Unified Germany still a country of ‘they’ and ‘we’

  • Jim Hoagland / Washington Post columnist
  • Wednesday, July 17, 2002 9:00pm
  • Opinion

BERLIN — Eleven years ago we left Edgar Uher bumping down Karl Marx Boulevard in his wheezing Trabi, a reasonable facsimile of an automobile spindled together in East Germany’s communist days of yore. Edgar, diplomat and spy extraordinaire, was driving off into the uncertainty of German unification and the capitalist world he had worked to undermine.

Spy? So it turns out. When I wrote a column on Edgar’s early adjustment to the end of the Cold War in 1991, he still would not confirm what I had suspected since we had met in Paris three years earlier: This courteous, engaging embassy first secretary actually worked for the loathsome East German Ministry for State Security, or Stasi.

Uher’s uncommonly smooth English, laser-like analytical ability and freedom to mix with Westerners without fear (or a minder) instantly marked him as a senior intelligence agent. Our conversations over coffee multiplied and became more transparent as East Germany’s disintegration accelerated. "This can’t last," he said five months before the Berlin Wall came down. "The powder keg will explode under this pressure."

So it did. I next encountered Edgar in eastern Berlin six months after unification. He and Stasi colleagues had been ordered home and fired as the regime came apart. Thus are silver linings minted.

"No state that dismantles its security service can survive," Uher says now. "We saw what was coming. Others expected the cheap food and subsidized vacations to continue. They waited for orders, while we scrambled to make a living."

We sit this time on a park bench behind the old East German parliament building. Sleek and generally prosperous looking, Uher now easily discusses the "end days of the German Democratic Republic" and his own role as an espionage officer in London and Paris for Erich Honecker’s regime in the 1980s.

"That chapter is absolutely closed in Germany. You talk honestly about what you did, get it over with and live in today. Everybody knows," Uher says. But as always with Germany, it is not quite that simple.

Uher notes with initial bitterness that "they" are determined to tear down the parliament building, a historical and architectural monstrosity that somehow still matters to him. Then he brightens: "Of course we tore down their royal palace on that same spot when we took over. So I guess it is fitting."

Throughout Uher’s remarks, "we" and "they" denote the East and West Germans who were supposedly united out of existence. It is otherwise, he admits: "We always ask whether someone is from East or West. Then all is revealed. The typical West German is to us arrogant. The typical East German is to them lazy. It has not changed. The psychological divide remains deep."

But, he protests, "we are not lazy. Germans in the east are still waiting for orders. They have to be told what to do. One bad thing we did was to take initiative away from people."

Uher’s biggest break — similar to the competitive advantage Vladimir Putin established in Russia — was to live in and understand Western societies built on capitalism’s creative destruction. In London in 1980, Uher bought an early British-made computer and taught himself DOS programming. That would be a career-saver.

He and other jobless Stasi officers were hired by the largest motorcycle factory in eastern Germany. Gradually Uher and five associates gained financial control of the firm’s spare-parts distribution company. But he had to fire 70 people as the economy soured. "It was the only way the company could survive," he says with remorse.

Uher’s ability to get the firm online and to take orders from overseas stabilized its sales. But his company has had to endure highly intrusive auditing and other official scrutiny. "Once an auditor said to me: ‘You always have to look twice when the Stasi is involved,’ " says Uher. "I thought the Cold War was supposed to be over."

Not quite. Two years ago the British press set out to find "the Chatham House Mole" after German intelligence disclosed that an agent code-named Eckart sent to East Berlin 27 reports on Cold War topics in the 1980s. Only a British spy inside the London think tank could have sent such detailed accounts to the Stasi, the newspapers breathlessly reported, fingering a retired British admiral.

"He wasn’t Eckart," Uher says. "I know. I was Eckart. I read and listened — all public and unclassified information — and wrote it up. In that time, it looked like gold to people here," says my friend the spare parts salesman who has come in from the cold.

Jim Hoagland can be reached at The Washington Post Writers Group, 1150 15th St. NW, Washington, DC 20071-9200 or hoaglandj@washpost.com.

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