To illustrate the region in which BR journalist Eberhard Schellenberger grew up and later worked, it is worth taking a longer look at Ermershausen in Lower Franconia. On May 19, 1978, this place on the German-German border almost made the world headlines, but for a long time the world didn’t know anything about it. The mayor of Ermershausen only told the Bayerischer Rundfunk much later the story behind the story – and in 2022 you don’t have to try too hard to believe Schellenberger that he briefly caught his breath at this description. Similar to later when leafing through his Stasi file.
But it’s not that far yet, the wall is still standing in 1978; and sadly very firmly. In that year, the people in Ermershausen had something else on their minds: the Bavarian territorial reform. They didn’t want to be incorporated into nearby Maroldsweisach, the Free State wanted that – which is about as if Fürther were summarily declared to be Nuremberg residents. So Ermershausen didn’t hand out the community files, instead pouring lead on the town hall locks. Which in turn called a few hundreds of the Bavarian riot police onto the scene. Order: secure files!
One may recognize from this that the authorities at that time were not only on the eastern side of the inner-German border, well, not all the slats on the fence. And in Ermershausen they apparently perceived it that way that day. In the reports on the Bavarian police operation at the town hall, their spontaneous action was completely lost. Only the mayor described years later that about four dozen angry Ermershäuser had gone to the border crossing at dawn with kith and kin, about 100 meters from the village, and there made preparations to leave the Free State in the direction of the workers’ and farmers’ state. According to the motto: It can’t get any more random over there than here.
The GDR border guards are said to have put on marching music when they saw the angry people from Lower Franconia, probably to lure them a little closer. According to their own statements, only the mayor of Ermershausen, Adolf Höhn, stopped his own people from converting. So the headline “50 Bavarians ask for asylum in the GDR” didn’t materialize. The world would probably have been interested in them.
Object of observation: For years, the Stasi had sniffed out the BR journalist Eberhard Schellenberger, who wrote the book “Codename Antenne” about it. The 65-year-old was honored with the Bavarian Constitutional Order in 2022.
(Photo: Thomas Berberich)
From a purely journalistic point of view, one could call this an enviably exciting area of reporting. And Eberhard Schellenberger, 65, editor-in-chief at BR-Studio Mainfranken from 1996 to 2020, would not object at all. Growing up near the border, he spent almost his entire professional life dealing with stories from a divided and reunited region – and does not hide the fact that the otherwise carefully maintained rules of professional distance reached a limit on October 3, 1990. Did he secretly shed a tear during the reunification live broadcast from the long godforsaken Eußenhausen/Meiningen border crossing? “Only one?” he asks back.
What Schellenberger didn’t know at the time was how meticulously the Stasi had taken care of him over the years – and not just when he was reporting from Suhl, Würzburg’s twin town in the GDR. On 400 pages, Schellenberger was later able to read when he reported what, how he spent his days and nights and what character he is said to have (“He represents a kind of national Franconian and feels very strongly drawn to his residence city of Würzburg”).
Echter Verlag has to be commended for having now published large parts of these Stasi files verbatim – appropriately with the code name “Antenna”. This document proves the pointless and unsuccessful activities a state has provided hundreds of snoopers with. Something illuminating about Schellenberger or the work of ARD reporters? Doesn’t come out of it – and that’s what makes this reading of nothings so fascinating.
The East German secret service kept their file on Eberhard Schellenberger under the name “Antenna”.
(Photo: Eberhard Schellenberger)
The photo secretly taken by Eberhard Schellenberger, which was found in his Stasi file, did not change the fact that the bearded Franconian was listed as “female”.
(Photo: Eberhard Schellenberger)
“Schellenberger’s political and ideological position cannot be precisely determined,” says one of the spies, who sometimes keep watch around the clock. Employed by the BR (“journalistic, hostile, negative”), Schellenberger is a “pragmatist”. What might have been done with such explosive exclusive information as a result of an “operative skimming” at the Stasi headquarters in Berlin? Hard to say. Perhaps the bosses simply took their colleagues from far-off Suhl for slobs. The level of accuracy with which they worked could be inferred from the gender they seriously ascribed to “Schellenberger” (Stasi quote) in the file: “female”.
Although it should not be claimed that all the “plans of measures for the political-operative security and control of the stay of FRG correspondents” were for nothing. The BR today has a huge archive with reports about German-German things from Franconia. Any irrelevance, however, has not been abolished, if only for reasons of space. Instead, Schellenberger was able to read long-forgotten posts in his Stasi file, logging them line by line.
After almost 200 surreal pages of Schellenberger’s book “Catch name antenna. As a journalist in the sights of the Stasi” – which will be presented on October 3 at the Würzburg Theater on Neunerplatz – at least one certainty remains: the Stasi really wasn’t too stupid for anything.