19. Germany III

Stasiland, Anna Funder

The third book I read from Germany dealt with perhaps the most unappreciated – or unresolved – part of its recent history: the reign of the autocratic German Democratic Republic (DDR) and their state police, the Stasi.

When Germany was divided after the Second World War the Soviets (occupying the eastern states of Germany under an agreed pact with the Allied powers) installed a communist government while in the western states and west Berlin, occupied by the Allies, a capitalist democracy was encouraged to flourish.  This uncomfortable stand-off, one country divided into two, lasted from 1949 to 1990.  When the DDR was overthrown a population that had lived under a completely different political, cultural and economic system was reunited with their richer, more industrialised western neighbours.  It is remarkable that, despite this divide, Germany has been so successful at creating and maintaining one of the strongest and lauded democracies in Europe, but it is hard not to sense – even from afar – something of an unresolved divide between its western and eastern halves.

What comes across quite clearly in Stasiland is that the story of the east Germans has perhaps not fully been told, or owned by Germany as a whole.  Funder, an Australian living in Berlin, recounts a meeting where she asks her TV executive boss why they don’t do a piece on stories from the former east Germany, “from the eastern point of view”. The discomfort of her west German colleagues, their disdain, is as telling as it is arresting: “No-one here is interested- they were backward, and they were broke and the whole Stasi thing […] it’s sort of embarrassing”.

But Funder has a need to understand east Germany which her west German colleagues seem to lack.  Going about her daily life in what was formerly east Berlin, she brushes against the fading vestiges of the DDR, it’s architecture and former citizens, and she seems drawn to learning more before it disappears.  Through a series of interviews with former DDR-citizens, including political prisoners, architects of the Berlin wall and former secret policemen, Funder starts to build a picture of the country that no longer exists, in particular an informative and chilling account of the Stasi.

Draconian secret police were a common feature of communist eastern states, their autocratic regimes maintained by the help of invasive state security and the threat of Soviet tanks.  But, as Funder recounts, the Stasi were infamous even in this context.  With two informers for every hundred people, infiltration agents in every vestige of east German life, invidious surveillance methods and a brutal prison regime they maintained an iron hold over the population: “It knew who your visitors were, it knew whom you telephoned, and it knew if you slept around.  It was a bureaucracy metastasised through the East German society: overt or covert, there was someone reporting to the Stasi on their fellows and friends in every school, every factory, every apartment block, every pub.”

Funder’s initial and most agonising interviews are with people who were persecuted, imprisoned or whose lives were otherwise ruined by the Stasi.  They include ordinary people who were subject to the most sickening mental and physical torture: a former prisoner, who recounts her brutal incarceration when a teenager after failing to escape over the Berlin Wall; people whose loved ones died in custody, their murders covered-up; a woman who was denied permission to see her dying child in the west unless she agreed to assist in the kidnapping of an east German dissident.

But we also meet those who worked for and supported the regime.  Some, such as a workaday former Stasi officer who “was never ideological”, are chilling in their normalcy and their willingness to carry out surveillance and send people for heinous punishments in order to uphold East German law.  She also interviews idealogues, committed communists, builders of the Berlin Wall and senior members of the GDR.  For these men East Germany was not “walled in” or the unfortunate sibling of its western neighbour, it was free of the vicissitudes of capitalism, its citizens were part of the Communist Bloc.  The wall and the intrusive state was necessary to stop people escaping to the West and to keep the Communist dream alive.  Even years after the fall of European Communism some of these men feel entirely vindicated in their view of the excesses and heartlessness of capitalism.

This book feels important as it goes some way to presenting the DDR in its own terms.  The unification is not over-extolled, but neither are the communal principles of the DDR exaggerated: Funder points out that, while homelessness wasn’t a feature of life in the DDR, state control of housing meant that homes were often overcrowded, young people couldn’t move out, or divorcing couples were forced to live together for years until a new property was available; there was alcoholism and depression.  But, as we saw with The Equestrienne, the freedoms of capitalism aren’t an unalloyed joy.

The indifference of the west Germans at that time seemed to have left so many stories untold and so many issues unresolved.  The interviews Funder conducts with former DDR-citizens seemed remarkable simply because it appeared to be the first time anyone was interested in what they had to say.  The paltry efforts made to uncover the Stasi crimes are contrasted with the ongoing trauma and lack of closure for its victims.  We can only hope that German attitudes have changed since the dismissive response of Funder’s colleagues.