The Stasi watched my every move: Dancing on Ice star Katarina Witt reveals East German secret police spied on her since the age of eight
- Katarina was originally accused by anti-government activists of being an informant to police
- She then discovered a 3,000 pages which documented her every move, including a suspected sexual encounter
- Her first boyfriend was deliberately stationed thousands of miles away because authorities worried the relationship would affect her performances
By
Katarina WittPUBLISHED: 22:21, 24 March 2012 |
UPDATED: 22:21, 24 March 2012
Katarina Witt performs her free programme during the Olympic Saddledome in Calgary
As a competitive figure skater, there was always one tiny moment just before the music began and I hit my pose, one second of absolute silence. I knew there were thousands of people in the arena, millions, maybe billions, watching on television.
But for that brief pause, I was completely on my own, rather lonely, rather vulnerable.
It turned out to be good practice, thanks to events well away from my life of rinks and rehearsals, events I could never have predicted. After the destruction of the Berlin Wall in 1989, I was accused not just of collaborating with the government of East Germany, the Deutsche Demo-kratische Republik (DDR), but of spying on my friends.
It was an astonishing claim, deeply hurtful and untrue, which is why in 1992 I found myself in an airless room somewhere in the heart of an ugly concrete building in the eastern half of Berlin, feeling lonely and vulner-able once again. It turned out that all my life, I had been watched more thoroughly than I could ever have imagined – by a very different, uninvited audience.
The trouble started when a civil rights activist claimed in a German newspaper that I was an informer for the Stasi, the secret police, and that I had taken money from them. The early Nineties was a strange time; the euphoria after the DDR’s collapse was overtaken by an atmosphere of suspicion and recrimination.
As the winner of two Olympic gold medals (and four world championships), I was a public figure and an easy target. It was essential to issue as firm a denial as possible, and that meant getting hold of whatever official documents I could.
So, like thousands of former DDR citizens, I applied to the German government to see my own Stasi files. In my case, there were boxes of them – boxes upon boxes – 3,000 meticulously compiled pages, all now stored in the official archive. It was unbelievable; intriguing yet horrifying. There, in front of me, was a detailed account of my life since childhood compiled by anonymous informers, a diary of my entire existence. I realised that, even in the silence of my own home, I had never really been alone.
One of the biggest surprises was seeing how young I was when the surveillance started. ‘She’s eight years old and she has lots of talent,’ was one of the opening entries.
Another surprise was seeing how crushingly dull most of the information turned out to be. The authorities were obsessed with minutiae, like the time I went for a trip with my friends in the car.
‘She was travelling way too fast,’ said the po-faced informer. ‘They all got out of the car feeling dizzy.’ Heaven knows why anyone thought it mattered.
Katarina is now a judge on ITV's Dancing On Ice show and works alongside skating legends Torvill and Dean
Katarina gives her opinion on the celebrities during Dancing on Ice
Some of the spying was plain rubbish, like the claim that I had made love in a hotel room.
‘Sexual intercourse took place from 20.00 to 20.07,’ said the files. Seven minutes! It can’t have amounted to much, had it been true – which it wasn’t. I’d met a male friend and after a long conversation we’d stayed quiet for a little while. And that was that. I suppose the hotel itself would have seemed incriminating to the Stasi. It was mostly used for foreign visitors, the sort of place – as I later read – where they hid cameras in the television sets. This particular informer, however, had an overactive imagination.
There was distressing material, too, such as the discovery that they had deliberately removed my first real boyfriend from my life. He didn’t fit into the East German world view: he was the drummer in a rock band who went around in stripy trousers, so you can imagine how that went down with my coaches. I was supposed to be a disciplined athlete.
He was also quite a bit older than me – he was 25 and I was 18 – and the authorities believed he might affect my concentration. In that respect, they were probably right.
Katarina, left in 1976, found files that read: 'She's eight years old and has lots of talent'
So when it was time for his national service, they stationed him as far away as they possibly could, so far that it was impossible for us to spend the weekend together. The journey would have taken him two or three days. At the time I was in floods of tears.
Finding out, later, that had been done on purpose really hurt. The prospect of gold medals was the only thing they truly cared about.
I’m not saying that the people who were spying tried to hurt me. After all, they wrote down almost nothing of importance. They were probably under great pressure from the authorities and might well have been told that they would, for example, be banned from studying unless they helped. That’s how it worked.
