Uta Felgner is a German businesswoman. By the end of 2006 she was becoming known as the most high-profile hotel manager in the country. She was the manager of Berlin's luxurious Castle Hotel ("Schlosshotel") in Grunewald during June/July 2006 when all the hotel's 42 rooms and 12 suites were taken over to accommodate the Germany national team while it participated in the 2006 FIFA World Cup. Other well known guests of the hotel while she was its manager had by that time already included Woody Allen, Roman Polanski, Henry Kissinger Vitali Klitschko, Uwe Seeler, the King of Spain and the Sultan of Brunei.
She hit the headlines three years later in November 2009 after journalists working for the Berliner Morgenpost (newspaper) revealed that during the 1980s she had operated as an unusually active Informal collaborator in the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), working for the country's Ministry for State Security (Stasi / intelligence services). The starting point for the journalists' researches had been an originally secret file on Felgner held in preserved Stasi records, comprising approximately 3,000 pages.
Life
Provenance and early years
Uta Felgner was born on 14 August 1951 in Weißenfels, a mid-sized manufacturing town a short distance upriver from Halle in what was then the southern part of the recently launched German Democratic Republic (East Germany). According to her own statements she was the only daughter of a holocaust survivor. Her father was a precision engineer and a man of exceptional fecundity. According to a 2005 newspaper report she had eleven half-siblings. Her mother worked as a nurse. She completed her schooling in East Berlin and then, unusually for an East German student at this time, spent a period in the west of the city, obtaining a business management degree at the Free University. In 2009 journalists attempting to corroborate Felgner's life story asked the Free University of Berlin for information on Felgner's university degree. However, the university found no reference to Felgner's degree in the archives.
Günther Asbeck
In 1973, after qualifying and working as a nurse, and having had a daughter, Felgner moved permanently to East Berlin where she undertook a range of jobs, including waitressing, selling, export administration, property management and as a beautician. In the mid-1970s she met Günther Asbeck, a charismatic businessman. Asbeck was the General Director of ASIMEX (Asbeck Import Export), a company that specialised in importing luxury western goods for senior members of the country's ruling party living in the prestigious Waldsiedlung "secure housing zone", just outside Berlin. She got to know Asbeck better: he changed Felgner's life dramatically. Asbeck was a worldly man with a special proposal. "He needed a female partner to provide representation services and to entertain Asimex business associates and others to meals. She must always be available for him, whenever he needed her." Records indicate that Uta Felgner did not need to be asked twice: she became his mistress.
Some years later, in 1981, Günther Asbeck turned up in the west. He provided the West German intelligence services with descriptions of around 100 top officials in East Germany's ruling Socialist Unity Party, its Ministry for State Security and its "front companies". His information included compromising details on these individuals which, he said, they had confided to his "business lady". Later, in a letter intercepted by the East German Ministry for State Security, it was found that Felgner herself had written that in the course of her work for Asbeck she had "gotten hold of [information on] the corruption of ministers, secretaries of state and senior officials".