Stasiland Review and Thoughts
If you were fortunate to have had a more comprehensive history education than I did, or have taken it upon yourself to learn history, feel free to skip the historical background and jump straight to the Stasiland Background section to read my summary and thoughts on Stasiland.
Historical Background
After WW2 Germany (and Berlin) was split into different zones between the Americans, French, British, and Russians. The American, French, and British zones were reunited in 1949 as the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG or West Germany) and embraced western ideals such as democracy and free markets. The Russian controlled zones became the German Democratic Republic (GDR or DDR or East Germany) as part of the Eastern Bloc and embraced Communism. The two separate Germanys were not reunited until 1990.
The Stasi (Ministry for State Security) was the official state security of the GDR from 1950 to 1990. It was responsible for both internal and external espionage. It has been described as one of the most effective and repressive intelligence agencies to have ever existed. One of the Stasi's main responsibilities was spying on the citizens of the GDR in order to root out and and fight any opposition to the State.
In the GDR it is estimated that as many as 1 in 6 people were working for the Stasi either directly or indirectly as informers; informing on friends, family and coworkers. You were constantly surveilled and every detail of your life was systematically recorded and filed away. This information was used to make sure you were a good citizen or was used in the future to blackmail you into informing on others or make you serve the State in another way.
The culture this system create meant that there was no one you could trust, not even your friends and family. “Relations between people were conditioned by the fact that one or the other of you could be one of them. Everyone suspected everyone else, and the mistrust this bred was the foundation of social existence.”
In the beginning, the Stasi's control tactics were pretty standard such as imprisonment and physical punishment (including torture). As time went on tactics changed and became more sophisticated and subtle, the goal was "psychological destruction of a soul." There were entire departments in universities that researched and wrote doctorate theses on this topic to help the Stasi more effectively achieve their goals. Among other tactics, the Stasi would spread rumors about people to ruin their work and social lives (or just use the power of the state), create false evidence to ruin marriages, arrest people because they were "mentally ill" then just keep them locked up and drugged.
As time went on the definition of who was an enemy of the state was ever expanding, professors spent their entire careers expanding the reach of the paragraphs in the law to encompass more people. Circular logic was used to determine who enemies were; we are investigating you therefore you are an enemy, we would not investigate you if you were not an enemy. No proof was needed. Anything you did other than serving the party risked persecution. During it's existence, the Stasi arrested 250,000 people as political prisoners.
The Wall
The Berlin Wall is one of the symbols of the cold war, but despite it's significance in history, it's not something I knew much about until recently.
Between 1949 and 1961 about 3 million GDR citizens fled to West Germany. At one point, around 2,000 people a day fled from East Berlin to West Berlin seeking refugee status. Most simply wanted access to the better living conditions and opportunities that were in the West, but many left for political reasons as well.
On August 13, 1961, in the middle of the night when most citizens were sleeping, the GDR began building fences and barriers to seal off entry points from East Berlin into the western part of the city. This later became the Berlin wall.
The Berlin Wall stretched for almost 27 miles across the city and employed landmines, dogs, barbed wire, beds of nails, and armed guards to prevent escape attempts. The guards on the GDR side shot and killed those trying to escape. While the wall was standing, over 100,000 people attempted to escape, and over 5,000 people succeeded. It is estimated that 136 to more than 200 people were killed or died while trying to escape.
The Berlin Wall fell on November 9 1989 and was one of the events that perpetuated the fall of the Iron Curtain and the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe.
Stasiland Background
In 1997 Anna Funder, an Australian who spoke German, went to Germany. While there she was shocked by the lack of understanding and interest in Germans to talk about what happened behind the Berlin Wall. She took it upon herself to seek out people who had lived behind the wall, both ordinary citizens and former Stasi agents, and tell their stories. This book is extremely well written and reads like fiction. It is filled with stories of the individual and their experience, both the people Anna talked to and her own experience being in Germany and conducting these interviews. She does a wonderful job of capturing these stories and the state of Germany 7 years after reunification. I highly recommend this book. If you are interested in reading and don't want any spoilers, stop reading here, otherwise continue on for spoilers.
Stories
As mentioned above, this isn't a grand history of life in the GDR, rather a collection of stories of people who had to live there. Don't expect to come away from reading understanding the whole history of the Stasi, but rather to come away understanding what life was like for average people there. These aren't just people she specifically sought out to interview, many are people she just met as she was living her life normally before she began investigating. Here are some quick summaries of some of them, but they don't really do the stories justice:
As a teenager, Miriam Weber nearly snuck past the Wall into West Berlin, but was caught. At 16 she was tortured with sleep deprivation and then sentenced to prison for her crime of attempted escape. As a grown woman, she still suffered from the effects of the prison sentence. Her husband, Charlie later "committed suicide" in a Stasi interrogation cell but most evidence seems to point to murder by the Stasi.
Frau Paul gave birth to a child named Torsten in 1961. Due to health complications, Torsten was moved to a hospital in West Berlin. When the Berlin wall went up over night, Frau was separated from her child and after a failed escape attempt, didn't see him again until he was nearly five years old. The Stasi offered to let her see her child again if she helped them abduct a West Berlin student that helped to plan her escape attempt, she denied the offer and had to live with the pain of denying her child.
At 17, Julia Behrend excelled at languages but was prevented from entering university or obtaining any job she applied for because she was dating an Italian. All of this despite never being against the Sate, she actually defended the GDR in letters to her pen pals who spoke different languages. The Stasi were constantly spying on her, her family, and her boyfriend (in Italy). She was later interrogated by the Stasi where an agent pulled out a copy of every letter that she sent to or received from her (then ex) boyfriend. Since the letters were written in English, she had to listen to the agent read them and help him translate every single word the agent didn't understand. Then they attempted to blackmail her into informing on her ex by threatening to not allow her younger sister to get into university.
Hagen Koch was a former Stasi agent. At one point Hagen's dad was fired from his job because Hagen met with his grandfather (from West Germany). When Hagen tried to quit the Stasi, the Stasi arrested him and blackmailed his wife into divorcing him by threatening to take away their children if she didn't. Later, the Stasi wouldn't let Hagen attend the funeral for his father because his sister from West Germany would be attending the funeral.
Note:
While writing this review, the scope of what I want to write about seems to keep on expanding. In an effort to keep this at a reasonable reading length and allow myself to post regularly, I will continue this next week.