Actor’s Role as Informer Is Bit Part in German Tragedy : Spying: Opened Stasi files have produced scandal and pain. There is some feeling enough may be enough.

A strong voice, a quick smile and direct manner all convey the self-assurance that helped make Joachim Nimtz a successful actor on the East German stage in the decade before communism collapsed. But today those same qualities help mask something very different: an inner turmoil born from the public airing of his terrible secret.

For just over a year in the late 1980s, Nimtz spied on friends and colleagues for the infamous Ministry for State Security--the Communists’ pervasive secret police better known as the Stasi.

It was a revelation that turned the 36-year-old actor’s life upside down overnight.

He was summarily fired from his job of 10 years at the respected Dresden Ensemble, canceled out of a planned guest engagement with a Munich playhouse and shunned everywhere else.

After working for nearly a year as a construction worker and a waiter, he has begun a stage comeback--in a one-man performance that centers on the struggle with his awful, personal truth.

“I still don’t know why I did it,” he said in an interview. “I really don’t.”

His struggle is one of thousands of often-agonizing personal dramas that have unfolded in Germany since the parliamentary decision two years ago to throw open the archives of the infamous Stasi, now seen as Communist Europe’s most intrusive internal security network.

The dramas have cut a swath through the eastern German psyche, destroying reputations, wrecking marriages, breaking friendships, ruining careers and tarnishing idols.

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But in many cases they have also cleared others suspected of wrongdoing and, occasionally, revealed tales of personal courage.

“You see people in nearly identical situations where one says ‘yes’ (to spying), the other says ‘no’ or manages to find some way out,” said Joachim Gauck, a former eastern German pastor who now heads the federal office in charge of the Stasi documents. “There are stories of betrayal and stories of heroism.”

With a staff of more than 3,000, Gauck’s office is also charged with running security checks on all those employed in democratic Germany’s public service to ensure they have no Stasi links. But the agonizing drumbeat of scandal, pain and disappointment produced by the Stasi files in the last two years has also spawned another sentiment--a feeling that enough may be enough.

Indeed, among a broadening cross-section of political opinion, concerns are growing that, far from being a catharsis, the secrets that continue to ooze from the Stasi files have become a social poison that saps public morale and further complicates the already difficult task of consolidating German unity.

With files containing the most intimate, inane details on at least 1 million people, in such volume that they can best be measured in miles (108 is the official figure), there remain many revelations still to come. Of the 700,000 people who have applied to see their files, more than half have yet to gain access.

Concerns about the files’ impact grew last fall, with an incident surrounding the nation’s newest hero: Franziska van Almsick, 15, a world-class swimmer whose fresh, outspoken, upbeat attitude toward life and family had visibly lifted spirits in the east. The national illustrated weekly Stern dubbed her “The Darling of the Nation.”

But the warmth and celebrations that followed her six gold medals and world-record performances at last summer’s European championships in Britain were suddenly crushed by news reports that the girl’s mother, Jutta, 42, had passed intimate details about friends and work colleagues to the Stasi for almost a decade before the Berlin Wall fell.

“Once and for all, I’d like to be able to live without this debate, without the need for people to have their biographies rewritten by the Stasi,” said Friedrich Schorlemmer, an eastern German Protestant pastor and political activist. He has called for the files to be closed in 1996 and destroyed in a giant bonfire.

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Even Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who initially backed the opening of the files, seemed worried as he testified last month before a parliamentary commission.

“The Stasi files are an irritant . . . because they poison the entire atmosphere and because nobody knows exactly what material in them is fact and what’s fiction,” he said. “If I were fully free to decide, then I know exactly what should happen to those files.”

Kohl’s comments surprised many and cut so directly across his government’s official policy on the issue that the chancellery was forced to issue a clarification, stressing that Kohl had expressed only his personal views on the sensitive issue.

So far, no other former Communist country has dared to expose its own security agency files to such public glare. The initial German experience seems to have only hardened the other nations’ resolve to keep such potentially explosive material under lock and key.

