of the israeli Editors Committee. It is a “Committee for Editors” which consists of the leaders of the most important media (TV, radio, newspapers) and the israeli government. The committee is responsible for the implementation of the so-called “control agreement”, censorship in plain language. The Committee had been established under David Ben-Gurion in order to allow the prime minister to reveal and discuss state secrets with editors and media representatives for the purpose of controlling and preventing their dissemination, not for publishing them.
In this case Benjamin Netanyahu’s office asked the editors to cooperate with the government and withhold the publication of information pertaining to the murder of Ben Zygier that was very embarrassing to a certain government agency.
Below follows the translation of several cases of secret imprisonment of jewish spies exposed in Hebrew editions of Yediot Aharonot, Maariv and Haaretz. Many details I was forced to research and fill in from other sources because much of the filthy details about these individuals and the history of the israeli organized crimes and terrorism around the world were omitted. Most of the details published below about these terrorists, spies and criminals are banned from publication or censored at the major israeli media until this day.
These cases document the israeli understanding of “honor among thieves”: after criminals and traitors render their services to zionism and israel, gratitude is shown them by way of murder and lengthy terms in jail.
Mordechai Kedar
Mordechai (Motke) Kedar (מרדכי (מוט’קה) קידר) (the name is from Khedira, a village in the north of occupied Palestine), also known as Prisoner X. Kedar was born on November 19 1929 in Vilnius (then Poland, today Latvia), an israeli intelligence asset who was convicted for the murder and robbery of a jewish mossad agent when he was in Argentina in preparation for departure to Israel.
Kedar is a war criminal who served in the Palmach marine which, he was involved in war crimes in Palestine before and during the Palestinian catastrophe (Nakba) in 1948. Prisoner X / Kedar was also involved in atrocities in other Arab countries including assassinations, terror operations and spying missions under the command of Josef Harel (יוסף הראל ויוס’קה יריב).
He was recruited by the israeli internal intelligence service “shin bet” in 1957 and later drafted into the zionist Army Intelligence Unit 131. The agents of Unit 131 operate in “enemy” countries, meaning Arab countries. The duties of Unit 131 at the time were to operate and recruit spies into a network in Egypt and to renew the ties and the networks in Egypt after the fall of the network (“bad business”) to the Egyptians and after the capture and suicide of several of their military intelligence agents in Egypt, Major Meir Bint Ben-Yosef, member of the “Haganah” terrorist group, who was killed on a terror mission in Egypt on December 21 1955. This is generally known as the “Lavon affair”.
On 30 September 1951, armed robbery occurred at a small bank called “Loan Fund and Savings” of Afula. Three armed men in military uniform entered the bank in broad daylight, robbed at gunpoint the sum of 10,000 pounds. An israeli army jeep was waiting for them. The police was not able not catch the bank robbers at that time.
On December 5, 1950, Kedar murdered a taxi driver at the beach of Hadera in his room. This crime led the police to the bank robbers and to the discovery of the identity of the murderer of the taxi driver.
According to israeli official version, Kedar was arrested because of his involvement in the bank robbery in Afula in 1951 and the murder of a taxi driver “James Freund” (יוסף ליפסקר) in Hadera in 1950. Kedar also perpetrated a number of other crimes but the real reason for his arrest was the murder of his Argentinean assistant Kalman Klein (קלמן קליין) whose real first name is Moses (במשה,), another mossad agent with connections to the Argentinean government who was falsifying identification papers for jews in order to help them to emigrate to israel as well as to travel to Arab countries, especially to Egypt, to perpetrate crimes. Klein was an officer in the mossad responsible for a network of assassins operating in Arab countries.
According to israeli official version, Kedar was arrested because of his involvement in the bank robbery in Afula in 1951 and the murder of a taxi driver “James Freund” (יוסף ליפסקר) in Hadera in 1950. Kedar also perpetrated a number of other crimes but the real reason for his arrest was the murder of his Argentinean assistant Kalman Klein (קלמן קליין) whose real first name is Moses (במשה,), another mossad agent with connections to the Argentinean government who was falsifying identification papers for jews in order to help them to emigrate to israel as well as to travel to Arab countries, especially to Egypt, to perpetrate crimes. Klein was an officer in the mossad responsible for a network of assassins operating in Arab countries.
The charges against Kedar for killing the taxi driver and looting the bank were dropped because he was a Mossad agent. Kedar was also involved in the “mess” of the failed operation in 1954 in Egypt (the Lavon affair) which included a network of jews in Egypt carrying out terrorist attacks designed to disrupt the diplomatic relations between Cairo, Washington and London.
In March 1957, Kedar traveled to Buenos Aires, Argentina to expand the zionist spy and terror network in that country. He was preparing horrific terrorism acts to be perpetrated in Egypt. Kedar identified himself as a businessman. The jewish community in Argentina helped him in his dirty mission: they gave him a large sums of money supposedly to be used to pay off a senior Arab General who would implement his terror plans in Egypt
In November 1957, the body of Kedar’s assistant Klein was found. Kalman Klein had left home to meet Kedar carrying 15,000 dollars to be given to Kedar at a secret place under the pretense that Kedar would meet with the supposed Arab General from Egypt and pay him this amount of money, but instead Klein was killed and the money disappeared, together with Kedar. The suspicions for the murder immediately were directed towards Kedar, who had fled to israel without the money but with a story alleging that he had fled Argentina in light of suspicions that the police there was about to arrest him on false charges.
On 28 November 1957 Kedar was arrested immediately after landing in Lod (לוֹד) airport. He was arrested by Joseph Harel, a zionist military intelligence officer in charge of Mossad cell 131 and Kedar’s boss. Kedar’s trial began two years after his arrest. Only in 1959 did the israeli media report about an israeli “messenger”, a spy who was arrested in secret. Censorship was imposed on the publication of the circumstances of Kedar arrest.
Kedar was sentenced by a secret military court to be imprisoned at a secret facility which was described by the Yediot Aharonot Hebrew edition as a reinforced, hidden stone building located between the Ramle and Rechovot in orchards. The trial ended in 1962 and Kedar was sentenced 20 years in prison. At the age of 32 he was jailed for seven months in a cell and then spent seven years in a solitary confinement annex, a special section built in the Ramle prison and named “Department of X’s”. Kedar was called “Prisoner X” at the secret jail. No one of Kedar’s family knew anything about his arrest.
In June 1958, it happened by chance that a friend of Kedar visited the jail to visit another prisoner and Kedar asked him to tell attorney Dr. Rudy that he was in prison. The secret trial of Mordechai Kedar began in February 1959 and ended in June 1962. Shmuel Tamir, who later became Minister of Justice, defended Kedar.
The military court convicted him of robbery and murder and sentenced him to 20 years in prison. After the conviction by the military court, the Attorney General Gideon Hausner decided to close the proceedings against him because of the bank robbery in Hadera and the murder of the taxi driver Afula.
In April 1974 and after 17 years in prison, Kedar was released. He was freed and he immediately left Israel and went to Los Angeles in the United States, where he became a boss in a worldwide drug trade network that has been linked to the name of his son Erez Ben Horin (ארז בן חורין).
In the 1990s Kedar returned to Israel to begin new procedures in his court case. The authorities delayed the court procedures. “Only” in 2001 a judge was appointed to discuss his request. In February 2002, the first hearing was held before the military court of appeals. The court rejected Kedar’s request, but he did not give up and appealed to the High Court. In 2004, the court rejected his petition again.
On September 14 2009, Kedar’s son, Erez Ben Horin (ארז בן חורין) died of a heart attack at the age of 56, but Kedar, the father, was not allowed to take part in his funeral.
Erez Ben HorinBen Horin had been one element of the sophisticated criminal network. In 1986 was arrested twice by Scotland Yard on suspicion of conspiracy of cocaine distribution and illegal commercial purposes. On Jan. 7 1987, he was arrested by Dutch Police as a member of an international gang of drugs and arms traders in Yugoslavia and Venezuela. This arrest happened after a big explosion in the apartment where he lived together with his partner in crime, a criminal jew called Dinor Dan. After they spent six years in jail, the Dutch foreign minister allowed then returns to Israel.According to Haaretz, the Ben-Horin gang involved Israel in trafficking drugs to the Netherlands, Austria, the United Kingdom and South America. The intelligence cooperation between police forces around the world raised suspicions that other gang members were Mordechai Kedar (Ben-Horin’s father) and Mann Ronnie, who was arrested in Israel in 1995 and sentenced to six years in prison. The drug smuggling operation using private yachts made them all wealthy. The Ben-Horin gang was also involved in relaying weapons to the Catholic underground resistance in Northern Ireland. Drug money helped to finance the acquisition of weapons for their struggle against the British occupation.Ben-Horin’s dirty activities around the world helped him in recent years to obtain a franchise of the Italian coffee brand Tazza D’Oro (gold cup). Criminal Catholic “friends” who he met while sailing his yacht described him as a person connected with the Vatican Bank and complicated money laundering operations in the USA.
Shabtai Kalmanovich
Shabtai Kalmanovich (Kalmanovitsch) (שבתאי קלמנוביץ’) was the second spy jailed at secret israeli facilities, he had worked in Israel as a spy for the Soviet Union. Kalmanovich was born in Lithuania on 18 December 1947, he died on 2 November 2009. According to sources, his parents were partial to zionist values, members of “Betar” and had fought for 12 years to get a Soviet exit visa to go to israel, the state of occupation. In 1971 the Kalmanovich family finally emigrated to israel and resides in an “absorption center”. According to foreign reports, in exchange for the emigration permit of family to Israel, the son Kalmanovich (Shabtai), at that time 24 years old, was recruited by the Soviet Union’s “KGB” and remained a dormant agent for many years, until the Soviets allowed him to follow his family.
After the KGB element Kalmanovich went to Israel he became active in the zionist Labor Party. He served as parliamentary assistant to Samuel Flatto-Sharon, who praised his work bringing down dissidents. According Yediot Aharonot, Kalmanovitz participated in missions and meetings designed to “liberate” Jews from various countries. He was known for his contacts to many politicians, including Golda Meir, Yigal Alon and Pinhas Sapir. Kalmanovich was a “businessman”: he built a net of spies under the cover of his business activities. In the mid-80s, his business empire began to collapse.
