More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
To remember or forget—which is healthier? To demolish it or to fence it off? To dig it up, or leave it lie in the ground?
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 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.
I wonder how it worked inside the Stasi: who thought up these blackmail schemes? Did they send them up the line for approval? Did pieces of paper come back initialled and stamped ‘Approved’: the ruining of a marriage, the destruction of a career, the imprisonment of a wife, the abandonment of a child? Did they circulate internal updates: ‘Five new and different ways to break a heart’?
To my mind, there is something warmer and more human about the carnality of other dictatorships, say in Latin America. One can more easily understand a desire for cases stuffed with money and drugs, for women and weapons and blood. These obedient grey men doing it with their underpaid informers on a weekly basis seem at once more stupid and more sinister.
‘There are no people who are whole,’ he says. ‘Everyone has issues of their own to deal with. Mine might be a little harder, but the main thing is how one deals with them.’
