“In Germany, you can still keep your private life separate from your public life,” Karsten Voigt, now 56, said in a recent interview with NEWSWEEK, describing his romance with his new wife, Brigitta, 41, in more detail than he has ever revealed before. German press interest in their love story has flagged, in part because they refused to talk about it. But it’s a timely tale, showing how sex and spying were intertwined in the divided Germany. The country is just now digesting the recently published memoirs of Markus Wolf, the former East German spymaster who was notorious for using sex as a tool of espionage.
And Karsten Voigt is not just any German politician. A member of the lower house of Parliament since 1976, he is a leading authority on defense and foreign-policy issues in the opposition Social Democratic Party (SPD). He insists that Brigitta gave the Stasi nothing of value. “She couldn’t tell them anything serious, because I didn’t tell her serious things,” he says. But the taint of her association with the Stasi lingers, and unlike her husband, Brigitta bitterly refuses to discuss their romance. “If you ask me in 10 years,” she says, “perhaps I’ll agree.” For now, she works as a freelance journalist and dabbles in politics, and she and her husband are expecting a baby, the first child for either of them.
They met in West Berlin, at an Aspen Institute conference. Voigt was a polished, conspicuously self-assured man, a political moderate and a favorite of journalists and American diplomats. Brigitta Richter hardly looked like a temptress. She was a disarmament specialist for Horizont, East Germany’s foreign-policy weekly. Her black hair was cropped short, her clothes were plain, and she wore little or no makeup.
But Voigt was attracted. He recalls that she was young, intelligent and surprisingly critical of East Germany’s sclerotic leaders. She was “very spontaneous, which was not typical” of the dogmatic East German women he met at official functions. Richter was clearly a committed communist; otherwise, she would not have had the rare privilege of frequent visits to West Berlin. Yet she was open to new ideas and refreshingly casual in manner. Karsten was married to an architect named Inge, but after 18 years the relationship had gone stale.
Voigt and Richter met several times in West Berlin, and then, as their romance blossomed, on his trips to East Germany. But someone was watching. In early 1988, Voigt recounts, the Stasi visited Brigitta. “You’re getting a visit tomorrow from Karsten Voigt,” one of them said. The policemen told her they wanted to talk to her after such visits. She agreed. Years later, Voigt says, she explained why she cooperated with the Stasi, and why she kept him in the dark. “I was already in love with you,” she said. “If I hadn’t talked to them, I could never have met you again. If I had told you, you would have immediately broken off the relationship.”
That happened anyway. Several months later, at another gathering in West Germany, Voigt talked to Gunter Rettner, who was in charge of the East German Communist Party’s relations with the other half of Germany. “You have a girlfriend in East Berlin,” Rettner said. He told Voigt that “she’s not working for us” and said Brigitta could leave East Germany legally if she wanted to. Instead, Voigt ended the affair; he says he was afraid of potential blackmail. “You don’t love me,” Brigitta wailed.
The break didn’t last long. They got together again a few months later, but now the Stasi seemed to have no interest in them. Voigt says Richter received no further visits from the secret police. Years later, after reunification, they dug into the Stasi files. Voigt says no records were found to indicate that Brigitta was listed as an informer, though the records of what she told the Stasi were not found, either. The couple did find a report from late 1988 by Andre Brie, an informer who worked with Richter at the East German Institute of International Relations. He wrote that Voigt and Richter were close but not “intimate.” Voigt recalls with a smile: “We were already intimate.”
Voigt says that Brigitta soon fell fromgrace. Without mentioning Voigt, her boss at Horizont told her she had abused the trust of the party and could no longer hope for a senior job at the magazine or a diplomatic post. In October 1989, just before the Berlin wall came down, Brigitta left the country for West Germany. The party expelled her, and her older sister, ever the faithful communist, told their mother: “I no longer have a sister.”
Voigt and Richter resumed their affair in the West. In late 1991, Brigitta admitted to Germany security that she had talked to the Stasi about Voigt on two or three occasions, a story that leaked to the press. The officials decided that her Stasi contacts had not caused a serious security breach, but Voigt was stunned by the revelation. ‘“I felt she had broken our confidence by not telling me, at least after 1989, about these visits she had,” he says. Voigt broke up with Richter again, then they reconciled. Press coverage quickly died down; his wife, Inge, helped deflate the story by telling reporters she had known about his affair-and was having one of her own.
Voigt’s political career didn’t suffer. To head off any damage, he introduced Richter to his constituents in Frankfurt. “This is the girl you have been reading about,” he told them. Voigt was re-elected in 1994, after a campaign in which his love life never became an issue. “Many parliamentarians have affairs,” he says. “This is normal.” After an amicable divorce from Inge, he married Brigitta.
She has had trouble adjusting to her new life. Suspicions that she was a Stasi stooge still haunt her, getting in the way of her journalism and her grass-roots work for the SPD. Voigt himself looks forward serenely to fatherhood and the’ next phase of his life. He says he will not run for re-election next year; after 22 years in Parliament, it will be time to move on to something new, perhaps a post in the foreign-policy field. He regards his romance and marriage as a symbol of East and West moving toward each other. Now that the cold war is over, statesmen who found love in the enemy’s camp don’t have to say they’re sorry.