According to the accusation filed against Kalmanovich and published in 1993, he passed information to the Soviet/Russian intelligence for 17 years. He was sentenced to nine years in prison but was released after five and a half years due to complaints about his weak state of health, and because of the fact that he had used his spying connections to help look for Lieutenant Colonel “Ron Arad”, the israeli air force weapons systems officer (WSO) who went missing during a war crimes mission over Lebanon in October 1986. After Kalmanovich was released, he returned to Russia, lived in Moscow and become a wealthy “businessman” and the owner of the famous Russian Women’s Basketball Club Spartak.
What the zionist Yediot Aharonot newspaper did not reveal in its story about Kalmanovich was that the “state” of israel paid “unknown mafia elements” who opened fire from automatic weapons on November 2, 2009 on the car of Kalmanovich in the center of Moscow. Kalmanovich reportedly was shot 35 times in the head. He died immediately, his driver was gravely injured.
Eitan Haber, a rightist columnist with Yediot Aharonot who has connections to different sources at the israeli military and civil authorities, wrote about Kalmanovich in his book “Spies”, in which he recounted espionage events against israel which have been declassified. He said that Kalmanovich was not an important spy to the Russians. He noted that the nature of the information provided by Kalmanovitz to the Soviets was supposedly “mainly gossip”.
Dr. Avraham Marcus Klingberg (מרקוס קלינגברג) was an Israeli scientist and spy. He was born in Poland in October 7, 1918 to a family of radical orthodox jews in Warsaw. His grandfather was the zionist rabbi Moshe Chaim Kleinberg. In 1935 he began studying medicine at the University of Warsaw, where he became acquainted with Marxist ideology.
On September 22, 1941, during the II World War he escaped to the Soviet Union and volunteered at the Red Army where he served as a physician specializing in epidemiology.From 1957 to 1975, Klingberg served as the deputy head of the secretive Biological Institute in Ness Ziona near Tel Aviv. He passed information to the Soviet Union about israel’s chemical and biological warfare programs.Klingberg served with the army “IDF”, the israeli war crimes force, reaching the rank of lieutenant colonel in 1950. He worked in a senior position at the Faculty of Medicine at Tel Aviv. In 1957 he was appointed deputy director of science and director of the Department of Epidemiology at the Institute for Biological Research in Ness Ziona.According the Hebrew media, a double agent led to Klinberg’s downfall. Only four years ago it became allowed to release some information about the Klingberg case following a request from “Yediot Ahronot” newspaper. The released information stated that the agent known by the code name “Samaritan” came to Israel as a Russian spy but that the israeli internal intelligence “Shin Bet” turned him a double agent. Every detail about the identity of this double agent has been banned from publication.In 1977, after the first contacts between Klingberg and his Russian employers, he communicated with “Samaritan”, the double agent. The communication was about putting a “poster” bearing encrypted names in his mailbox at home in Tel Aviv. The communication was documented by the “Shin Bet”, what led to the arrest of Klingberg.According the newspaper, after several days of interrogation at a hidden apartment (a “secret place”) Klingberg broke down and admitted that he had been spying for the Soviets for 20 years and that he had provided the Soviets with information on the biological and chemical activity of Israel.Klingberg was sentenced to 20 years in prison. For the first ten years it was not allowed to publish anything about the Klingberg arrest. He was released under restrictive conditions to house arrest after spending 16 years in jail.In 2003 his jail term ended and he moved to live in France. According to Wikipedia, Ian Brossat, a grandson of Klingberg via his daughter Silvia, is a councilor for the communist party in Paris.
'The Gatekeepers': Confessions of the Shin Bet Six
Courtesy of AMI Ayalon/Sony Pictures Classics
In his Oscar-nominated documentary, Dror Moreh convinced Israel's top secret-service men to appear on camera, where they renounced their country's war on terrorism and demanded peace.
This story first appeared in the Feb. 15 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine.
Tough as tank armor, Carmi Gillon, a former chief of Israel's Shin Bet secret service, has battled assassins. But when Sony Pictures Classics ordered him to face red-carpet flashbulbs at the Producers Guild Awards on Jan. 26, he was terrified. "I was so embarrassed!" says Gillon, who appears in The Gatekeepers, DrorMoreh's PGA- and Oscar-nominated documentary, in which all six living former Shin Bet chiefs recount their long war on terrorism, call it a failure and advocate peace talks. "Can you imagine heads of the CIA talking about Guantanamo?" says Gillon. "I can't."
Gillon's unlikely trip accompanying Moreh to Hollywood can be traced to 2004, when Moreh saw Errol Morris' doc The Fog of War, in which former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara discusses modern warfare and international security. "It blew me away," says Moreh. "To get someone so strong in the circles of power to speak out firsthand on what went wrong and analyze it!" Moreh, interested in doing something similar, was advised not to contact the secretive Shin Bet veterans. "My friend said: 'You're crazy! They've never spoken to anyone.' " But at least one of the former terrorist hunters also was a fan of Fog. Fed up with Israel's negotiation-disdaining political leaders, one by one they agreed to be interviewed.
"The film cost about $1.5 million," says Moreh. "In Israeli terms, that's very large. I don't think even fiction films have had that kind of budget. I knew I'd need expensive archive research and a lot of time in the editing room."
Despite its stark criticism of Israel, the film was co-funded by the government. "I asked Dror if the government asked for their money back," jokes Gillon. Says Moreh, "Most of the money came from Europe." He screened a few of the interviews with English translations for about 150 film-commission representatives in Lyon in 2009: "There was a long silence. And then almost all of them rose and said, 'We want to be in.' "
Moreh chose the best funding partners then spent 3½ years artfully pruning his interview footage, leaving out 98 percent and adding animation to dramatize still photos of the notorious 1984 killings of two Palestinian bus hijackers. "I wanted to put the event in the point of view of the photographer," he says. "It was because of his photos that it came to light that Shin Bet murdered people whenever they liked."
Point of view became an issue when Moreh's doc premiered at September's Telluride Film Festival, where he did a panel with Argo's Ben Affleck and Ziad Doueiri, the Lebanon-born director of the suicide-bomber drama The Attack. Doueiri told Moreh that Gatekeepers' "Collateral Damage" section, in which Palestinians appear as dots obliterated by real explosions on video-gamelike war-room monitors, made him "plenty pissed." "But I wanted the audience to feel what it's like to be the Shin Bet commander, looking at the screen, deciding who will live and who will die," says Moreh. At Telluride, Morris applauded the film and quizzed Moreh on its technical aspects: the animated passages as well as the intentional lack of depth of field in the interview shots, forcing the viewer to concentrate on the subjects' faces.
Gatekeepers has won awards from the L.A., New York and National Society film critics, and Indiewire's 204-critic poll ranked it 2012's No. 6 doc, ahead of Searching for Sugar Man.
So Moreh and Gillon wound up on the PGA red carpet, alongside nominees for other Middle East-themed hits. "I told Ben Affleck Argo was great," says Gillon. And acknowledging his own past as an interrogator, he told Homeland's Damian Lewis, "I was one of the bad guys."
Compare to the Securitate of Romania - the secret service terror squads
Twenty years ago, communist regimes collapsed one after the other like dominoes across Central and Eastern Europe.
The last one to fall, in a bloody revolution, was Romania's dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. But communism has left a poisonous legacy in the vast archives of the secret police, the dreaded Securitate.
Inside a sprawling military compound at Popesti-Leordeni, on the outskirts of the Romanian capital Bucharest, grey metal shelves are stacked with bulging grey files. There are more than two million files on 20km (12.4 miles) of shelves.
Germina Nagat calls it "an evil library". As the chief investigator for the National Council for the Study of the Securitate Archives (CNSAS), Mrs Nagat spends a lot of time poring over the files.
"You can find anything," she says. "It's a story of human guilt, human weakness, sometimes courage."
Boiled bark
What Ioana Voicu Arnautoiu has found here is an incredible story of defiance.
A concert violinist, she was born in a cave in the Carpathian mountains. Her parents were partisans, part of a small desperate band that resisted the communist takeover in the 1950s.
They held out for nine years - surviving sometimes on boiled bark - before the Securitate hunted them down.
Now it is the Securitate's own records that are revealing Ioana's family history, in 85 thick files and a collection of black-and-white photographs.
One shows her mother climbing out of the cave and going down a ladder, carrying baby Ioana under one arm like a doll.
Before her father was executed, the Securitate took a last photograph of his gaunt face, with dark, haunted eyes. Her mother died later in prison.
Ioana was spared. Aged two, she was taken to an orphanage and adopted by a loving family. She grew up without knowing who she really was - until Communism fell and the archives opened.
Her story might be unbelievable - if the Securitate had not archived everything so thoroughly. What in some ways is even more unbelievable is the extensive records on those who did not actively resist.
Blackmail
Almost anything could be a reason for opening a file, Germina Nagat explained: "Persons who had relatives abroad; persons who used to tell jokes; persons interested in studying foreign languages."
By the 1980s, about one in 30 Romanians was a Securitate informer, including 10-year old children.
Some did it out of conviction, some were blackmailed. Most were offered something - a rare opportunity to travel abroad or better career prospects.
Like so many Romanians, I too had a file. In 1983, a Securitate officer tried to get me to spy on people I knew in exchange for a passport to travel abroad, and cancer drugs for my father. I said no.
When I asked to see that file five years ago, I was told it could not be found.
But the bulk of the archives was only transferred to the CNSAS before Romania joined the European Union in 2007. And recently, my file also surfaced.
Strictly secret
It was with some trepidation that I went to the CNSAS headquarters to read it.
The first surprise was that it came not in one, but two volumes. And it started much earlier than I thought - roughly at the time I became a student of English and Spanish at Bucharest University.
In one report, dated April 1983, a Securitate captain wrote that I refused to sign a written pledge to inform. The next page, marked "Strictly Secret" was signed by his superior.
It is a list of measures to be taken for my surveillance, including bugging my phone calls and intercepting my letters.
I suddenly recognise my father's minute handwriting in a letter to a friend abroad that I never knew he had sent.
