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Filing Cabinets Full of Betrayals
When Anna Funder visited the former East Germany in 1994–five years after the Wall came down–she found it to be a very strange place, “a place lost in time. It wouldn’t have surprised me if things had tasted different here–apples like pears, say, or wine like blood.” The German Democratic Republic, as it called itself, had been a suffocating surveillance state, dedicated to the monitoring and control of every aspect of its citizens’ lives–enforced by a huge organization known as the Ministry for State Security, Staatssicherheit, abbreviated Stasi.
Funder wrote of her experiences and observations in a 2003 book, Stasiland.
The author, an Australian, came to Germany in the 1980s after studying the language in school, and often wondered what went on behind the Wall. She became convinced that the stories of the people who had lived in East Germany…both those who had suffered under the regime and the perpetrators of the suffering…needed to be told. In 1996, she moved to the former GDR city of Leipzig and gathered the stories that resulted in this book.
Her first interviewee was a woman named Miriam. In 1968, protest demonstrations arose in Leipzig–the proximate cause being the government’s demolition of an old church–and were quickly crushed. Miriam and her friend Ursula were appalled at the regime’s brutality. “At sixteen you have an idea of justice, and we just thought it was wrong.” Miriam and Ursula were not anti-regime at this point, just anti-beating-people-up-for-protesting. They bought a child’s stamp set and used it for a makeshift printing facility, making posters and putting them up around town. Quickly, they were caught and both were held in solitary confinement for a month and repeatedly interrogated. Eventually, they confessed and were released to await their trials.
Miriam had no intention of going back to prison, and decided to go over the Wall instead.
She came very close to making it but ultimately failed. (Telling the story to Funder many years later, she expressed concern about the fate of the police dog which had fallen down on the job, allowing her to almost get away.) Again she faced interrogation, this time for 10 hours a night, and was sentenced to a year and a half in prison. Following her release, she met her husband-to-be, Charlie, who was a phys ed teacher. He also wound up in trouble with the regime: swimming out too far into the Baltic Sea led to his arrest on suspicion of wanting to leave the country. Although he was released, he fell under further suspicion after assisting Miriam’s sister and her husband in their unsuccessful escape attempt. He was arrested and imprisoned in 1980 as part of a roundup of potential troublemakers on the eve of West German Chancellor Schmidt’s planned visit, and soon thereafter Miriam was told to pick up his things–that he had hanged himself in prison. Miriam suspected, apparently with good reason, that he had in fact not committed suicide but had rather been beaten and killed by Stasi.
In 1989, Miriam was expelled from East Germany, on less than one day’s notice. A few months later, the regime fell and the Wall came down. When Funder talked with her, she had been unable–despite her stringent efforts–to find out what really happened to Charlie.
She chose to live in an apartment building without elevators…they were too reminiscent of prison cells. Brave and strong and broken all at once is the way Funder describes Miriam’s psychological state. Sometimes, Miriam liked to drive up to the former Stasi building and park right outside. “‘I just sit there in the car and feel…triumph!’ Miriam makes a gesture that starts as a wave, and becomes a guillotine. ‘You lot are gone.’”
There are other stories–for example, that of Sigrid Paul, whose son was born in 1961 with severe health problems. His life was saved by West Berlin doctors, and when the Wall went up he was separated from his parents. Stasi attempted to enlist Mrs. Paul in a plot whereby she would be allowed to be with her son IF she would assist them by meeting with a certain person–a border-crossing activist named Michael Hinze–in the West. Remembering the case of Wilhelm Fricke, who had been kidnapped from West Berlin by the Stasi, she was sure they had the same fate in mind for Michael Hinze–and she refused their deal. But the psychological price was high.
“Me–bait in a trap for Michael! And of course that was an absolute no. I couldn’t.” Her back is straight, and her hands are clenched into fists on her thighs. “Karl Wilhelm Fricke,” she says, “was my guardian angel!” She starts to crumble and break. At this moment, she does not look like a woman who was saved from anything. “I had to decide against my son, but I couldn’t let myself be used in this way.’ Her back slumps and she is crying again.
Funder talked with numerous former Stasi and other GDR officials, most of whom were nostalgic for the past and unrepentant about the regime’s atrocities. Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler, for example, hosted a television program called The Black Channel, which was dedicated to exposing the “lies” told by the Western media about the GDR…and when interviewed by Funder still defended his support of the Wall as something humane and the killings at the border as acts of peace. Mr. Winz, who had worked in counterintelligence and now ran an association of former Stasi officers, strongly defended the Old Regime and argued that things had gotten much worse since the end of the Communist regime.
