recovery of 1 million DM in agent payments. Although pardoned
in 1999 by President Roman Herzog because of his failing health,
Wienand faced additional legal problems three years later concerning
irregularities in the construction of a Cologne garbage facility.WIENS, PAUL (1922–1982). An influential East German writer and
an informer for the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (MfS), Paul
Wiens was born into a Jewish family in Königsberg (now Kalinin-
grad, Russia) on 17 August 1922. After spending his childhood in
Berlin, he left Germany for Switzerland in 1933, studying philosophy
in Geneva and Lausanne. In 1942, he was arrested in Vienna for il-
legal activity and spent the remainder of the war in Austrian intern-
ment. A publishing position attracted him to East Berlin, where his
career as a writer began to prosper. In addition to composing lyrical
poetry, he cowrote the screenplay for the 1958 film Sonnensucher
(Sun Seekers) directed by Konrad Wolf. His relationship with the
MfS began modestly in November 1961, five months after being se-
lected as head of the Berlin Writers’ Association. Working under the
code name dichter, Wiens supplied incriminating information about
other writers in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) as well as
those encountered at international conventions in the Soviet Union,
Hungary, and Yugoslavia.
An even more productive phase commenced in 1972. His Füh-
rungsoffizier, Rolf Pönig, praised not only Wiens’s linguistic
ability in Russian, English, French, Italian, and Serbo-Croatian but
also his “brisk intellect and operational agility.” Among the long
list of literary figures appearing in his voluminous reports are Wolf
Biermann, Heinrich Böll, Hans Magnus Enzenberger, Stephan
Hermlin, Heiner Müller, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Christa
Wolf. Wiens also attracted young aspiring writers, showing no
hesitation in reporting signs of ideological deviation on their part.
On occasion he performed tasks expressly for the KGB, and in 1980
his official status was elevated to the top category of Inoffizielle
Mitarbeiter. Shortly after assuming editorial direction of Sinn und
Form, the GDR’s leading literary journal, Wiens died in East Berlin
on 6 April 1982.
WILLIAMSON, HARRY. See SCHMIDT, WULF.
494 • WIENS, PAUL