It was duly photocopied, together with both sides of the envelope. The file contains many of my own letters. Some passages were underlined in blue or red pen by the Securitate.
The second volume is more of a shock. It contains 138 pages with transcriptions of phone-calls, including with my mother and my then-boyfriend. What we mostly talked about was my father's illness and his impending death.
All those conversations replay in my mind, as I go through dozens and dozens of transcriptions, all written in longhand by what appears to be a whole army of Securitate scribes.
The file ends in December 1985, several months after I had been allowed to leave Romania and just as I started working at the BBC's Romanian Service in London.
As the archives show, another arm of the Securitate continued to monitor me, along with many other exiles working for foreign broadcasters, until the last days of 1989...
Bullet in the head
To see the file at last is liberating, but deeply unsettling. So many strangers photocopied my letters and transcribed my phone calls - and for what?
But opening the archives is unsettling for others too. "These files aren't mine or yours, they belong to the state," said Dumitru Burlan, a retired Securitate colonel who was Nicolae Ceausescu's chief bodyguard.
"If Ceausescu rose up from the grave, he would put a bullet through his own head!"
At the CNSAS, chief investigator Germina Nagat believes that these dark secrets have to be exposed.
She and her colleagues regularly uncover evidence that some of those who collaborated with the former secret police are now senior judges, politicians and top civil servants.
"They have a hidden agenda - resistance to reforms," she said. "To violate the human and civil rights every day, that was their job. And now [they] have to do the reverse!
"How can you do this? You cannot be a ballerina after being an elephant!"
Romanian courts are dealing with some 700 cases of alleged Securitate collaborators in high places, but so far judges have ruled on only three.
There may be many Communist-era elephants out there still trampling on Romania's fledgling democracy.
You can hear more in State Secrets, Oana Lungescu's two-part documentary on the BBC World Service, starting on 10 December.
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To violate the human and civil rights every day, that was [the Securitate's] job
31/08/2009
Securitate in all but name
Twenty years after Ceausescu's execution his secret service is still active. For the first time, Romanian-German writer Herta Müller describes her ongoing experience of Securitate terror.
Update October, 8th: Romanian-born German novelist Herta Müller wins the Nobel Prize for Literature 2009! Here you can read an excerpt from her latest novel "Everything I Own I Carry With Me" ("Atemschaukel").
For me each journey to Romania is also a journey into another time, in which I never knew which events in my life were coincidence and which were staged. This is why I have, in each and every public statement I have made, demandedaccess to the secret files kept on me which, under various pretexts, has invariably been denied me. Instead, each time there was signs that I was once again, that is to say, still under observation.
In spring earlier this year I visited Bucharest, on the invitation of the NEC (New European College). On the first day I was sitting in the hotel lobby with a journalist and a photographer when a muscular security guard inquired about a permit and tried to tear the camera from the photographer's hands. "No photos allowed on the premises, nor of any people on the premises," he bellowed. On the evening of the second day I had arranged to have dinner with a friend who, as we had agreed on the phone, came to pick me up from the hotel at six o'clock. As he turned into the street in which the hotel was situated, he noticed a man following him. When he asked to call me at the reception, the receptionist said he would have to fill in a visitor's form first. This frightened him because such a thing was unheard of, even under Ceausescu.
My friend and I walked to the restaurant. Again and again he suggested that we cross to the other side of the street. I thought nothing of it. Not until the following day did he tell Andrei Plesu, the Director of the NEC, about the visitor's form and that a man had followed him on his way to the hotel, and later the two of us to the restaurant. Andrei Plesu was infuriated and sent his secretary to cancel all bookings at the hotel. The hotel manager lied that it was the receptionist's first day at work and that she had made a mistake. But the secretary knew the lady, she had worked in the reception for years and years. The manager replied that the "patron", the owner of the hotel, was aformer Securitate man who, unfortunately, would not change his ways. Then he smiled and said that by all means the NEC could cancel its bookings with him, but that it would be the same in other hotels of the same standard. The only difference being that you wouldn't know.
I checked out. After that I didn't notice anyone else following me. Either the secret service had backed off, or they worked professionally, i.e. unnoticed.
In order to know that a shadow was needed at six o'clock, my phone must have been tapped. Ceausescu's secret police, the Securitate, has not disbanded, just given another name, the SRI (Romanian Information Service). And according to their own figures, 40% of the staff was taken on from the Securitate. The real percentage is probably much higher. And the remaining 60% are retired and living on pensions that are three times higher than those of everybody else, or they are the new architects of the market economy. Apart from jobs in the diplomatic corps, a former spy in today's Romania can attain any post.
Access to files, the Romanian way
Romanian intellectuals were as uninterested in seeing the secret files opened as they were in all the crushed lives around them, or in the new arrangements of the party's top brass and secret service officers. If, like me, you have publicly demanded access to files year in year out, you start to get on the nerves even of your friends. This was another reason why, for years, the Securitate files were not in the hands of the National Council for the Study of the Securitate Archives (the tongue-twistingly named CNSAS), which was grudgingly set up in 1999 at the instigation of the EU, but with the new-old secret service. They controlled all access to files. The CNSAS had to submit applications to them; sometimes they were granted, but mostly they were refused, even for the grounds: The file applied for is still being worked on. In 2004 I was in Bucharest in order to lend weight to my repeated application for file access. At the entrance to the CNSAS I was puzzled to find three young women in mini-dresses with plunging necklines and shiny neon tights, as if this were some erotic centre. And between the women stood a soldier, a machine-gun slung over his shoulder, as if this were a military barracks. The head of CNSAS pretended not to be there, even though I had an appointment with him.
This spring a group of researchers happened upon the files kept on the Romanian-German authors of the "Aktionsgruppe Banat". The Securitate had a specialised department for each minority. For the Germans, it was called "German Nationalists and Fascists", the Hungarian section was called "Hungarian Irredentists", the Jewish one "Jewish Nationalists". Only Romanian authors had the honour of being placed under the observation of the department of "Art and Culture".
Suddenly I found my file, too, under the name of Cristina. Three volumes, 914 pages. It was allegedly opened on 8 March, 1983 – although it contains documents from earlier years. The reason given for opening the file: "Tendentious distortions of realities in the country, particularly in the village environment" in my book "Nadirs". Textual analysis by spies corroborate this. And the fact that I belong to a "circle of German-language poets", which is "renowned for its hostile works".
The file is a botched job by the SRI on behalf of the old Securitate. For ten years they had all the time in the world to "work" on it. You could not call this cooking the books, the file has simply been emptied of all substance.
The three years at the tractor factory Tehnometal where I was a translator are missing. I translated the manuals for machines imported from the GDR, Austria and Switzerland. For two years I sat with four bookkeepers in the office. They worked out the wages of the workers, I turned the pages of my fat technical dictionaries. I didn't understand the first thing about hydraulic or non-hydraulic presses, levers or gauges. When the dictionary offered three, four, or even seven terms, I went out onto the factory floor and asked the workers. They told me the correct Romanian word without any knowledge of German – they knew their machines. In the third year a "protocol office" was established. The company director moved me there to work alongside two newly employed translators, one from French, the other from English. One was the wife of a university professor who, even in my student days, was said to be a Securitate informant. The other was the daughter-in-law of the second most senior secret service officer in town. Only those two had the key to the file cupboard. When foreign professionals visited, I had to leave the office. Then, apparently, I was to be put through two recruitment tests with the secret police officer Stana, to be made suitable for the office. After my second refusal, his goodbye was: "You'll be sorry, we'll drown you in the river. "
One morning when I turned up for work, my dictionaries were lying on the floor outside the office door. My place had been taken by an engineer, and I was no longer allowed into the office. I couldn't go home, they would have sacked me there and then. Now I had no table, no chair. For two days, I defiantly sat my eight hours with the dictionaries on a concrete staircase that joined the ground and first floors, trying to translate so that no one could say I wasn't working. The office staff walked past me in silence. My friend Jenny, an engineer, knew about what was happening to me. Every day on our way home I explained it to her in detail. She came to me in the lunch break and sat down on the stairs. We ate together as we had done before in my office. Over the loudspeaker in the yard we could always hear the workers' choruses about the happiness of the people. She ate and cried for me, I didn't. I had to be strong.
On the third day I installed myself at Jenny's desk, she cleared a corner for me. On the fourth day too. It was a large office. On the fifth morning she was waiting for me outside the door. "I am no longer allowed to let you in the office. Just think, my colleagues say you are a spy. " "How's that possible," I asked. "But you know where we're living," she reasoned. I took my dictionaries and sat down on the stairs again. This time I cried too. When I went out onto the factory floor to ask about a word, the workers whistled after me and shouted: "Informer". It was a witches' cauldron. How many spies were there in Jenny's office and on the shop floor. They were acting on instructions. There were orders from above to attack me, the slander was meant to force me to resign. At the beginning of these turbulent times my father died. I no longer had a grip on things, I had to reassure myself that I really existed in the world, and began to write down the story of my – these writings formed the basis of the short stories in "Nadirs".
The fact that I was now considered a spy because I had refused to become one was worse than the attempt to recruit me and the death threat. I was being slandered by precisely the people that I was protecting by refusing to spy on them. Jenny and a handful of colleagues could see the games that were being played with me. But those who knew me less well could not. How could I have explained to them what was going on, how could I have proved the opposite. It was completely impossible, as the Securitate knew only too well, and that is exactly why they did it to me. They knew, too, that such perfidy would be far more destructive than any blackmail. You can even get used to death threats. They are part and parcel of this one life we have. You can defy anxiety to the depths of your soul. But slander steals your soul. You just feel surrounded by horror.
How long this situation lasted, I no longer know. It seemed endless to me. It was probably just weeks. Finally, I was sacked.
In my files this period is covered by just two words, a handwritten note in the margin of a surveillance protocol. Years later, at home, I related the attempt in the factory to enlist me as a spy. In the margin Lieutenant Padurariu wrote: "That's correct."
Then came the interrogations. The reproaches: that I wasn't looking for a job, that I was living from prostitution, black market dealings, as a "parasitic element". Names were mentioned that I had never heard in my life. And espionage for the BND (West German Intelligence Service) because I was friendly with a librarian at the Goethe Institute and an interpreter at the German Embassy. Hours and hours of fictitious reproaches. But not only that. They needed no summons, they simply plucked me off the street.