“This capitalism is, above all, exploitation! It is unfair. It’s brutal…Each industrialist is a criminal at war with the other, each business at war with the next!…Capitalism plunders the planet, too–this hole in the ozone layer, the exploitation of the forests, pollution–we must get rid of this social system! Otherwise the human race will not last the next fifty years!”
The stifling and almost surrealistic nature of the GDR’s totally-government-dominated society comes through strongly in this book. “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 were responsible (even in part) for the Holocaust; that the GDR was a multi-party democracy; that socialism was peace-loving..Many people withdrew into what they called ‘internal emigration.’ They sheltered their secret inner lives in an attempt to keep something of themselves from the authorities.”
The regime attempted to tightly control the language. Julia, one of Funder’s interviewees, was at the Employment Office looking for a job–she turned to the man behind her in line and asked, “So how long have you been unemployed?” She was immediately chastised by an official for using the term “unemployed”…”You are not unemployed; you are seeking work. When Julia responded, “I’m seeking work because I’m unemployed,” the official started to shout: “I said, you are not unemployed, you are seeking work! and then, almost hysterically “There is no unemployment in the German Democratic Republic.”
Julia did pick up a little money working as a tour group leader…but she couldn’t call herself that–because the German word for “leader” is “fuehrer,” and that word had been banned due to its Hitlerian connotation. So instead, she was a Stadtbilderklaererin…a “town plan explainer.” Similarly, a locomotive engineer could not be called by the traditional term train-driver, but was instead a Lokkapitaen…a “locomotive captain.”
For those with spirit and integrity, the stifling environment was agonizing. “Every Wednesday before the Party meetings, Dad would be in a foul mood,” said Julia of her father, a teacher, “really grim.” “(He) spoke up against things he disagreed with, such as recruiting eighth-graders for the army, or teaching boring Russian socialist-realist novels. He would come home hollow. ‘They dressed him down like a child in there.’” Julia’s father retired as soon as he could, and required medication for depression. “Living for so long in a relation of unspoken hostility but outward compliance to the state had broken him.”
And if someone didn’t appreciate the wonderfulness of life in the GDR, why, there was clearly something wrong with him. Browsing through documents at the Stasi Law School at Potsdam, Funder saw a dissertation topic “On the Probable Causes of the Psychological Pathology of the Desire to Commit Border Infractions.”
The overall head of Stasi was Erich Mielke. In an interview, Funder notes that Mielke’s office was on the second floor of his headquarters building, so the office number normally would have started with a “2.” But Mielke had the entire first floor renamed the mezzanine, so that his office number could be 101.
Room 101, in George Orwell’s 1984, was the ultimate torture chamber in the regime’s “Ministry of Love.”
After the Wall came down and the East and West were reunified, a massive effort was made to piece together the voluminous Stasi files, most of which had been shredded, but not very thoroughly so. “Puzzle women” were employed to piece together the shredded pieces, when possible, so that visitors to the Stasi Museum could review their own files and see which of their friends and neighbors had betrayed them…for money, for revenge, for career advantage, or, probably, in some cases due to genuine moral indignation that anyone should oppose the regime in any way.
I see through a window into a room where several men and a woman sit each at their own small table. They look at pink and dun-coloured manila folders and take notes. What mysteries are being solved? Why they didn’t get into university, or why they couldn’t find a job, or which friend told Them about the forbidden Solzhenitsyn in their bookcase?
Stasi records were very voluminous–it is said that the quantity of Stasi documents exceeded all of the official records of all of Germany since medieval times. (Not remotely comparable, though, to what can be accumulated today via the capturing and surveillance of social media and other Internet traffic)
There is a lot of very good descriptive writing in this book. Two examples:
A bar in Leipzig:
Auerbach’s Cellar is a famous Leipzig institution It is an underground bar and restaurant with oak bench tables in long alcoves under a curved roof, just like a cellar. The walls and ceilings are covered with ark painted scenes from Goethe’s Faust: Faust meeting Mephistopheles, Faust betraying Margarethe, Faust in despair. Goethe used to drink here. It is a good place to meet the devil.
Leaving Leipzig:
In the morning Miriam takes me to the station To my relief I find a copy shop, so I can give Charlie’s poem back to her. She comes to the platform and waits till the train moves out, silent and slow. The girl opposite me lip-smacks her puppy; on the platform an older dog huffs and rearranges itself in jealousy. Then Miriam waves and walks away, straightbacked into the sunlight.
