Totalitarian Busybodies

The horrors of the Stasi's East Germany.

Glenn Garvin from the January 2006 issue

(Page 2 of 3)

When Miriam was released, not yet 18, her life in East Germany was effectively over. She wasn't allowed to go to school or get a job. She subsisted, barely, by selling photographs to magazines under the names of friends. When she fell in love with a lifeguard named Charlie, a dissident whose writing had been published in the West, they applied to emigrate legally. Charlie was soon arrested under suspicion of "attempting to flee the republic." A couple of weeks later, the cops told Miriam that Charlie had hung himself in his jail cell. Her doubts about that steadily mounted as she saw the massive wounds to his head, noticed that Stasi men with cameras and microphones outnumbered mourners at the funeral, and finally discovered paperwork suggesting that Charlie's body was removed from the casket before burial and cremated.

Then there is the woman Funder identifies only as Frau Paul. Her son Torsten was born with a damaged esophagus and stomach that caused inflammation and internal bleeding. The baby required medicines and special formula available only in West Berlin--no problem until the Wall went up when he was seven months old. Frau Paul's desperate pleas for day passes to collect the medicine were turned down by an East German official, who was unmoved by her plea that without them the child would die. "If your son is as sick as all that," he counseled helpfully, "it would be better if he did." The baby began spitting up blood and was hospitalized; in the middle of the night, as he hovered near death, the doctors somehow smuggled him across the border, saving the child's life but leaving the family impossibly, impassibly divided by Cold War geography.

Frau Paul and her husband began seeking ways to escape. They lent their apartment to three West Berlin students who visited the East regularly with day passes, pretending to study while they actually coordinated construction of a tunnel under the Wall. But the Stasi discovered the plot and busted the students.

Inevitably, the trail led back to Frau Paul. After several sleepless days of round-the-clock questioning, the lieutenant interrogating her suddenly changed tacks. Her child--now 2 years old--was over in enemy territory, the lieutenant said; didn't she miss him? Wouldn't it be nice to visit--wouldn't it be nice if her baby knew he had a mother? That could be arranged, the lieutenant explained, if only Frau Paul would contact another West Berlin student well known for arranging escapes. Ask him to visit her in East Berlin, meet up in a park. "You can leave the rest to us," the lieutenant said. It never even occurred to Frau Paul to take the deal. "I had to decide against my son," she tearfully told Funder nearly four decades later. "But I couldn't let myself be used in this way."

There followed 18 months in a dank East German prison where torture was widely practiced. Frau Paul did not have to endure the most popular techniques, the immersion in icy water or the wooden yoke that bent prisoners double. For her, the Stasi deemed it sufficient to simply forward her mail from the hospital in West Berlin where her child was being raised by doctors and nurses. "Torsten has painted you an Easter picture, all by himself--brown Easter bunnies and a nest with colorful eggs," wrote a nurse in 1965. "He said, 'That is for my mommy, she'll like that.' Yesterday we received your lovely card, and we thank you on behalf of Torsten. He was so happy, we had to read it to him straight away. He never lets it out of his little hands..."

As I read that, I tried to decide� which one--the Stasi officer who used a baby as a hostage against his mother, or the West German newsman who derided Frau Paul and other Easterners as whiners--was the bigger fucker. And which one--Frau Paul or Torsten--was the bigger hero. Torsten was 5 before he met his parents; not only did he not know them, he didn't even have any concept of what a parent was. For all that, he told Funder, "I have never looked at my parents and thought they made the wrong decision."

There were others like Frau Paul. When Funder visits the "puzzle women"--the Nuremberg team that is painstakingly piecing together millions of Stasi documents that were shredded but not burned--they tell her the files are full of stories of people who rejected Stasi recruitment. "There were lots of people who just said no," explains one team member. "Not everyone can be bought."

Literally millions, however, just said yes. In many cases, they weren't bought but blackmailed, backed into dilemmas as tortuous as that of Frau Paul. Hagen Koch, who as a young Stasi officer in 1961 walked the streets of Berlin, painting the line where the Wall would be built, was actually the victim of multigenerational extortion. Koch's father Heinz served in the German army during World War II, then returned to his village, in the sector of Germany then under Soviet control. He became a schoolteacher, was popular with the townfolk, and founded the local chapter of the centrist Liberal Democratic Party, a political mainstay in West Germany. In October 1946 he ran for mayor in East Germany's first postwar elections and beat the Communist candidate easily. But instead of taking office, he was declared a prisoner of war by the Soviet army and thrown into a POW camp located on the site of one of the old Nazi concentration camps.