I was on my way to the hairdresser's when a policeman escorted me through a narrow metal door into the basement of a hall of residence. Three men in plain clothes were sitting at a table. A small bony one was the boss. He demanded to see my identity card and said: "Well, you whore, here we meet again." I had never seen him before. He said I was having sex with eight Arab students in exchange for tights and cosmetics. I didn't know a single Arab student. When I told him this, he replied: "If we want to, we'll find 20 Arabs as witnesses. You'll see, it'll make for a splendid trial." Time and again he would throw my identity card on the floor, and I had to bend down and pick it up. Thirty or forty times maybe; when I got slower, he kicked me in the small of my back. And from behind the door at the end of the table I heard a woman's voice screaming. Torture or rape, just a tape recording, I hoped. Then I was forced to eat eight hard boiled eggs and green onions with salt. I forced the stuff down. Then the bony man opened the metal door, threw my identity card outside and kicked me in the rear. I fell with my face in the grass beside some bushes. I vomited without raising my head. Without hurrying I picked up my identity card and headed home. Being pulled in from the street was more terrifying than a summons. No one would have known where you were. You could have disappeared, and never shown up again or, as they had threatened earlier, you could be pulled out of the river, a drowned corpse. The verdict would have been suicide.
No interrogation is mentioned in the files, no summons, and nothing about being pulled in from the street
This is what the file states on 30 November, 1986: "Notification of every journey that Cristina undertakes, to Bucharest and other places in the country, must be given in due time to Directorate I/A (Internal Security) and III/A (Counterespionage)", so that "permanent control may be maintained." In other words, I could not travel anywhere in the country without being shadowed, "to carry out the necessary control measures re. her relationships with West German diplomats and West German citizens. "
The shadowing varied according to their intentions. Sometimes you didn't notice it, sometimes it was conspicuous, sometimes it became aggressive and brutal. When "Nadirs" was due to be published by the West Berlin publishers Rotbuch, the editor and I had arranged to meet in Poiana Brasov in the Carpathian Mountains to avoid attracting attention. We travelled there separately as winter sports enthusiasts. My husband Richard Wagner had gone to Bucharest with the manuscript. I was to follow the next day by night train, without the manuscript. Two men met me in train station, wanting to take me away. I said: "I'm not coming unless you have an arrest warrant ." They confiscated my ticket and my identity card and said, before disappearing, that I should not leave that spot until they returned. But the train pulled in and they didn't come back. I went out onto the platform. This was the time of the great electricity saving effort, the sleeping car was standing in the dark at the end of the platform. You were only allowed to get on shortly before departure, the door was still locked. The two men were there, too, walking up and down, they jostled me and pushed me to the ground three times. Dirty and confused I picked myself up as if nothing had happened. And the waiting crowd looked on as if nothing had happened. When, finally, the door of the sleeping car opened, I pushed my way into the middle of the queue. The two men got on as well. I went into the compartment, undressed partly, and slipped on my pyjamas so that if they pulled me out, I would look conspicuous. As the train pulled away, I went to the toilet and hid a letter to Amnesty International behind the sink. The two men were standing in the corridor, talking to the conductor of the sleeping car. I had the lower bunk in the compartment. Perhaps because I'm easier to snatch from there, I thought. When the conductor came to my compartment, he handed me my ticket and my identity card. Where had he got those, and what did the two men want from him, I asked. "Which men," he said, "there are dozens of men here."
I didn't sleep a wink all night. It was foolish of me to get on the train, I thought, they'll throw me off somewhere in a snowy field during the night. When dawn arrived, my anxiety abated. They would have used the dark to stage a suicide, I thought. Before the first passengers awoke, I went to the toilet to retrieve the hidden letter. Then I got dressed, sat down on the edge of the bunk and waited until the train arrived in Bucharest. I got out of the train as if nothing had happened. Not a word about this in the file either.
The shadowing had consequences for others too. A friend was first noticed by the secret service during a reading from "Nadirs" at the Bucharest Goethe Institute. His details were taken, a file on him was opened and he was under surveillance from then on. This information comes from his file, no mention is made of it in mine.
The secret police came and went as they pleased when we weren't at home. Often they would deliberately leave signs: cigarette butts, pictures removed from the wall and left on the bed, chairs moved. The most uncanny incident of this kind lasted weeks. First the tail, then the paws, and finally the head was cut off a fox skin lying on the floor, and laid on the fox's belly. You couldn't see the cuts. I first noticed the tail lying there while cleaning the apartment. I still thought it was accidental. It was only weeks later, when the hind paw had been cut off, that I began to get the creeps. Until the point when the head was also cut off, the first thing I would do on coming home was to check the fox skin. Anything could happen, the flat was no longer private. At every mealtime you would wonder if the food had been poisoned. There is not a word about this psychological terror in the files.
In the summer of 1986 the writer Anna Jonas visited us in Timisoara. In a letter – which is enclosed in my file – from 4 November 1985, to the Romanian Society of Authors, she and other authors protested against the fact that I was not allowed to travel to the Book Fair, to the Evangelical Church Day, and to my publishers. The visit is accurately documented in my file, and there is a "telex" from 18 August 1986, to the border authority instructing them to search her luggage "thoroughly" on her leaving Romania, and to report their findings. In contrast, the visit of the journalist Rolf Michaelis from Die Zeit is missing. After the publication of "Nadirs" he wanted to conduct an interview with me. He had announced his arrival by telegram and trusted that he would find me at home. But the telegram was intercepted by the secret service, and Richard Wagner and I, knowing nothing, had gone to see his parents in the country for a couple of days. Two days running he rang our doorbell in vain. On the second day three men were lying in wait for him in the little room housing the rubbish chute, and brutally beat him up. The toes on both his feet were broken. We were living on the fifth floor, the lift wasn't working due to a power shortage. Michaelis had to crawl on all fours down the pitch-dark stairwell and onto the street. The telegram from Michaelis is missing from the file, although there is quite a collection of intercepted letters from the West. According to the file his visit never took place. This gap shows, too, that the secret service has erased the actions of their officers, so that no one can be held responsible as a result of file access – they have seen to it that the post-Ceausescu Securitate has become an abstract monster.
This is also how I explain to myself that no reference can be found in my file to another bizarre incident: I was already living in Berlin when I was called to the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution. I was shown a photo of a Romanian man unknown to me, who had been arrested in Königswinter as a Securitate agent. My name and address were in his notebook. The agent was suspected of travelling in Germany to carry out murders.
Rolf Michaelis wanted to protect us and didn't write about these attacks until we had left Romania. From the files I know that this was a mistake. Not silence, but publicity would protect us in the West. My file also reveals that surreal criminal proceedings were prepared against me for "spying for the BND". It was thanks to the reaction to my books and the literary prizes in Germany that this plan was never realised and I was not arrested.
Rolf Michaelis could not call us prior to his visit as we had no telephone. In Romania you had to wait years for a connection. We, however, were offered one without having applied. We refused, as we all knew that a telephone would be the most practical listening post in our small flat. When you visited friends who had a telephone, it had to be put in the fridge immediately and a record played to cover the voices. As is turned out, our refusal of the phone was pointless, as half of the file material I was given resulted from our flat being bugged.
Richard Wagner's file contains the "Nota de analiza" of 20 February 1985, which documents when neither of us is at home. "Similarly, special apparatus was installed in the flat, which delivers data of operative interest." The plan to install bugs can also be found in his file. Holes were drilled in the ceiling of the flat below, and in the our own floor. In both rooms the bugs were concealed behind the cupboards.
The monitoring protocols are often full of empty brackets because the music from the records disturbed the bugging. But we let the music play because we believed that the secret service was working with directional microphones. We never thought that we were being bugged day and night. True, during interrogations you were always confronted with things the interrogators couldn't possibly know. But as Romania was so poor and backwards we assumed that the Securitate couldn't afford modern bugging equipment. More to the point, we also thought that although we were state enemies, we were hardly worth such expense. For all our anxiety, we remained naive and thoroughly clueless about the level of surveillance.
The Securitate investigated the occupation, workplace and political trustworthiness of each and every occupant of our ten-storey tenement block and kept personal files – probably in order to recruit spies in the neighbourhood. Those who until then had escaped the attentions of the secret service, were stamped as "NECUNOSCUT" (unknown).
The bugging protocols are daily reports. The bugged conversations were summarised, but all "subversive" bits were transcribed word for word. Unknown visitors merit question marks in the margins and instructions to establish their identity. The bugging protocols also are incomplete.
One of our closest friends was Roland Kirsch. He was living round the corner from us and came to see us almost daily. He was an engineer in a slaughterhouse, took photographs of everyday dreariness, and wrote prose miniatures. In 1996 his volume "Traum der Mondkatze" (the dream of the moon cat) was published in Germany. It was published posthumously, because in May 1989 he was found hanged in his flat. The neighbours now say that they heard several loud voices in his flat on the night of his death. I do not believe it was suicide either. In Romania it would take days of running around to sort out all the formalities for a funeral. In suicide cases a post mortem was a matter of course. But Roland Kirsch's parents were handed all the relevant papers within a day. He was buried quickly and there was no post mortem. And there is no mention of a single visit from Roland Kirsch in the fat envelope of bugging protocols. His name is deleted, this person has been erased from existence.
The tangle of love and betrayal
My file at least answered one painful question. A year after my departure from Romania, Jenny came to visit in Berlin. Since the time of the harassment in the factory she had been my closest friend. Even after I was sacked we saw each other almost daily. But when I saw her passport in our Berlin kitchen, and the additional visas for France and Greece, I confronted her directly: "You don't get a passport like that for nothing, what did you do to get it?" Her answer: "The secret service has sent me, and I was desperate to see you again." Jenny had cancer – she is long dead now. She told me that her task was to investigate our flat and our daily habits. When we get up and go to bed, where we do our shopping and what we buy. On her return, she promised, she would only pass on what had been agreed between us. She lived with us, wanted to stay for a month. With each day my distrust grew. After just a couple of days I rummaged through her suitcase and found the telephone number of the Romanian consulate and a copy of our door key. After that I lived with the suspicion that in all probability she had been spying on me from the outset, her friendship just part of the job. After her return, I see from the file, she delivered a detailed description of the flat and of our habits, as "SURSA (source) SANDA".
