With the twentieth anniversary (9
th November 1989) of the fall of the Wall rapidly approaching it is worth remembering a few things about the then East Germany and the East German Government. The nominally Communist (but fully Totalitarian) Government maintained its hold on power by subjecting its own citizens to the full weight of fear and intimidation via its own secret police.
Ordinary people were turned into informers or collaborators to remain “safe” from the attentions of the Stasi: estimates as to the numbers who turned informer vary between one for every 50 people to one in seven (in Ceausescu’s Romania it may have been one in three). The secret police happily ruined the lives of anyone it decided to: men, women, teenagers and children. During the really dark days this meant the murder, or “liquidation”, of their opponents.
As East Germany mellowed in the 1970s and 1980s the regime opted to destroy its opponents psychologically — spreading rumours, ruining careers, destroying marriages, taking peoples children away, wrecking peoples chances of higher education, or exiling them. The East Germany State (and the Stasi) was effectively at war with its own people, if you kept your head down, did not rock the boat, towed the party line, and parroted that the current line in ideological claptrap; then you might get by. The Stasi (at the behest of the East German State) demonstrated a degree of viciousness and utterly disregarded basic human rights and cast aside any trace of human dignity.
As had been well documented elsewhere the Stasi broke into people’s flats and bugged them; they actually irradiated objects and people (with some pretty lethal consequences) so they could track “suspects” with Geiger counters; and also used drugs to wreck people’s lives, literally drugging the East German States opponents whilst detaining them under house arrest. The East German State waged a brutal and vicious war upon its own people, who could with a literal stroke of a pen became “traitors”, “asocials” or “negative-enemy elements”.
As has been well documented elsewhere, there is a trend in totalitarian states towards excessive bureaucracy and record keeping; East Germany was pretty typical in that respect to other equally unpleasant totalitarian repressive regimes. Since the fall of the wall historians and archivists have revealed that between 1949 and 1989 the East German party Bureaucrats managed to accumulate more paperwork (mostly relating to their own people) than the whole of Germany throughout the Middle Ages.
Ironically some twenty years after the fall of the wall, a heated debate is taking place in Germany as to how East Germany should be remembered! Some of the former Communists (many of whom shrugged of their inconvenient outdated and irrelevant ideology) would no doubt like East Germany to be remembered as some sort of idealistic, left wing utopian well intentioned but failed socialist experiment – within which they had hoped to look after the people from literal cradle to grave - the non rose tinted reality was sadly very different.
Many former human rights activists, political prisoners and most historians would have East Germany remembered exactly the way it was.
It is worth remembering that few people defected to East Germany (save for at least one former NUM deputy leader and he rapidly changed his mind and quietly came back to the West) to embrace its nominally Communist values.
Nostalgia can be a powerful thing, but, it won’t bring back those people who were murdered by the East German state and it won’t heal the damage done to people’s lives. It is also worth remembering that many thousands of ordinary East German’s risked life and limb to escape to the West over the years and that some paid the ultimate price in the attempt. As we remember the events of twenty years ago (in the winter of 1989) we should also remember that thousands of East Germans rose in courageous and peaceful revolt to topple the tyrannical East Germany Government and cast their rulers deservedly into the dustbin of history.
