Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall

by Anna Funder

In its forty years, ‘the Firm’ generated the equivalent of all records in German history since the middle ages.

At the end, the Stasi had 97,000 employees—more than enough to oversee a country of seventeen million people.

In Hitler’s Third Reich it is estimated that there was one Gestapo agent for every 2000 citizens, and in Stalin’s USSR there was one KGB agent for every 5830 people. In the GDR, there was one Stasi officer or informant for every sixty-three people. If part-time informers are included, some estimates have the ratio as high as one informer for every 6.5 citizens.

the GDR had the oldest leadership in the world,

By comparison with other Eastern Bloc countries, East Germany never had much of a culture of opposition. Perhaps this was in part due to the better standard of living, perhaps to the thoroughness of the Stasi—or, as some put it, to the willingness of Germans to subject themselves to authority. But mostly it was because, alone of all Eastern Bloc countries, East Germany had somewhere to dump people who spoke out: West Germany.

‘Some towns we went to, the main street would have its buildings painted only halfway up! The top part would be bare grey concrete.’ He looks at me as if he has posed a riddle, which he has. ‘It was because when Honecker came through, that was the level he could see to from the back seat of the limousine.

I once saw a note on a Stasi file from early 1989 that I would never forget. In it a young lieutenant alerted his superiors to the fact that there were so many informers in church opposition groups at demonstrations that they were making these groups appear stronger than they really were. In one of the most beautiful ironies I have ever seen, he dutifully noted that, by having swelled the ranks of the opposition, the Stasi was giving the people heart to keep demonstrating against them.

professors at the academy spent their careers expanding the reach of the paragraphs of the law so as to be able to encompass more enemies in them. ‘In fact, their promotions depended on it,’

I check with him what the consequences were when someone who had been approached to inform either told people about it or flatly refused. ‘There really were no consequences,’ he says. ‘That was the thing. The file was just closed, marked “dekonspiriert”. But of course,’ he adds, ‘no-one could know at the time that nothing would happen to him. So hardly anyone refused.’