But in a bugging protocol from 21 December, 1984, a note in the margin, next to Jenny's name, reads: "We must identify JENI, apparently there is great trust between them." This friendship, which meant so much to me, was ruined by her visit to Berlin, a terminally ill cancer patient lured into betrayal after chemotherapy. The copied key made it clear that Jenny had fulfilled her task behind our backs. I had to ask her to leave our Berlin flat at once. I had to chase my closest friend out in order to protect myself and Richard Wagner from her assignment. This tangle of love and betrayal was unavoidable. A thousand times I have turned her visit over in my mind, mourned our friendship, discovering to my disbelief that after my emigration, Jenny had a relationship with a Securitate officer. Today I am glad, for the file shows that our intimacy had grown naturally and had not been arranged by the secret service, and that Jenny didn't spy on me until after my emigration. You become grateful for small mercies, trawling through all the poison for a part that isn't contaminated, however small. That my file proves that the feelings between us were real, almost makes me happy now.
The expansion of tradition through libel
After the publication of "Nadirs" in Germany, and as the first invitations came, I was not allowed to travel. But when these were followed by invitations for literary award ceremonies, the Securitate changed its strategy. Having been out of work until then, it came as a great surprise when, in the late summer of 1984, I was offered a teaching job, and on my first day of work I received the recommendation from the head teacher that was the requirement for travelling. And in October 1984 I was actually allowed to travel. I was also permitted to receive literary prizes in person on the two occasions that followed.
The reasoning behind this lenience, however, was malicious: instead of being considered a dissident among my colleagues at the school, as I had been until then, I was to be seen as profiteering from the regime and, in the West, suspected of espionage. The secret service worked intensively on both, but in particular on the "agent" persona. Spying staff were sent to Germany on asmear campaign. The plan of action of 1 July 1985, states with satisfaction: "As a result of several journeys abroad, the idea was planted among some actors at the German State Theatre in Timisoara that Cristina is an agent for the Romanian Securitate. The West German stage director Alexander Montleart, temporarily at the German Theatre in Timisoara, has already voiced his suspicions to Martina Olczyk from the Goethe Institute and to employees at the German embassy in Bucharest."
After my emigration in 1987 they stepped up the pressure to "compromise and isolate" me. A "Nota de analiza" from March 1989 reads: "As part of the operation to compromise her reputation, we will work with Branch D (disinformation), publishing articles abroad or sending memoranda – that appear to come from the German emigre community – to several circles and authorities with influence in Germany." One of the spies appointed to this job is "Sorin", "for he is said to have the literary and journalistic leanings necessary to execute the plan of action." On 3 July 1989, department I/A sends a "report" to the Securitate HQ in Bucharest. The Romanian writerDamian Ureche has written a letter, in accordance with their instructions, in which Richard Wagner and I are denounced as spies. There follows a request to HQ to authorise the letter. A dancer from one of the folklore ensembles, who was travelling to Germany, was to pass it on to Radio Free Europe and the ARD (the West German public broadcaster).
The most important "partner" in Germany for smear campaigning was theAssociation of Banat Swabians. As early as 1985 the Securitate note with satisfaction: "The leadership of the Association of Banat Swabians has made negative comments about this book ("Nadirs"), also in the presence of representatives of the Romanian Embassy in Germany." This is strong stuff. Since the publication of "Nadirs" the Association had waged a character assassination campaign against me. "Fecal language, urine prose, traitor,party whore" were the comments typical of their homespun "literary criticism". I was a spy, they alleged, I had even written "Nadirs" at the behest of the Securitate. While I was sitting on the concrete steps of the tractor factory, the Association had obviously been in cahoots with the embassy staff of the Ceausescu dictatorship. I, on the other hand, would never have dared set foot in that embassy, for fear of never leaving it alive. In view of these relations with Ceausescu's diplomats it is hardly surprising that throughout all those years the Association never uttered one critical syllable. In collaboration with the regime it carried on the sale of Romanian-Germans, unconcerned that the Federal Republic was paying as much as 12,000 DM for each emigrant. Nor did it seem to mind that this human trafficking was a considerable source of hard currency for the dictatorship.
As part of their little agreement with the regime, they shared a hatred of me and joined in the business of libel. I became public enemy number one and, as their permanent target, a vital part of the Association's identity. To libel me was to prove one's love of the homeland. The Association libelled me as a new way of nurturing tradition. The only time the Association seemed used the term "spy" was to blacken my reputation. My file reads: "Because of her writings which put the Banat Swabians in a bad light," persons from this circle outside of Romania had "isolated and embarrassed" me. And: "Using the means at our disposal, our organs have participated in this campaign." My file says: "Compromising material should also be sent to Horst Fassel, at the address of his institute, requesting that it be disseminated." The institute in question is the Danube Swabian Institute in Tübingen, which Fassel headed at that time. Before that, in the eighties, he was editor of the Banater Post.
In their reports the spies led the Romanian secret service to believe that the Association in Germany had a significance that it never actually had. Despite the geographical distance, it had a similar level of dependence that a secret police informant has to his or her case officer, the same pressure to obey, the same fear of being dropped and exposed in the West.
One of the most diligent informants was "Sorin", who as early as 1983 snooped on the Timisoara group of authors. An acquaintance, who has seen the file on his now-dead father, learned from the code which is attached to the name of a spy on each report, that by 1982 "Sorin" had already delivered 38 such reports. In my file which contains 30 spy names, "Sorin" is one of the leading protagonists. A plan of action launched on 30 November 1986, expressly states that "Sorin" was to be given the task of prying into any plans I was hatching and which relationships I was cultivating in Romania and abroad. The chief editor of the culture section of the Bucharest paper New Way, once visited us in Timisoara accompanied by Walther Konschitzky. In the bugging protocol for that day Lieutenant Padurariu, who always interrogated me, noted in the margin the identification of this visitor: "Sorin".
During the dictatorship this "Sorin" was travelling regularly to Germany and, like so many spies, emigrated before the fall of Ceausescu. He became the cultural consultant of the Banat Association from 1992 to 1998. After his position in the Munich HQ was axed, he has continued to carry out his function on a voluntary basis.
The Association has never cared about the spies in its own ranks. Since its founding in 1950 it has created its imaginary homeland of brass band music, traditional costume parties, cosy peasant cottages and hand carved wooden gates. It has always turned a blind eye to dictatorships under Hitler or Ceausescu. Leading figures in the National Socialist population in the Banat were among the Association's founders.
These days the Association refuses to investigate the Securitate's influence on its own ranks, with the excuse that the matter is statute-barred. That is not acceptable in view of its political weight in Germany. Although fewer than 10% of Banat Swabian emigres are organised in the Association, throughout the years it has had representatives on broadcasting boards and in cultural institutions. After my arrival in Germany, radio journalists said that they had run into problems after featuring me on their programmes because the Association had intervened. Furthermore, all these years it has been one of the switch points for processing emigration applications from Romania, which it has occasionally sought to prevent. The Banat tried to block emigration application by the literary critic Emmerich Reichrath, whose reviews went beyond their narrow horizons. Before leaving the country I, too, received letters from "fellow Banat Germans" in Germany, saying: "You are not welcome in Germany." At the transit home in Nuremberg the Association had its office next door to that of the BND. A stamp from the Association was imperative for processing immigration formalities. I was received with the sentence: "German air won't be good for your health." I had a heavy cold after an overnight journey to the border on the trailer of a tractor. It was February.
Behind the next door, at the BND, the reception was even more brusque. Today I know why. The Securitate's smear campaign had succeeded: "Did you have dealings with the Romanian secret service?" My answer: "It had dealings with me. There's a difference," did not impress the civil servant. "Leave that for me to decide, that's my job," he said. "If you are on an assignment, it's not too late to say so now." While everyone else left this office after a few minutes with a "harmless" stamp, Richard Wagner and I were interrogated for several days, together and separately. While my mother received her certificate of naturalisation automatically, we were told for months that "thorough research was needed". It was grotesque. On the one hand the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution warned us against the Securitate's threats: Do not live on the ground floor, do not accept gifts while travelling, do not leave cigarette packs on the table, never enter a house or a flat with an unknown person, buy yourself a fake pistol, etc. On the other hand the suspicion that I was an agent hampered my naturalisation.
I ask myself why the BND held me in suspicion but didn't get wind of the numerous spies in the Association and among the emigres. Probably the BND also trusted the information coming from the Association. That is why Germany today is a cosy reserve for Securitate spies. When you compare the files on the Banat group of authors with one another, they are riddled with spies: "Sorin", "Voicu", "Gruia", "Marin", "Walter", "Matei", and many more. They are teachers, professors, civil servants, journalists, actors. No one has ever bothered them. They couldn't care less about the debate on the Stasi, which has continued since the fall of the Wall. They may all be German citizens, but they remain impenetrable to the German authorities. Their spying activities are extraterritorial in this country. And unlike the Stasi spies, the Securitate spies were not cut off from their case officers after reunification, because these now hold positions in the new Romanian secret service. The German Bundestag financed the Association's work during and after the dictatorship. Has anyone ever demanded an investigation into theentanglement of its staff with the Romanian dictatorship?
In 1989, after Ceausescu's fall, I thought that the smear campaigns against me would finally be over. But they continued. In 1991 I even received threatening phone calls in Rome while on a bursary at the Villa Massimo. And the Securitate's letter campaign has apparently taken on a life of its own. When in 2004 I was awarded the literature prize of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, not only did the Foundation receive piles of letters containing the usual slander, this time the action took on grotesque proportions as even the chairmanship of the Bundestag, the then leader of the federal state of Baden-Württenberg, Erwin Teufel, the chairman of the jury, Birgit Lermen, and Joachim Gauck, who was to give the award speech, received letters denouncing me as an agent, a member of Romania's communist party, and a traitor. Birgit Lermen's phone rang at a quarter to midnight, on the dot of 12, Bernhard Vogel, the chairman of the foundation received a call, and at a quarter past, Joachim Gauck's phone was ringing. Smears and threats with the Nazi party anthem blaring in the background. These calls were made on a nightly basis until the police eventually traced the caller.
