The new publishers of The Berliner Zeitung, Silke and Holger Friedrich, centre left and right, at a meeting with the editors in Berlin this month. Photo / Lena Mucha, The New York Times
An entrepreneur took over a venerable Berlin daily, saying he wanted a new conversation about East Germany. Then his own past became the news.
When a wealthy married couple bought the Berliner Zeitung, a distinguished but ailing survivor of the East German press, they timed their newspaper's big revamp for the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall last month.
In an attention-grabbing two-page editorial, the entrepreneurial couple, Silke and Holger Friedrich, urged a reimagining of history since German reunification. They argued that 30 years after the wall came down, East Germans should wrest back control of their own narrative from the West, and stirred controversy by defending the last East German leader.
But there was an essential piece of information that they left out.
A week later, a rival newspaper reported that Holger Friedrich, 53, had been an informant for the Stasi, the feared secret police of Communist East Germany in the late 1980s.
Instead of apologising, Friedrich chose to come out fighting.
He argued that he was coerced into being an informant and that he worked with his supposed victims to ensure that he disclosed little of value. He insisted that he has little, if anything, to be sorry for. But at the same time, he acknowledged that he could not be sure whether anyone was harmed as a result of his actions.
"I'm not an Easterner who has to apologise. I'm not an Easterner who needs to grovel," he said in an interview at his newspaper's offices.
In the hope of telling his side of the story, Friedrich granted access to his copy of his Stasi files to The New York Times and The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper. He also had the former head of the Stasi Archives and a historian write an official report on his files.
In their report, the archivist and the historian verified the authenticity of the files, although they noted that there was no way of knowing whether the hundreds of pages represented all that the Stasi ever had on him.
The case reflects the debate within Germany over the legacy of the Stasi and those who collaborated with it and how some perceptions are evolving.
In its final throes, the Stasi used an estimated 189,000 informants to help maintain its grip on a Communist state of about 16 million. It was a source of terror in East Germany and of deep shame after its fall.
But in recent years, many Germans have taken a more nuanced view of those who collaborated with the secret police as it has become clearer that many of them were blackmailed or otherwise coerced.
"People are more willing to discuss the ambiguities surrounding those individuals who were acting as informers," said Ned Richardson-Little, a historian at the University of Erfurt, in the former East Germany.
These changing perceptions have also been reflected in popular culture.
In 2006 the Academy Award-winning film The Lives of Others focused on the Stasi's cold-hearted methods. But last year, the film Gundermann was somewhat sympathetic in its portrayal of a real-life story of a Stasi informant, a coal miner turned popular singer. It won national awards and drew large audiences in the east in particular.
Friedrich's file has more than 700 pages, more than 500 of them related to surveillance of him, rather than by him.
He was eventually dropped by his Stasi handlers, who noted in his file that he was proving unproductive.
The extensive report by Marianne Birthler, a former head of the Stasi archives, and historian Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk, noted that even if Friedrich was trying to avoid harming others, there is no way to be certain that he didn't.
Asked why he had not disclosed his Stasi past earlier, Friedrich said, "We felt it was better to get the business going before this came out to be better able deal with it."
His interactions with the Stasi began after he joined the East German Army in 1986. In 1987, after being arrested on suspicion of planning to flee the country and held in a Stasi facility, he was given a choice between prison or collaboration.
"It didn't take me 30 seconds to make up my mind," Friedrich said in the interview, adding that he had always been honest with his family and friends about his involvement.
In Friedrich's file, it said his handlers instructed him to befriend several specific people. But he appeared to have returned with little valuable intelligence.
The storm around Friedrich's Stasi file has become a public spectacle.
It capped a turbulent introduction to public life for a couple who were little known until it was announced that they had bought the Berliner Verlag newspaper group, which publishes the Berliner Zeitung and several smaller titles.
Holger Friedrich made his money in tech in past decade or two, including a stint at the consulting firm McKinsey, and Silke Friedrich founded an English-German private school in Berlin. They promised to bring technological and business expertise to bear on reviving the newspaper company. Its titles retain only a small fraction of the combined 2.5 million circulation that they claimed before the wall fell.
But several missteps brought controversy in the following weeks.
In one instance, they ran a glowing article on a business that Holger Friedrich owned a stake in without noting the connection.
Still, the Friedrichs' purchase of Berliner Verlag, for a price that is not publicly known, made it the only major newspaper publishing house in Germany in the hands of independent Easterners.
Friedrichs' debut editorial attacked the bedrock of the official German narrative about the fall of the wall on November 9, 1989, and reunification. For example, the couple suggested that keeping President Vladimir Putin of Russia closer to Germany might have been a wise move.
But it was another remark that provoked some of the most controversy. They suggested that East Germany's last dictator, Egon Krenz, who was part of efforts to repress the peaceful revolution of the 1980s, should be thanked for not violently cracking down on protesters.
While some said they went too far, others welcomed the call for a rethink.
"I might not share his opinions, but it's about the question of who has the authority to interpret East German history and the history of the fall of the wall, and that is justified," said Mandy Tröger, who teaches media and communication at University of Munich. "Especially if you look at conventional media narratives, this op-ed can be seen as an act of emancipation."
Robert Ide, the managing editor of the paper's biggest local competitor, the Berliner Tagesspiegel, said that as an East German and a senior editor, "I think it's really a good thing that the Berliner Zeitung is being revived with new impulses."
Ide, who was 14 when the wall fell, did not criticise Friedrich for his actions as a young soldier — but he was less indulgent of Friedrich's decisions as a rookie media owner.
"We can't presume to know how we would have acted under those circumstances, but we can ask ourselves how would we have dealt with it today as publishers," Ide said. "He could have come out with it on the 9th of November, and it could have been part of that new frank discussion."
Written by: Christopher F. Schuetze
Photographs by: Lena Mucha
© 2019 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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