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288 pages, Paperback
First published June 5, 2003
Everyone suspected everyone else, and the mistrust this bred was the foundation of social existence.The German Democratic Republic (GDR) emerged in 1949 from the eastern section of Germany that had been occupied by the Soviet Union forces during World War II. The name was the first lie, for the GDR was no democracy. Multiple political parties existed on paper, but in reality the Social Unity Party (SED) ruled in tandem with the State Security Service (Stasi). The SED espoused Marxist-Leninist doctrines and the GDR was effectively a satellite state of the Soviet Union. As an odd quirk of geopolitics, the city of Berlin retained its political divisions from its WWII occupiers. East Berlin, originally occupied by the USSR, became the capital of GDR while its former other half, West Berlin, was an island symbolic of the capitalist West floating in the GDR sea.
"Just remember Comrades this one thing: the most important thing you have is power! Hang on to power at all costs! Without it, you are nothing!" Erich Mielke October 1989
The clearer you see, the worse you feel.According to GDR leadership, the GDR was a socialist, peace-loving nation without problems like unemployment and prostitution. But the little island of Kapitalismus had proven too tempting. Within 10 years of 1950, 1.2 million of the original 18.4 million GDR residents fled to West Berlin or further afield. That’s why the Wall was erected seemingly overnight in August 1961 and without advance warning to Berliners.
There are no whole people. Everyone has issues of their own to deal with… the main thing is how one deals with them.
I cross to the bakery past a billboard that reads 'Advertising Makes Better Known.' My baker holds, to some extent, with tradition. He makes wholegrain and rye and country loaves, stacked as oblong bricks on the back wall. But now, freed of state-run constraints on his ingenuity, he appears to be conducting his own personal experiment in bestsellerdom. On the left-hand side under the glass counter are the baked goods: iced doughnuts and cheesecake and blueberry crumble. On the other side, also under the glass and laid out just as neatly, is a bewildering assortment of fat paperbacks with embossed titles.Nothing wrong with this, of course, but not really on-point if you're looking for a book on history. Svetlana Alexievich this ain't.
I am served by a woman with a bad perm. She's wearing a T-shirt which has a lion's face on it -- the lion has winking sequins for eyes placed exactly where her nipples must be.
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 responsible (even in part) for the Holocaust; that the GDR was a multi-party democracy; that socialism was peace-loving; that there were no former Nazis left in the country; and that, under socialism, prostitution did not exist.
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. If part-time informers are included, some estimates have the ratio as high as one informer for every 6.5 citizens.
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, by having swelled the ranks of the opposition, the Stasi was giving the people heart to keep demonstrating against them.