The doppelganger from the falsification workshop
In my file I am two different people. One is called "Cristina", who is being fought as an enemy of the state. To compromise this "Cristina" the falsification workshop of Branch "D" (disinformation) fabricated a doppelganger from all those ingredients that would harm me the most – party-faithful communist, unscrupulous agent. Wherever I went, I had to live with this doppelganger. It was not only sent after me wherever I went, it also hurried ahead. Even though I have always and from the start, written only against the dictatorship, the doppelganger still continues on its own way. It has taken on a life of its own. Even though the dictatorship has been dead for 20 years, the doppelganger is still wandering about. For how much longer?
*
This article was originally published in Die Zeit on 23 July, 2009.
Herta Müller was born in Nitzkydorf in Romania in 1953. In 1987 she emigrated to Germany with her ex-husband, the writer Richard Wagner. In 2004 she won the Literature Prize of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation. Her latest novel "Atemschaukel" was published by Hanser Verlag this month. She lives in Berlin.
Translation: Karsten Sand Iversen and Christopher Sand-Iversen
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In spring earlier this year I visited Bucharest, on the invitation of the NEC (New European College). On the first day I was sitting in the hotel lobby with a journalist and a photographer when a muscular security guard inquired about a permit and tried to tear the camera from the photographer's hands. "No photos allowed on the premises, nor of any people on the premises," he bellowed. On the evening of the second day I had arranged to have dinner with a friend who, as we had agreed on the phone, came to pick me up from the hotel at six o'clock. As he turned into the street in which the hotel was situated, he noticed a man following him. When he asked to call me at the reception, the receptionist said he would have to fill in a visitor's form first. This frightened him because such a thing was unheard of, even under Ceausescu.
My friend and I walked to the restaurant. Again and again he suggested that we cross to the other side of the street. I thought nothing of it. Not until the following day did he tell Andrei Plesu, the Director of the NEC, about the visitor's form and that a man had followed him on his way to the hotel, and later the two of us to the restaurant. Andrei Plesu was infuriated and sent his secretary to cancel all bookings at the hotel. The hotel manager lied that it was the receptionist's first day at work and that she had made a mistake. But the secretary knew the lady, she had worked in the reception for years and years. The manager replied that the "patron", the owner of the hotel, was aformer Securitate man who, unfortunately, would not change his ways. Then he smiled and said that by all means the NEC could cancel its bookings with him, but that it would be the same in other hotels of the same standard. The only difference being that you wouldn't know.
I checked out. After that I didn't notice anyone else following me. Either the secret service had backed off, or they worked professionally, i.e. unnoticed.
In order to know that a shadow was needed at six o'clock, my phone must have been tapped. Ceausescu's secret police, the Securitate, has not disbanded, just given another name, the SRI (Romanian Information Service). And according to their own figures, 40% of the staff was taken on from the Securitate. The real percentage is probably much higher. And the remaining 60% are retired and living on pensions that are three times higher than those of everybody else, or they are the new architects of the market economy. Apart from jobs in the diplomatic corps, a former spy in today's Romania can attain any post.
Access to files, the Romanian way
Romanian intellectuals were as uninterested in seeing the secret files opened as they were in all the crushed lives around them, or in the new arrangements of the party's top brass and secret service officers. If, like me, you have publicly demanded access to files year in year out, you start to get on the nerves even of your friends. This was another reason why, for years, the Securitate files were not in the hands of the National Council for the Study of the Securitate Archives (the tongue-twistingly named CNSAS), which was grudgingly set up in 1999 at the instigation of the EU, but with the new-old secret service. They controlled all access to files. The CNSAS had to submit applications to them; sometimes they were granted, but mostly they were refused, even for the grounds: The file applied for is still being worked on. In 2004 I was in Bucharest in order to lend weight to my repeated application for file access. At the entrance to the CNSAS I was puzzled to find three young women in mini-dresses with plunging necklines and shiny neon tights, as if this were some erotic centre. And between the women stood a soldier, a machine-gun slung over his shoulder, as if this were a military barracks. The head of CNSAS pretended not to be there, even though I had an appointment with him.
This spring a group of researchers happened upon the files kept on the Romanian-German authors of the "Aktionsgruppe Banat". The Securitate had a specialised department for each minority. For the Germans, it was called "German Nationalists and Fascists", the Hungarian section was called "Hungarian Irredentists", the Jewish one "Jewish Nationalists". Only Romanian authors had the honour of being placed under the observation of the department of "Art and Culture".
Suddenly I found my file, too, under the name of Cristina. Three volumes, 914 pages. It was allegedly opened on 8 March, 1983 – although it contains documents from earlier years. The reason given for opening the file: "Tendentious distortions of realities in the country, particularly in the village environment" in my book "Nadirs". Textual analysis by spies corroborate this. And the fact that I belong to a "circle of German-language poets", which is "renowned for its hostile works".
The file is a botched job by the SRI on behalf of the old Securitate. For ten years they had all the time in the world to "work" on it. You could not call this cooking the books, the file has simply been emptied of all substance.
The three years at the tractor factory Tehnometal where I was a translator are missing. I translated the manuals for machines imported from the GDR, Austria and Switzerland. For two years I sat with four bookkeepers in the office. They worked out the wages of the workers, I turned the pages of my fat technical dictionaries. I didn't understand the first thing about hydraulic or non-hydraulic presses, levers or gauges. When the dictionary offered three, four, or even seven terms, I went out onto the factory floor and asked the workers. They told me the correct Romanian word without any knowledge of German – they knew their machines. In the third year a "protocol office" was established. The company director moved me there to work alongside two newly employed translators, one from French, the other from English. One was the wife of a university professor who, even in my student days, was said to be a Securitate informant. The other was the daughter-in-law of the second most senior secret service officer in town. Only those two had the key to the file cupboard. When foreign professionals visited, I had to leave the office. Then, apparently, I was to be put through two recruitment tests with the secret police officer Stana, to be made suitable for the office. After my second refusal, his goodbye was: "You'll be sorry, we'll drown you in the river. "
One morning when I turned up for work, my dictionaries were lying on the floor outside the office door. My place had been taken by an engineer, and I was no longer allowed into the office. I couldn't go home, they would have sacked me there and then. Now I had no table, no chair. For two days, I defiantly sat my eight hours with the dictionaries on a concrete staircase that joined the ground and first floors, trying to translate so that no one could say I wasn't working. The office staff walked past me in silence. My friend Jenny, an engineer, knew about what was happening to me. Every day on our way home I explained it to her in detail. She came to me in the lunch break and sat down on the stairs. We ate together as we had done before in my office. Over the loudspeaker in the yard we could always hear the workers' choruses about the happiness of the people. She ate and cried for me, I didn't. I had to be strong.
On the third day I installed myself at Jenny's desk, she cleared a corner for me. On the fourth day too. It was a large office. On the fifth morning she was waiting for me outside the door. "I am no longer allowed to let you in the office. Just think, my colleagues say you are a spy. " "How's that possible," I asked. "But you know where we're living," she reasoned. I took my dictionaries and sat down on the stairs again. This time I cried too. When I went out onto the factory floor to ask about a word, the workers whistled after me and shouted: "Informer". It was a witches' cauldron. How many spies were there in Jenny's office and on the shop floor. They were acting on instructions. There were orders from above to attack me, the slander was meant to force me to resign. At the beginning of these turbulent times my father died. I no longer had a grip on things, I had to reassure myself that I really existed in the world, and began to write down the story of my – these writings formed the basis of the short stories in "Nadirs".
The fact that I was now considered a spy because I had refused to become one was worse than the attempt to recruit me and the death threat. I was being slandered by precisely the people that I was protecting by refusing to spy on them. Jenny and a handful of colleagues could see the games that were being played with me. But those who knew me less well could not. How could I have explained to them what was going on, how could I have proved the opposite. It was completely impossible, as the Securitate knew only too well, and that is exactly why they did it to me. They knew, too, that such perfidy would be far more destructive than any blackmail. You can even get used to death threats. They are part and parcel of this one life we have. You can defy anxiety to the depths of your soul. But slander steals your soul. You just feel surrounded by horror.
How long this situation lasted, I no longer know. It seemed endless to me. It was probably just weeks. Finally, I was sacked.
In my files this period is covered by just two words, a handwritten note in the margin of a surveillance protocol. Years later, at home, I related the attempt in the factory to enlist me as a spy. In the margin Lieutenant Padurariu wrote: "That's correct."
Then came the interrogations. The reproaches: that I wasn't looking for a job, that I was living from prostitution, black market dealings, as a "parasitic element". Names were mentioned that I had never heard in my life. And espionage for the BND (West German Intelligence Service) because I was friendly with a librarian at the Goethe Institute and an interpreter at the German Embassy. Hours and hours of fictitious reproaches. But not only that. They needed no summons, they simply plucked me off the street.
I was on my way to the hairdresser's when a policeman escorted me through a narrow metal door into the basement of a hall of residence. Three men in plain clothes were sitting at a table. A small bony one was the boss. He demanded to see my identity card and said: "Well, you whore, here we meet again." I had never seen him before. He said I was having sex with eight Arab students in exchange for tights and cosmetics. I didn't know a single Arab student. When I told him this, he replied: "If we want to, we'll find 20 Arabs as witnesses. You'll see, it'll make for a splendid trial." Time and again he would throw my identity card on the floor, and I had to bend down and pick it up. Thirty or forty times maybe; when I got slower, he kicked me in the small of my back. And from behind the door at the end of the table I heard a woman's voice screaming. Torture or rape, just a tape recording, I hoped. Then I was forced to eat eight hard boiled eggs and green onions with salt. I forced the stuff down. Then the bony man opened the metal door, threw my identity card outside and kicked me in the rear. I fell with my face in the grass beside some bushes. I vomited without raising my head. Without hurrying I picked up my identity card and headed home. Being pulled in from the street was more terrifying than a summons. No one would have known where you were. You could have disappeared, and never shown up again or, as they had threatened earlier, you could be pulled out of the river, a drowned corpse. The verdict would have been suicide.