Yet in a recent, 90-minute interview in his Berlin office, Gauck strenuously rejected both the calls to close the files and any comparison with the other former Soviet satellite states. Although he himself was a target of at least 10 separate Stasi informers during the Communist era, Gauck insisted that the need to keep the files open had little to do with personal revenge.

For him, the files contain a priceless chronicle of how a dictatorship worked, how it coerced hundreds of thousands of normal people to betray their closest friends and how others were able to avoid the trap.

“In this mixture of heroism, betrayal and self-defense, we can, together, find the next step (toward the future) with a bit of dignity,” he said. “Especially for Germans, who have a tendency to wilt in the face of power, they must not be ashamed of this confrontation with the past.

“We have to use this as a learning process--to see our mistakes and learn how to develop a greater sense of civil courage, something that isn’t found in abundance in this culture,” he added.

Gauck admitted that he has concerns about the sensationalized media reporting that focused on specific cases but said that was not a reason to close the files. He dismissed those Western politicians and the former Communist Establishment now pushing for closure as an unlikely alliance between those who want to avoid personal damage and those who want social peace.

He also claimed that a complex system of cross checking in the Ministry for State Security, coupled with the psychological mind-set of most of its officers, kept the Stasi files remarkably accurate.

With 90,000 full-time employees and more than 100,000 part-time informers--like Nimtz and the elder Van Almsick--the Stasi was easily the most extensive secret police in the former Communist Bloc. But only two years in the public spotlight have revealed just how frighteningly pervasive the Stasi was.

In one of the most widely reported cases, East German civil rights activist Vera Wollenberger learned from her file how the Stasi had turned her own husband against her, that her jail interrogator was none other than her husband’s Stasi control officer and that the father of her children had been among those who conspired to trick her into applying for an exit permit--an act that effectively exiled her from her homeland.

Rainer Eppelmann, another prominent activist, read how the Stasi tried to rig his car in a way that would eliminate him in a deadly accident.

Former East German figure-skating champion Katarina Witt found that the Stasi had carefully noted every detail of her personal life. “They followed me right into the bedroom,” she remarked in an extensive interview in the December issue of the Hamburg-based magazine Sports.

“That level of intrusion is impossible to comprehend,” she said.

In total, Stasi agents are believed to have kept track of somewhere between 1 million and 6 million East Germans, the higher figure being roughly equal to a third of the population.

But what has shaken Germans more than the totality of the Stasi’s intrusion were the revelations of who were the spies: close friends, work mates, apparent dissidents, respected figures in the arts and even family members.

Christa Wolf, one of East Germany’s most respected writers, and Heiner Mueller, the east’s leading playwright, are said to have passed information to the security police.

With depressing regularity, leading eastern political figures, including Lothar de Maiziere, East Germany’s only democratically elected prime minister, also fell after being linked to the Stasi.

Some naive informers were easily blackmailed into their work, while others seemed to slip into it, even while expressing distaste for the security police.

Nimtz, raised in a strict Communist family, said he was repulsed that his father urged him to become a Stasi officer after he had been forced to give up air force pilot training on health grounds. Yet, several years later, Nimtz signed a pledge to pass a Stasi control officer information about his fellow actors in the Dresden Ensemble.

“At the time I signed, I still had no feeling I was doing something wrong,” he said. “I wasn’t approached (by a control officer) in a toilet or a dark alley. It happened outside the theater director’s office at an official reception. I believed in the system. I was asked to help.”

Nimtz said he severed his contacts a year later because of a growing disillusionment with East Germany’s hard-line brand of communism.

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Moral guilt, he said, came only after reading his own personal file and seeing how others had spied on him. “I regret deeply I worked for them,” he said of the Stasi. “I’m just fortunate I did no real damage to anyone.”

He has had two emotional meetings with people he informed on, and in one instance a former victim offered to help him find new acting work. “It’s a good thing that the files are open,” he said. “Without them, there can be no catharsis.”

If Gauck has his way, the files will remain open for years. He says mandatory screening for those in public service jobs will probably end well before the present limit of 15 years set by Parliament. But he insists that it will be decades--if ever--before the files are closed.

“The Germans have created two dictatorships this century,” noted Gauck. “At least once, they should face their past with a similar degree of discipline.”