Date: 25 October 2007 21:06:45
A few weeks ago, Lanark drew my attention to a book called Stasiland by the Australian journalist Anna Funder.
In a chatty personal style it tells the stories of various people Funder met whilst living in Berlin in 1997. She wanted to research how living in Communist East Germany had affected people and put an ad in the paper asking for former members of the Stasi (secret police) and informers to contact her. Which they did.
I ordered the book from the library and it arrived on Tuesday this week. I started reading it (in glorious sunshine in the back garden) during my lunch-hour which elongated somewhat. And also whilst waiting for the kettle to boil for my afternoon cuppa. As soon as I had finished working on the job I was doing (no recollection now of what it was), I abandoned the idea of supper and read. Four hours and 300 pages later, I had finished reading these people's remarkable stories. The quote from Marie Claire magazine on the front of the book is that they are “funny, heart-breaking and stirring.” I can agree with the last two adjectives but wonder how the reviewer came to the conclusion that they were “funny” unless s/he meant it in the sense of bizarre, odd, peculiar. Certainly not in the sense of ha-ha.
One or two of the stories seemed strangely familiar. Perhaps I had heard them or similar ones before. And it was not the horror or tragedy of the stories which struck me most for I had read quite a lot about the GDR and have heard stories first-hand from people I've met. What did strike me was the different mind-sets of the two groups of people. The Stasi officers largely took the attitude that they had behaved quite acceptably, had done a good job and were justified in what they had done. Their victims had enormous courage, integrity and dignity and were not willing to conform to a system that was inherently rotten and corrupt.
How is it that people who are products of the same system who have learned from kindergarten upwards that loyalty and obedience to the State is the only thing that matters can fall into two such distinct groups? One group believes what they are told while the other group has the independence of mind to think differently - and the courage to carry out their convictions at great personal risk. It is particularly remarkable because as from 1933 or thereabouts, Germans were not allowed to freely express views which deviated from the party line. After 1945, Germans living in the West were part of the free world again but those in the East had to knuckle down under another party line and suppress their personal thoughts. That's over 50 years of conforming. There was little outside influence (TV, radio, films, books) that was permitted into the country to even allow the population to consider the notion that things might be different. And yet somehow they knew this was not how things should be. How wonderful that after all that time people had not been sufficiently brain-washed to believe what the regime said was true. How soul-destroying and exhausting to have to watch what you said the whole time. Over 1 in 6 of the population were official informers - colleagues, neighbours, church members, family members - all waiting for a chance to denounce you.
There are apparently “Puzzlefrauen” in Nuremberg who are piecing together all the files which were ripped up by the Stasi when they realised their time was up. On average one worker reconstructs 10 pages per day. Over an average working year, the team reconstructs 100,000 pages. There are approximately 2,500 pages in a sack and 100,000 pages equate to 40 sacks a year. There are 15,000 sacks to reconstruct which means that with the current number of workers it will take 375 years to reconstruct all the documents. There are people waiting for their set of documents to be reconstructed so that they can finally find out what happened to loved ones who disappeared and were never heard of again. 375 years.