No interrogation is mentioned in the files, no summons, and nothing about being pulled in from the street
This is what the file states on 30 November, 1986: "Notification of every journey that Cristina undertakes, to Bucharest and other places in the country, must be given in due time to Directorate I/A (Internal Security) and III/A (Counterespionage)", so that "permanent control may be maintained." In other words, I could not travel anywhere in the country without being shadowed, "to carry out the necessary control measures re. her relationships with West German diplomats and West German citizens. "
The shadowing varied according to their intentions. Sometimes you didn't notice it, sometimes it was conspicuous, sometimes it became aggressive and brutal. When "Nadirs" was due to be published by the West Berlin publishers Rotbuch, the editor and I had arranged to meet in Poiana Brasov in the Carpathian Mountains to avoid attracting attention. We travelled there separately as winter sports enthusiasts. My husband Richard Wagner had gone to Bucharest with the manuscript. I was to follow the next day by night train, without the manuscript. Two men met me in train station, wanting to take me away. I said: "I'm not coming unless you have an arrest warrant ." They confiscated my ticket and my identity card and said, before disappearing, that I should not leave that spot until they returned. But the train pulled in and they didn't come back. I went out onto the platform. This was the time of the great electricity saving effort, the sleeping car was standing in the dark at the end of the platform. You were only allowed to get on shortly before departure, the door was still locked. The two men were there, too, walking up and down, they jostled me and pushed me to the ground three times. Dirty and confused I picked myself up as if nothing had happened. And the waiting crowd looked on as if nothing had happened. When, finally, the door of the sleeping car opened, I pushed my way into the middle of the queue. The two men got on as well. I went into the compartment, undressed partly, and slipped on my pyjamas so that if they pulled me out, I would look conspicuous. As the train pulled away, I went to the toilet and hid a letter to Amnesty International behind the sink. The two men were standing in the corridor, talking to the conductor of the sleeping car. I had the lower bunk in the compartment. Perhaps because I'm easier to snatch from there, I thought. When the conductor came to my compartment, he handed me my ticket and my identity card. Where had he got those, and what did the two men want from him, I asked. "Which men," he said, "there are dozens of men here."
I didn't sleep a wink all night. It was foolish of me to get on the train, I thought, they'll throw me off somewhere in a snowy field during the night. When dawn arrived, my anxiety abated. They would have used the dark to stage a suicide, I thought. Before the first passengers awoke, I went to the toilet to retrieve the hidden letter. Then I got dressed, sat down on the edge of the bunk and waited until the train arrived in Bucharest. I got out of the train as if nothing had happened. Not a word about this in the file either.
The shadowing had consequences for others too. A friend was first noticed by the secret service during a reading from "Nadirs" at the Bucharest Goethe Institute. His details were taken, a file on him was opened and he was under surveillance from then on. This information comes from his file, no mention is made of it in mine.
The secret police came and went as they pleased when we weren't at home. Often they would deliberately leave signs: cigarette butts, pictures removed from the wall and left on the bed, chairs moved. The most uncanny incident of this kind lasted weeks. First the tail, then the paws, and finally the head was cut off a fox skin lying on the floor, and laid on the fox's belly. You couldn't see the cuts. I first noticed the tail lying there while cleaning the apartment. I still thought it was accidental. It was only weeks later, when the hind paw had been cut off, that I began to get the creeps. Until the point when the head was also cut off, the first thing I would do on coming home was to check the fox skin. Anything could happen, the flat was no longer private. At every mealtime you would wonder if the food had been poisoned. There is not a word about this psychological terror in the files.
In the summer of 1986 the writer Anna Jonas visited us in Timisoara. In a letter – which is enclosed in my file – from 4 November 1985, to the Romanian Society of Authors, she and other authors protested against the fact that I was not allowed to travel to the Book Fair, to the Evangelical Church Day, and to my publishers. The visit is accurately documented in my file, and there is a "telex" from 18 August 1986, to the border authority instructing them to search her luggage "thoroughly" on her leaving Romania, and to report their findings. In contrast, the visit of the journalist Rolf Michaelis from Die Zeit is missing. After the publication of "Nadirs" he wanted to conduct an interview with me. He had announced his arrival by telegram and trusted that he would find me at home. But the telegram was intercepted by the secret service, and Richard Wagner and I, knowing nothing, had gone to see his parents in the country for a couple of days. Two days running he rang our doorbell in vain. On the second day three men were lying in wait for him in the little room housing the rubbish chute, and brutally beat him up. The toes on both his feet were broken. We were living on the fifth floor, the lift wasn't working due to a power shortage. Michaelis had to crawl on all fours down the pitch-dark stairwell and onto the street. The telegram from Michaelis is missing from the file, although there is quite a collection of intercepted letters from the West. According to the file his visit never took place. This gap shows, too, that the secret service has erased the actions of their officers, so that no one can be held responsible as a result of file access – they have seen to it that the post-Ceausescu Securitate has become an abstract monster.
This is also how I explain to myself that no reference can be found in my file to another bizarre incident: I was already living in Berlin when I was called to the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution. I was shown a photo of a Romanian man unknown to me, who had been arrested in Königswinter as a Securitate agent. My name and address were in his notebook. The agent was suspected of travelling in Germany to carry out murders.
Rolf Michaelis wanted to protect us and didn't write about these attacks until we had left Romania. From the files I know that this was a mistake. Not silence, but publicity would protect us in the West. My file also reveals that surreal criminal proceedings were prepared against me for "spying for the BND". It was thanks to the reaction to my books and the literary prizes in Germany that this plan was never realised and I was not arrested.
Rolf Michaelis could not call us prior to his visit as we had no telephone. In Romania you had to wait years for a connection. We, however, were offered one without having applied. We refused, as we all knew that a telephone would be the most practical listening post in our small flat. When you visited friends who had a telephone, it had to be put in the fridge immediately and a record played to cover the voices. As is turned out, our refusal of the phone was pointless, as half of the file material I was given resulted from our flat being bugged.
Richard Wagner's file contains the "Nota de analiza" of 20 February 1985, which documents when neither of us is at home. "Similarly, special apparatus was installed in the flat, which delivers data of operative interest." The plan to install bugs can also be found in his file. Holes were drilled in the ceiling of the flat below, and in the our own floor. In both rooms the bugs were concealed behind the cupboards.
The monitoring protocols are often full of empty brackets because the music from the records disturbed the bugging. But we let the music play because we believed that the secret service was working with directional microphones. We never thought that we were being bugged day and night. True, during interrogations you were always confronted with things the interrogators couldn't possibly know. But as Romania was so poor and backwards we assumed that the Securitate couldn't afford modern bugging equipment. More to the point, we also thought that although we were state enemies, we were hardly worth such expense. For all our anxiety, we remained naive and thoroughly clueless about the level of surveillance.
The Securitate investigated the occupation, workplace and political trustworthiness of each and every occupant of our ten-storey tenement block and kept personal files – probably in order to recruit spies in the neighbourhood. Those who until then had escaped the attentions of the secret service, were stamped as "NECUNOSCUT" (unknown).
The bugging protocols are daily reports. The bugged conversations were summarised, but all "subversive" bits were transcribed word for word. Unknown visitors merit question marks in the margins and instructions to establish their identity. The bugging protocols also are incomplete.
One of our closest friends was Roland Kirsch. He was living round the corner from us and came to see us almost daily. He was an engineer in a slaughterhouse, took photographs of everyday dreariness, and wrote prose miniatures. In 1996 his volume "Traum der Mondkatze" (the dream of the moon cat) was published in Germany. It was published posthumously, because in May 1989 he was found hanged in his flat. The neighbours now say that they heard several loud voices in his flat on the night of his death. I do not believe it was suicide either. In Romania it would take days of running around to sort out all the formalities for a funeral. In suicide cases a post mortem was a matter of course. But Roland Kirsch's parents were handed all the relevant papers within a day. He was buried quickly and there was no post mortem. And there is no mention of a single visit from Roland Kirsch in the fat envelope of bugging protocols. His name is deleted, this person has been erased from existence.
The tangle of love and betrayal
My file at least answered one painful question. A year after my departure from Romania, Jenny came to visit in Berlin. Since the time of the harassment in the factory she had been my closest friend. Even after I was sacked we saw each other almost daily. But when I saw her passport in our Berlin kitchen, and the additional visas for France and Greece, I confronted her directly: "You don't get a passport like that for nothing, what did you do to get it?" Her answer: "The secret service has sent me, and I was desperate to see you again." Jenny had cancer – she is long dead now. She told me that her task was to investigate our flat and our daily habits. When we get up and go to bed, where we do our shopping and what we buy. On her return, she promised, she would only pass on what had been agreed between us. She lived with us, wanted to stay for a month. With each day my distrust grew. After just a couple of days I rummaged through her suitcase and found the telephone number of the Romanian consulate and a copy of our door key. After that I lived with the suspicion that in all probability she had been spying on me from the outset, her friendship just part of the job. After her return, I see from the file, she delivered a detailed description of the flat and of our habits, as "SURSA (source) SANDA".
But in a bugging protocol from 21 December, 1984, a note in the margin, next to Jenny's name, reads: "We must identify JENI, apparently there is great trust between them." This friendship, which meant so much to me, was ruined by her visit to Berlin, a terminally ill cancer patient lured into betrayal after chemotherapy. The copied key made it clear that Jenny had fulfilled her task behind our backs. I had to ask her to leave our Berlin flat at once. I had to chase my closest friend out in order to protect myself and Richard Wagner from her assignment. This tangle of love and betrayal was unavoidable. A thousand times I have turned her visit over in my mind, mourned our friendship, discovering to my disbelief that after my emigration, Jenny had a relationship with a Securitate officer. Today I am glad, for the file shows that our intimacy had grown naturally and had not been arranged by the secret service, and that Jenny didn't spy on me until after my emigration. You become grateful for small mercies, trawling through all the poison for a part that isn't contaminated, however small. That my file proves that the feelings between us were real, almost makes me happy now.
