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The romance comes from the dream of a better world the German Communists wanted to build out of the ashes of their Nazi past: from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs. The horror comes from what they did in its name.
The Stasi was the internal army by which the government kept control. Its job was to know everything about everyone, using any means it chose.
Scheller’s off-sider Uwe Schmidt was there too. Uwe’s main job as adjutant is to make Scheller seem important enough to have an adjutant. The other part of his job is to appear busy and time-short, which is more difficult because he has hardly anything to do.
Mielke’s apparatus, directed largely against his own countrymen, was one and a half times as big as the GDR regular army.
At the end, the Stasi had 97,000 employees—more than enough to oversee a country of seventeen million people. But it also had over 173,000 informers among the population. 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.
All I understand is that it only took forty years to create two very different kinds of Germans, and that it will be a while before those differences are gone.
There is an art, a deeply political art, of taking circumstances as they arise and attributing them to your side or the opposition, in a constant tallying of reality towards ends of which it is innocent.
she has the kind of finely articulated voice you occasionally come across here, which can turn this barking language into a song of aching beauty and finesse.
In the GDR people were required to acknowledge an assortment of fictions as fact. Some of these fictions were fundamental, such as the idea that human nature is a work-in-progress which can be improved upon, and that Communism is the way to do it. Others were more specific: that East Germans were not the Germans responsible (even in part) for the Holocaust; that the GDR was a multi-party democracy; that socialism was peace-loving; that there were no former Nazis left in the country; and that, under socialism, prostitution did not exist.
Lately, a study has suggested that depressed people have a more accurate view of reality, though this accuracy is not worth a bean because it is depressing, and depressed people live shorter lives. Optimists and believers are happier and healthier in their unreal worlds.
In its later stages the regime stopped, for the most part, direct action (arrest, incarceration, torture) against its people. It opted instead for other ways of silencing them, methods that Amnesty would find harder to chronicle.
Her bitterness and nostalgia shock me. It is part of the nostalgia for the east (ost) which has given rise to a new sticklebrick word: Ostalgie.
From here to Vladivostok this was Communism’s gift to the built environment—linoleum and grey cement, asbestos and prefabricated concrete and, always, long long corridors with all-purpose rooms.
you see the mistakes of one system—the surveillance—and the mistakes of the other—the inequality—but there’s nothing you could have done in the one, and nothing you can do now about the other.’
I am mulling over the idea of the GDR as an article of faith. Communism, at least of the East German variety, was a closed system of belief. It was a universe in a vacuum, complete with its own self-created hells and heavens, its punishments and redemptions meted out right here on earth. Many of the punishments were simply for lack of belief, or even suspected lack of belief. Disloyalty was calibrated in the minutest of signs: the antenna turned to receive western television, the red flag not hung out on May Day, someone telling an off-colour joke about Honecker just to stay sane.
The English, Americans and French took over the western parts of Germany and the Russians took the eastern states of Thuringia, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, Mecklenburg-West Pomerania and Brandenburg. Berlin was divided among the victors in the same way: its western suburbs to the English, French and Americans, its eastern ones to the USSR.
History was so quickly remade, and so successfully, that it can truly be said that the easterners did not feel then, and do not feel now, that they were the same Germans as those responsible for Hitler’s regime. This sleight-of-history must rank as one of the most extraordinary innocence manoeuvres of the century.
As well as leaving to work in the western sector each day, hundreds and later thousands of refugees started leaving the eastern sector for good. By 1961 about 2000 people were leaving the east each day through West Berlin.
Ulbricht, the head of state, decided he needed to build an ‘anti-fascist protective measure’. I have always been fond of this term which has something of the prophylactic about it, protecting easterners from the western disease of shallow materialism. It obeys all the logic of locking up free people to keep them safe from criminals.
‘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. They didn’t have enough paint to go further up!’ I know about this, and about the butchers’ shops full of smallgoods for the drive-by, which would vanish again after Honecker or other officials had been through.
Klaus finds all this hysterically funny. Then he says, ‘This society, it was built on lies—lie after lie after lie.’
‘It was much worse under Hitler,’ he says. ‘We would have been whisked off to a concentration camp.’
The internal service of the Stasi was designed to spy on and control the citizens of the GDR. The only way to make sense of its name is to understand the Stasi as defending the government against the people.
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.
‘Well,’ he says in his soft voice, ‘once an investigation was started into someone, that meant there was suspicion of enemy activity.’ This was perfect dictator-logic: we investigate you, therefore you are an enemy.
Stasi men are by and large less affected by the unemployment that has consumed East Germany since the Wall came down. Many of them have found work in insurance, telemarketing and real estate. None of these businesses existed in the GDR. But the Stasi were, in effect, trained for them, schooled in the art of convincing people to do things against their own self-interest.
The desecration of Mielke’s grave is unlikely to have been the work of westerners, and it is only a product of capitalism in that capitalism does not protect, or not adequately to his mind, the former leadership of the former GDR from what their people thought of them.
Herr Koch is pleased to be with someone who shares his interest in the Wall. He is also, perhaps, even more obsessed with it than I remember. He seems to have lost the awareness that his is a particular interest. He is, once more, a true believer: the Wall is the thing that defined him, and he will not let it go. I think for a moment of Frau Paul, who will also not let it go. Herr Koch starts to take photographs. I look up at the angel’s long face and I think of Miriam and Julia; lives shaped, too, by the Wall. Will they let it go? Or, will it let them go?
‘I think at the end the Stasi had so much information,’ the fair man says, ‘that they thought everyone was an enemy, because everyone was under observation. I don’t think they knew who was for them, or against, or whether everyone was just shutting up.’ He is shy and looks at his hands, closed around his coffee mug, when he speaks. ‘When I find a file where they’ve been watching a family in their living room for twenty years I ask myself: what sort of people are they who want all this knowledge for themselves?’
Ostalgie parties—where if you show an East German ID you get in for free, everyone calls one another ‘Comrade’ and the beer is only DM 1.30. She says, ‘Things like this feed into a crazy nostalgia for the GDR—as if it had been a harmless welfare state that looked after people’s needs. Most of the people at these parties are too young to remember the GDR anyway. They are just looking for something to yearn for.’