One of the files contained a paragraph which explained how Katarina had sexual intercourse which lasted seven minutes
Maybe they wanted to find out if I wanted to defect, or if I was bad-mouthing the government. In fact, while the party bosses could never have known it, I would never, ever have left my family in that way. My coach, Frau (Jutta) Mueller, bore no responsibility, but it’s clear that there must have been other people at the ice rink who were dealing with the authorities. At first, I wondered how they could possibly have overheard private, one-on-one conversations. It’s possible they somehow used the music consoles at the side of the rink. That’s where we would stand and discuss the routines.
As I sat there with my lawyer in Berlin, surrounded by files, I did feel betrayed, thinking of how truthful and loyal I had always been to my country. I felt I had deserved some trust in return.
But seeing the evidence gave me enormous relief on two counts: I had proof in my hands that I had never spied on anyone. And, perhaps more importantly, it was clear that none of my family and none of my close friends had ever been informers.Understandably, people ask what, if anything, I knew at the time, and seem surprised when they hear the answer: I suspected little, or nothing.
To me this is quite natural. I had a normal, loving family; my mother worked in a hospital, my father sold agricultural seeds.
Then, when I was older, I was effectively a full-time sportswoman, concentrating on very little outside the ice rink. My training was intense. Today in Germany, some young skaters will practise no more than three hours a day after school. There were times when I spent seven hours a day on the ice, three hours just on the compulsory ‘figures’ (the technical turns and circles that form the basis of skating technique).
My relationship with Frau Mueller was intense too. I still have more respect for her than anyone else in the world yet, although we were close, she was still capable of taking me to the limits of what I could stand mentally and physically. She would use all sorts of little tricks. She knew I didn’t like an empty ice rink, for example (who wants to flirt with concrete walls?) so she scheduled some of my training sessions for when the male speed skaters were warming up in the second-floor gym above the rink – and watching. I certainly tried that little bit harder.
So that was my life: skating, skating, skating. There wasn’t much time for political dissent.
Throughout Katarina's life her every move was monitored by the Stasi
Of course I became aware of international differences as I grew older. I remember my first trip abroad to compete in Vienna when I was 12. I looked at one shop window after another, crammed with goods. Everything was so much more colourful than shops at home in Karl Marx Stadt (which has now reverted to its original name of Chemnitz). Every Viennese street felt like a candy store, but an expensive one. I must have spent five hours trying to find an outfit I could afford.
Katarina celebrates after winning the gold medal at the World Championships of Skating in Budapest, Hungary
In later years, I went on international exhibition tours alongside skaters from other countries. We became friends and, in the evenings, we would all get together in one or other of our hotel rooms and talk – with the Americans, the Russians, the West Germans. The Russians brought the vodka, naturally. The Americans ordered French fries.
Looking back, two decades later, it is as if we were living on a different planet, but we never questioned it at the time. The constant control, particularly when it came to travelling abroad, just became a part of my life. ‘We want to protect you,’ was the message. ‘We want to make sure you’re safe and sound.’
The rhetoric was all rather comforting in its way. I believed we were a country of fairness and good social values. Would I have wanted to live in another country? A free country? The question never occurred to me.
In fact, I probably had even less reason to question than most as I was well treated. Like other leading athletes, I was given rewards for winning. There were financial bonuses, for example, and I was allowed to rent an apartment of my own, even though I was only 19 and not married!
They let me jump the queue to buy a Russian-made Lada instead of going on the ten-year waiting list like everyone else.
Then, eventually, they let me turn professional, which was completely unheard of. (I was in the middle of shooting the movie Carmen On Ice in Spain in 1989 when my producer came on set shouting that the wall had just come down.)
I’m glad that Germany is one country again and that people are free to speak and to travel. Democracy is an absolute priority. But there has been a price.
My father lost his job when the company that employed him was bought by Western interests. And, while the cities of eastern Germany are far more beautiful than before, there are still young people who have little sense of future for themselves.
It is a strange thing, psychologically, to find that part of your past has been wiped away. Today I tend to think of my ‘home’ as my family, rather than the place where I grew up.
The Dancing On Ice final will be screened tonight on ITV1 at 6.50pm.
Katarina, centre, training in 1984
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