(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
East Germany had a security service. The name was Stasi, mostly consisting of 97 employees, well helped by over 000 informants among the population. They should know everything – about you and your family, about marital relationships, about what you had on the slice of bread. They could stop your career, or create one for you, if you played on their team.
Tens of thousands of stories
About here starts Stasiland. An award-winning documentary about East Germany's secret police seen through the eyes of Australian author Anne Funder.
She has spoken extensively with both victims and abusers who struggle to relate to the past, including the cartographer who drew the route of the wall with a brush and white paint through the streets of Berlin and Klaus Renft, the whole of Eastern Europe's "Mik Jegger".
Funder has met Miriam, who at the age of 16 tried to flee over the wall, but ended up in jail, and then lost her husband, probably after torture. She has heard Julia's story, which reluctantly explains how her relationship with an Italian boyfriend was recounted in detail over one of Stasis's desks in an extortion attempt to make her informant. And she has interviewed Frau Paul, who was divorced from her dead son when the barbed wire, which later became the hated wall, was rolled out the night between 12. and 13. August 1961.
- When I launched the book in Germany in March 2003, I was shocked at how sensitive this topic still is, says Funder, who was on a short visit to Oslo this week.
- Even Frau Paula, Miriam and Julia, who were heroes, have difficulty living with what happened, she says.
- They do not feel like heroes?
- No, it is difficult to get over the knowledge of what one person is able to do against another. In addition, they feel forgotten in the whole of Germany, that their stories are of little value, stories they are not alone in, but of which there are tens of thousands.
through paranoid
There were layers upon layer in the GDR's political surveillance system. Even Erich Mielke, the longtime and dreaded Stasi boss self applied for access to without folder a few years after the fall of the wall.
- Yes, this stretched from top to bottom, and is not without roaring humor. Mielke even had a folder about Erich Honecker in his office. Then it was probably just to expect that Honecker had a folder on Mielke, says Funder.
After placing an ad in a newspaper in East Berlin, Funder was called down by former Stasi members who wanted to tell without version, that they acted in good faith or they would convert her to socialism.
- It must be difficult to live with what you have done when what you believe in collapses before your eyes. These men must have understood on some level that what they were doing was wrong. The question is how to live on with all the remorse when the system collapses. Those I spoke to suggested denial. They lived in a fantasy world, which they will not let go of.
When evil gets good
Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler can serve as an example. He was the host of "Black Channel" on the GDR's state television channel, whose task was to "undress" the false propaganda that crept in over the wall in the form of Western television broadcasts. In the book, Funder asks him if he still considers the wall a necessity. He replies: “I did not 'consider' the wall as a necessity. It var absolutely necessary! It was a historical necessity. It was the most useful construction in all of German history! In European history! ” Why? Yes, "because it prevented imperialism from contaminating the eastern territories."
- The wall becomes humanism, the surveillance a fight against the imperialist enemy. Evil becomes good, and good becomes evil. This is like in Orwell's 1984. Have you thought about what creates such a cognitive dissonance with the former regime supporters?
- Well, you can see it in ordinary politicians too. It may start with a half-truth, or a pure lie, but when you have repeated it many enough times, you actually begin to believe that it is so. It is necessary to live with a clear conscience. Mr. Winz in the book met me because he thought he could convince me of the excellence of socialism. He even wanted to give me a copy The Communist Manifesto. No one can argue that equality is a great ideal. Neither Winz nor von Schnitzler would talk, however reality, but returned to the ideals again and again. In a way, this is similar to religion. It takes "a leap of faith" to believe in such a thing, but what they believed in was not true, and could not be.
Two dictatorships
When the wall fell and Stasi realized that they would lose their immense power, they launched a large-scale operation to destroy the archives. Sheets after sheets were run through the shredding machines. When these collapsed, Stasi smuggled in new ones from West Germany. When they also collapsed, the agents tore sheets by hand. The remains of all this were stuffed in garbage bags and stowed away. Today, Germany is trying to reconstruct the archive. A gang is set to glue sheet by sheet into a giant puzzle.
- Von Schnitzler responds to your questions with aggression. Nobody wants to listen to the stories of Julia, Miriam and Frau Paul. A wave of "Ostalgia", nostalgia on behalf of the GDR, is spreading in the culture. And then there was this with the archives. How do you experience Germany's relationship to its own history?
- I think von Schnitzler's aggression arose because he lacks arguments. The main problem with Ostaligen is that it makes the GDR era harmless. Movies like Goodbye, Lenin makes the GDR one harmless imagination. I was shocked that they were just 31 people working on the archive reconstruction. I expected an orderly German effort. Even with 40 people, the leader of the work calculated that it would take 375 years to put together all the sheets from all the bags. This is madness, and basically shows that it is all meant primarily to fulfill a symbolic function.
- In the book you also describe an alcoholic in East Berlin who shouts that he does not want to be German anymore. After two dictatorships in a hundred years, do you think this speaks for Germany's self – awareness?
- Yes. I who come from outside are always asked, especially in the west, if I can say something about what is wrong with the Germans. "What is wrong with us?" It is asked. This is how I am invited to make great cultural generalizations, and I do not want to, but the 20th century is tragic in German history, and I am really fond of this constant self-examination. It is precisely this that we may be able to learn something from.