The expansion of tradition through libel
After the publication of "Nadirs" in Germany, and as the first invitations came, I was not allowed to travel. But when these were followed by invitations for literary award ceremonies, the Securitate changed its strategy. Having been out of work until then, it came as a great surprise when, in the late summer of 1984, I was offered a teaching job, and on my first day of work I received the recommendation from the head teacher that was the requirement for travelling. And in October 1984 I was actually allowed to travel. I was also permitted to receive literary prizes in person on the two occasions that followed.
The reasoning behind this lenience, however, was malicious: instead of being considered a dissident among my colleagues at the school, as I had been until then, I was to be seen as profiteering from the regime and, in the West, suspected of espionage. The secret service worked intensively on both, but in particular on the "agent" persona. Spying staff were sent to Germany on asmear campaign. The plan of action of 1 July 1985, states with satisfaction: "As a result of several journeys abroad, the idea was planted among some actors at the German State Theatre in Timisoara that Cristina is an agent for the Romanian Securitate. The West German stage director Alexander Montleart, temporarily at the German Theatre in Timisoara, has already voiced his suspicions to Martina Olczyk from the Goethe Institute and to employees at the German embassy in Bucharest."
After my emigration in 1987 they stepped up the pressure to "compromise and isolate" me. A "Nota de analiza" from March 1989 reads: "As part of the operation to compromise her reputation, we will work with Branch D (disinformation), publishing articles abroad or sending memoranda – that appear to come from the German emigre community – to several circles and authorities with influence in Germany." One of the spies appointed to this job is "Sorin", "for he is said to have the literary and journalistic leanings necessary to execute the plan of action." On 3 July 1989, department I/A sends a "report" to the Securitate HQ in Bucharest. The Romanian writerDamian Ureche has written a letter, in accordance with their instructions, in which Richard Wagner and I are denounced as spies. There follows a request to HQ to authorise the letter. A dancer from one of the folklore ensembles, who was travelling to Germany, was to pass it on to Radio Free Europe and the ARD (the West German public broadcaster).
The most important "partner" in Germany for smear campaigning was theAssociation of Banat Swabians. As early as 1985 the Securitate note with satisfaction: "The leadership of the Association of Banat Swabians has made negative comments about this book ("Nadirs"), also in the presence of representatives of the Romanian Embassy in Germany." This is strong stuff. Since the publication of "Nadirs" the Association had waged a character assassination campaign against me. "Fecal language, urine prose, traitor,party whore" were the comments typical of their homespun "literary criticism". I was a spy, they alleged, I had even written "Nadirs" at the behest of the Securitate. While I was sitting on the concrete steps of the tractor factory, the Association had obviously been in cahoots with the embassy staff of the Ceausescu dictatorship. I, on the other hand, would never have dared set foot in that embassy, for fear of never leaving it alive. In view of these relations with Ceausescu's diplomats it is hardly surprising that throughout all those years the Association never uttered one critical syllable. In collaboration with the regime it carried on the sale of Romanian-Germans, unconcerned that the Federal Republic was paying as much as 12,000 DM for each emigrant. Nor did it seem to mind that this human trafficking was a considerable source of hard currency for the dictatorship.
As part of their little agreement with the regime, they shared a hatred of me and joined in the business of libel. I became public enemy number one and, as their permanent target, a vital part of the Association's identity. To libel me was to prove one's love of the homeland. The Association libelled me as a new way of nurturing tradition. The only time the Association seemed used the term "spy" was to blacken my reputation. My file reads: "Because of her writings which put the Banat Swabians in a bad light," persons from this circle outside of Romania had "isolated and embarrassed" me. And: "Using the means at our disposal, our organs have participated in this campaign." My file says: "Compromising material should also be sent to Horst Fassel, at the address of his institute, requesting that it be disseminated." The institute in question is the Danube Swabian Institute in Tübingen, which Fassel headed at that time. Before that, in the eighties, he was editor of the Banater Post.
In their reports the spies led the Romanian secret service to believe that the Association in Germany had a significance that it never actually had. Despite the geographical distance, it had a similar level of dependence that a secret police informant has to his or her case officer, the same pressure to obey, the same fear of being dropped and exposed in the West.
One of the most diligent informants was "Sorin", who as early as 1983 snooped on the Timisoara group of authors. An acquaintance, who has seen the file on his now-dead father, learned from the code which is attached to the name of a spy on each report, that by 1982 "Sorin" had already delivered 38 such reports. In my file which contains 30 spy names, "Sorin" is one of the leading protagonists. A plan of action launched on 30 November 1986, expressly states that "Sorin" was to be given the task of prying into any plans I was hatching and which relationships I was cultivating in Romania and abroad. The chief editor of the culture section of the Bucharest paper New Way, once visited us in Timisoara accompanied by Walther Konschitzky. In the bugging protocol for that day Lieutenant Padurariu, who always interrogated me, noted in the margin the identification of this visitor: "Sorin".
During the dictatorship this "Sorin" was travelling regularly to Germany and, like so many spies, emigrated before the fall of Ceausescu. He became the cultural consultant of the Banat Association from 1992 to 1998. After his position in the Munich HQ was axed, he has continued to carry out his function on a voluntary basis.
The Association has never cared about the spies in its own ranks. Since its founding in 1950 it has created its imaginary homeland of brass band music, traditional costume parties, cosy peasant cottages and hand carved wooden gates. It has always turned a blind eye to dictatorships under Hitler or Ceausescu. Leading figures in the National Socialist population in the Banat were among the Association's founders.
These days the Association refuses to investigate the Securitate's influence on its own ranks, with the excuse that the matter is statute-barred. That is not acceptable in view of its political weight in Germany. Although fewer than 10% of Banat Swabian emigres are organised in the Association, throughout the years it has had representatives on broadcasting boards and in cultural institutions. After my arrival in Germany, radio journalists said that they had run into problems after featuring me on their programmes because the Association had intervened. Furthermore, all these years it has been one of the switch points for processing emigration applications from Romania, which it has occasionally sought to prevent. The Banat tried to block emigration application by the literary critic Emmerich Reichrath, whose reviews went beyond their narrow horizons. Before leaving the country I, too, received letters from "fellow Banat Germans" in Germany, saying: "You are not welcome in Germany." At the transit home in Nuremberg the Association had its office next door to that of the BND. A stamp from the Association was imperative for processing immigration formalities. I was received with the sentence: "German air won't be good for your health." I had a heavy cold after an overnight journey to the border on the trailer of a tractor. It was February.
Behind the next door, at the BND, the reception was even more brusque. Today I know why. The Securitate's smear campaign had succeeded: "Did you have dealings with the Romanian secret service?" My answer: "It had dealings with me. There's a difference," did not impress the civil servant. "Leave that for me to decide, that's my job," he said. "If you are on an assignment, it's not too late to say so now." While everyone else left this office after a few minutes with a "harmless" stamp, Richard Wagner and I were interrogated for several days, together and separately. While my mother received her certificate of naturalisation automatically, we were told for months that "thorough research was needed". It was grotesque. On the one hand the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution warned us against the Securitate's threats: Do not live on the ground floor, do not accept gifts while travelling, do not leave cigarette packs on the table, never enter a house or a flat with an unknown person, buy yourself a fake pistol, etc. On the other hand the suspicion that I was an agent hampered my naturalisation.
I ask myself why the BND held me in suspicion but didn't get wind of the numerous spies in the Association and among the emigres. Probably the BND also trusted the information coming from the Association. That is why Germany today is a cosy reserve for Securitate spies. When you compare the files on the Banat group of authors with one another, they are riddled with spies: "Sorin", "Voicu", "Gruia", "Marin", "Walter", "Matei", and many more. They are teachers, professors, civil servants, journalists, actors. No one has ever bothered them. They couldn't care less about the debate on the Stasi, which has continued since the fall of the Wall. They may all be German citizens, but they remain impenetrable to the German authorities. Their spying activities are extraterritorial in this country. And unlike the Stasi spies, the Securitate spies were not cut off from their case officers after reunification, because these now hold positions in the new Romanian secret service. The German Bundestag financed the Association's work during and after the dictatorship. Has anyone ever demanded an investigation into theentanglement of its staff with the Romanian dictatorship?
In 1989, after Ceausescu's fall, I thought that the smear campaigns against me would finally be over. But they continued. In 1991 I even received threatening phone calls in Rome while on a bursary at the Villa Massimo. And the Securitate's letter campaign has apparently taken on a life of its own. When in 2004 I was awarded the literature prize of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, not only did the Foundation receive piles of letters containing the usual slander, this time the action took on grotesque proportions as even the chairmanship of the Bundestag, the then leader of the federal state of Baden-Württenberg, Erwin Teufel, the chairman of the jury, Birgit Lermen, and Joachim Gauck, who was to give the award speech, received letters denouncing me as an agent, a member of Romania's communist party, and a traitor. Birgit Lermen's phone rang at a quarter to midnight, on the dot of 12, Bernhard Vogel, the chairman of the foundation received a call, and at a quarter past, Joachim Gauck's phone was ringing. Smears and threats with the Nazi party anthem blaring in the background. These calls were made on a nightly basis until the police eventually traced the caller.
The doppelganger from the falsification workshop
In my file I am two different people. One is called "Cristina", who is being fought as an enemy of the state. To compromise this "Cristina" the falsification workshop of Branch "D" (disinformation) fabricated a doppelganger from all those ingredients that would harm me the most – party-faithful communist, unscrupulous agent. Wherever I went, I had to live with this doppelganger. It was not only sent after me wherever I went, it also hurried ahead. Even though I have always and from the start, written only against the dictatorship, the doppelganger still continues on its own way. It has taken on a life of its own. Even though the dictatorship has been dead for 20 years, the doppelganger is still wandering about. For how much longer?
*
This article was originally published in Die Zeit on 23 July, 2009.
Herta Müller was born in Nitzkydorf in Romania in 1953. In 1987 she emigrated to Germany with her ex-husband, the writer Richard Wagner. In 2004 she won the Literature Prize of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation. Her latest novel "Atemschaukel" was published by Hanser Verlag this month. She lives in Berlin.
Translation: Karsten Sand Iversen and Christopher Sand-Iversen
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