An important book, well-written, which deserves to be widely read.
I published an earlier version of this post at Chicago Boyz in 2012. At the time, I could not have imagined how quickly the US was going to move in the direction of the surveillance and betrayal society portrayed so well in Funder’s book.
Published in General
Thanks for that. I read it some years ago, some of the incidents described really stay with you.
Thank you as well, a good book review as well – I haven’t read it but will make a point of doing so. I’ve tried to relay to my kids some of the Cold War atmosphere. I’ll definitely look for this, it is such an important story to be learned and remembered.
In all this ‘Tranny Madness’ going on, I’ve been telling my kids of how the East German female athletes were often accused of taking male hormones or of being castrated male athletes, posing as females. They’ve watched the “Death of Stalin” which is a very good/dark comedy but effective in relating the Soviet madness & brutalities. I’ll need to re-watch “The Lives of Others” (can’t recall if the sex is too gratuitous for young teen (14), not worried about our older kids.
I’ve added it to my Kindle queue. I find it useful to read stories like these for insights on how to cope with the system that is developing in our country.
It is unfortunate that “kids” today do not hear more first-hand stories of people who lived on the other side of the Iron Curtain.
My family visited Berlin in 1963 when the Berlin Wall was relatively new. That visit made an indelible impression on 7 year old me.
I seemed to encounter in my high school, college, and early professional days in the 1970s and early 1980s a number of people who had escaped, each with their own story of why and how they left.
I guess now that we are 30 years past the fall of the Iron Curtain those personal stories are dying off. Younger people who do not hear or read them don’t recognize how much what they think they want resembles what was promised decades ago that ended up being terror for those who lived it. Rather than having the government directly enforce all the rules, they are getting government to deputize companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Google to enforce some of the rules, but the end result will be the same.
“Stasi records were very voluminous”.
Sort of makes one wonder about the FBI’s files doesn’t it? Of course, now, their record keeping, aided by GPS and remote camera data, is much more efficient…and intrusive.
I don’t know.. The Stasi had a lot of informants….
“By 1995, some 174,000 inoffizielle Mitarbeiter (IMs) Stasi informants had been identified, almost 2.5% of East Germany’s population between the ages of 18 and 60.[18] 10,000 IMs were under 18 years of age.[18] From the volume of material destroyed in the final days of the regime, the office of the Federal Commissioner for the Stasi Records (BStU) believes that there could have been as many as 500,000 informers.[18] A former Stasi colonel who served in the counterintelligence directorate estimated that the figure could be as high as 2 million if occasional informants were included.”
The population of the DDR in 1990 was about 16 million.
With everything that is coming out about how Mark Zuckerberg used his monies to institute polices in California, Wisconsin and Georgia that allowed for election protocols that overwhelmingly favored the Dems, “our” government at this point is the social media moguls, and the social media moguls are the government.
With Trump as President we had a shot at Anti Trust against these oligarchs. And also a shot at seeing legislation passed to rein them in. Whether or not such efforts would have succeeded, I don’t know. But with him gone, the chances of either of those things occurring are very slim.
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Wonder how many informants we have in the US today, if you count people who spend their time trying to get other people cancelled for Political Deviations.
I just assumed it was ~50%. Should I be happy if it’s only 12%?
Interesting how those in charge cited capitalism as “polluting the environment, exploitation of the forests – it must be eliminated”. They cared more about the environment than human beings and freedom – does that sound familiar? They also changed the language – again, familiar. This wasn’t a century ago – this was the 1980’s and 90’s. Where did these people go, the ones in charge who longed “for the good ol’days?” If anyone caught Tucker Carlson last night, his story on indoctrination is mirroring this mentality, and it is in the schools – in kindergarten. Kids are being taught before they can even understand how to write a sentence, that our history is tainted, that whiteness is wrong, and they are being sent home with propaganda to give their parents. We are in very dangerous times, and just talking about it won’t change it.
Unless we wake up and stop it, our fate, and the fate of future generations, will be much worse than what is described in the book in the post.
The most chilling statement about the informers is that some did it out of sheer moral indignation that anyone would oppose the government.
The future has been here for a while
https://canarymission.org
wrt DDR, Christa Wolf is a really interesting author who lived and wrote there. I liked her “Cassandra” and “Medea”.
When the wall came down in 1989, I was 36 year old student in a community college class. The teacher was near my age, maybe a little older, and the rest of the participants fresh from high school. I had five children of my own who were enrolled in school between high school and elementary. (That they were all in school allowed me to go back and finish my degree.)