It was a scene repeated all over East Germany as the Soviets used service in the Wehrmacht as a pretext for decimating any nascent political opposition. The camps were so miserable, filthy, and violent that some 43,000 men would die in them. No wonder that when Heinz Koch was offered a deal--his freedom in return for renouncing the Liberal Democrats and joining the Communists--he took it. No wonder that he raised his son Hagen to believe in the Communists "like a religion," as Hagen would say later. And no wonder that Hagen, when he grew up, was recruited into the Stasi as a cartographer.

But in the Stasi, with its voracious hunger for personal secrets, the failure to disclose even the most trivial fact was disastrous. When Hagen Koch didn't mention that his long-lost biological grandfather had been located in the Netherlands and had come to visit for a few hours on a day pass, the Stasi retaliated by having Heinz Koch fired from his teaching job. That was when the Kochs had the East German version of a father-and-son chat, and Hagen learned his whole upbringing was a lie. Outraged, he resigned from the Stasi. That very afternoon, he was arrested on trumped-up pornography charges.

While he languished in jail, the Stasi told his wife he was a deviant, and unless she divorced him she too would be arrested and their child taken by the state. After she reluctantly signed divorce papers, the Stasi told Koch she had dumped him at the first sign of trouble. The porn charges were erroneous, the Stasi conceded, and would be cleared up, but he still faced nearly five years in prison for insulting the organization by trying to leave it. Two decades after his father capitulated to Stasi extortion, Hagen did the same. "At that moment my world broke apart," he told Funder.

It takes a stony heart and a drab imagination to criticize people like the Kochs for giving in to the Stasi, to say that we would have toughed it out in their situation. More ethically problematic are the large numbers of East Germans who cooperated without any pressure at all, who helped the Stasi spy on their neighbors for money or simply the thrill of it. Funder interviews a former Stasi recruiter who says this was not a small category. Some of them were truly committed Communists, he says, but not many. And the pay was pathetic. "I think it was mainly because informers got the feeling that, doing it, they were somebody," he muses. "You know--someone was listening to them for a couple of hours a week, taking notes. They felt they had it over other people."

Funder seems to think this was a quality unique to East Germans. "There is something warmer and more human about the carnality of other dictatorships, say in Latin America," she writes. "One can more easily understand a desire for cases stuffed with money and drugs, for women and weapons and blood. These obedient gray men doing it with their underpaid informers on a weekly basis seem at once more stupid and more sinister. Betrayal clearly has its own reward: the small deep human satisfaction of having one up on someone else. It is the psychology of the mistress, and this regime used it as fuel."

That assessment may misjudge the pressures felt by average East Germans. They did try to rebel in 1953 with a series of violent street protests that two Russian armored divisions quickly crushed. At least 21 were killed--that's what the regime admitted to, anyway--and thousands more were jailed or executed. Three years later, the vicious Soviet suppression of the revolt in Hungary made the point again for anyone who missed it the first time: Political resistance in East Germany would be dealt with not by the Berlin regime but its Soviet puppet masters, and there was no American cavalry waiting over the hill. In such a hopeless situation, doing small favors for the Stasi may have seemed like an evil but necessary insurance policy to many East Germans, a way of building a reserve of good will against the day when their own petty black market transactions or muttered insults against the regime came to light.

Funder is wrong, too, about Latin America, though oddly enough her mistake puts her on the right track. In both Cuba and revolutionary Nicaragua, the governments created watch committees on every block. In Nicaragua they were called Committees for the Defense of Sandinismo; in Cuba, Committees for the Defense of the Revolution. They encouraged neighbors to engage in "revolutionary vigilance"--that is, to rat out one another for slaughtering an unauthorized pig or fondling an unauthorized sex organ, for changing money on the black market or smoking a joint, for having strangers in the house or coming home late, or anything else that seemed suspicious or contrary to the regime's moral and political orthodoxies. Originally the committees had some sway over rations in the chronically short-of-supply countries, but even when their economies approached brain death and rationing broke down, there were no shortages of squealers, for precisely the reasons Funder listed--the bong buzz that some people get out of sticking it to a neighbor.

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Pingback| 10.22.09 @ 11:14PM

Posted without comment « OnParkStreet links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:

…journalist Anna Funder in Stasiland: True Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall. “Everyone suspected everyone else, and the mistrust this bred was the foundation of social existence.” -  Glenn Garvin, Reason 3. The pivotal scene in the magnificent new ( OPS: it’s a 2006 film) German movie The Lives of Others–which won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film last week–takes place in an…

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Chicago Boyz » Blog Archive » Posted without comment links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:

…journalist Anna Funder in Stasiland: True Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall. “Everyone suspected everyone else, and the mistrust this bred was the foundation of social existence.” -  Glenn Garvin, Reason 3. The pivotal scene in the magnificent new ( OPS: it’s a 2006 film) German movie The Lives of Others–which won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film last week–takes place in an…