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Obsessed with detail, the Stasi entirely failed to predict the end of Communism, and with it the end of the country. Between 1989 and 1990 it was turned inside out: Stalinist spy unit one day, museum the next. In its forty years, ‘the Firm’ generated the equivalent of all records in German history since the middle ages. Laid out upright and end to end, the files the Stasi kept on their countrymen and women would form a line 180 kilometres long.
After the Wall fell the German media called East Germany ‘the most perfected surveillance state of all time’. 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.
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 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.
Rudolf Bahro’s manuscript was irradiated so it could be traced to recipients, even in the west. To detect the marked person or object, the Stasi developed personal geiger counters that could be strapped to the body, and would silently vibrate if the officer got a reading. And in the prison and remand centres, the Stasi sometimes used radiation machines as well as cameras where the prisoners’ mug shots were taken.
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 it appeared that, by having swelled the ranks of the opposition, the Stasi was giving the people heart to keep demonstrating against them.