Anyway…the teacher and I were both astounded by the current events in Germany–wall being toppled, people traveling back and forth between West and East Berlin, soldiers just putting down their rifles, and removing their uniforms. Yet, because they didn’t have any context for it, the young people in our class were hardly moved. They couldn’t understand our amazement, astonishment, joy! I don’t know what they’d learned up till then about Communism, but it apparently didn’t include anything about how long it had held the Germans in its thrall, and how it had divided Berlin. I was only eight when the wall went up, but I vividly remember my parents watching the news on television about it, and their dismay and horror. So, to have it demolished when I was an adult was amazing!
Just considering how awful communist Germany, Soviet Union, and China actually were/are to the environment, should make it easy for people to dismiss their other claims which are equally false.
Thank you for reposting that. I’m going to get that book.
The problem with these communist systems was deregulation. When the same entity that owns the industrial factories is in charge of regulating them, you essentially have no safety and environmental regulation. You don’t even get as much regulation as when industries in a capitalist system regulate themselves, where consumers might have a slight bit of influence on what they do.
The conflict of interest inherent to the government regulating the government is yet another of the problems with socialism.
In mixed-economy capitalism, the regulated industry is not psrt of the government, so the results are usually better. Even there you can get regulatory capture, in which the regulator starts to behave as if it were a part of the industry.
In a more free market system, of course, a lot of regulation takes place through tort law.
When I was a post-doc at an Ivy League medical school (1986–1989), Helga worked in the same lab as I. Helga was a 40ish-year-old woman who had been born in East Germany. One December day she heard me singing softly the German Christmas carol “O du froliche” and she said, oh I knew that song in my youth, but we were forbidden to sing carols. I pressed her on life in East Germany and to all of us in the lab, she opened up, she spoke deeply and eloquently. She described the soul crushing uniformity and fear, the constant for fear of informers. She told me how her mother got her out of east Germany as an eight-year-old, before the wall was built, by packing her in a suitcase and crossing to West Berlin for a brief visit with a sister, after which she defected with her daughter.
I learned a lot about communism in my endocrinology post doc. There was more. In the next lab were two post docs from Communist China, a married couple both in their 40s. They have taken bachelors’ degrees in China, masters and PhD degrees in the eastern bloc, and were on their third post docs in the United States. When I asked them why they continued to take post docs rather than returning to China to become faculty at some prestigious university, the husband answered “oh no, we don’t go back to China. We do anything to stay from going back to China.”
I will never forget either of those conversations.
Good stories, but with China’s control on their people, I’m more inclined to believe that the Chinese government allows them to stay for its own purposes. Never trust China. You know them better than I do, but I’m guessing the Chinese government has a future plan for them.
Related: The Enduring Relevance of Czeslaw Milosz’s ‘The Captive Mind’, at Quillette.
“We do anything to stay” logically includes spy for the regime, or act as an agent of influence.
For some overseas Chinese, the Communist regime is restoring Chinese pride. And Tibet is an inherent part of China. (I had a coworker like that in the Eighties.) Similarly, some German-Americans in the Thirties had warm feelings for the Nazis.
China is a mafia with an army. Trading with them was a mistake.
It’s like 50 families trying to rip off their own country and the whole planet.
Brilliant.
And nuclear weapons.
Just like the Piranha Brothers!
CCP delenda est.
We had two ways to deal with communists. With the USSR, Cuba, Vietnam (for its first half) we treated them like the pariahs they were and they collapsed.
With Vietnam (second half) we supported them and traded with them with the hope that they would improve. The jury is still out.
With China, Richard Nixon and all presidents since (but especially with Clinton) we encouraged trade with them. It’s been exactly like being married to the mob. We can’t break free.
If we were to attempt to break free, every business in the US would scream bloody murder, and the Chinese government would just force their people to tighten their belts and die if need be. You cannot have free trade with people who are not free.
This conversation took place 1988-89. Whatever plans the Chinese Gummint has for them are long-ago executed.
That reminds me, our graduation dinner was on June 13, 1989. The Tiananmen Square Massacre had occurred a week prior. At the dinner, our director asked all the Chinese nationals to stand for a round of applause. They of course returned it to us in true Oriental fashion.
That’s not really true. Reagan played both ends of that, speaking of the Evil Empire on the one hand and making nice with Gorbachev on the other. That’s not making them collapse by treating them like pariahs.
A society of snitches
Good band name…