Keywords: surveillance state, wall, deportation, authoritarianism

 

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 63 people. If part-time informers are included, some estimates have the ratio as high as one informer for every 6.5 citizens (Stasiland: 57).

During the 1990s, after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, Australian journalist Anna Funder visited the former East Germany several times to find out for herself what life had been like for the average person during the forty years of communist rule. Her book, Stasiland, was the result. Walls and borders have been very much on our minds lately, here at the Media+Migration Lab, as well as discussions of democracy, authoritarianism, citizenship and rights in the newsmedia, and so I went back to Funder’s book, wondering how it would feel to step into that world. Her account is as bone-chilling today as it was when the book was first published, as many reviewers at the time noted. “Heartbreaking,” “a classic,” “humane” and “sensitive” were some of the words used to describe Funder’s work.

For younger readers who may be unfamiliar with this history, a bit of context. The Stasi were the secret police installed by the communist regime when, after World War 2, a defeated (Nazi) Germany was divided into two zones of influence by American and Soviet forces. Western and Eastern Europe were separated by what came to be known as the Iron Curtain. Berlin was situated in the Soviet-controlled zone and in 1961 the Soviets built a wall to prevent German citizens from traveling to the western side of their city.

Early on, Funder makes explicit what is perhaps the most frightening insight of all: humans’ ability to erase from our minds the atrocities of the past so that we fail to recognize repeat acts. She states, in discomforting detail:

The Stasi was the internal army by which the government kept control. Its job was to know everything about everyone, using any means it chose. It knew who your visitors were, it knew whom you telephoned, and it knew if your wife slept around. It was a bureaucracy metastasised through 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. Obsessed with detail, the Stasi entirely failed to predict the end of Communism, and with it the end of the country. Between 1989 and 1990 it was turned inside out: Stalinist spy unit one day, museum the next. In its forty years, ‘the Firm’ generated the equivalent of all records of German history since the middle ages. Laid out upright and end to end, the files the Stasi kept on their countrymen and women would form a line 180 kilometers long (Stasiland: 5). 

Records kept or records destroyed: authoritarianism follows little but the logic of power. Funder interweaves three storylines – her own first-person narrative as she moves about this alien space finding informants who will talk to her; stories of various persons whose efforts to escape brought incarceration, torture, and loss; and ex-Stasi men who want to explain or justify their actions. She does not shy away from expressing the disgust the latter elicit in the aftermath of their reign of terror. One chapter is titled, “The Smell of Old Men.” But it is the victims and their destroyed lives – Miriam and Charlie, Julia, Frau Paul – that evoke both sadness and admiration. At sixteen, Miriam tries to make a dash for the Wall, hoping to cross over to the other side, but is caught and imprisoned, surveilled and tortured. Later, her husband Charlie is jailed on trumped-up charges and never heard from again. Julia, Funder’s landlady, lives in a state of constant fear. Frau Paul’s saga of a failed attempt to leave via a secret tunnel and her subsequent harassment makes her life one of prolonged sadness. She is not allowed to see her very sick infant son who is being treated in a hospital in the western side of Berlin. She is interrogated repeatedly, and offered a reprieve if she will identify a person helping others escape to the west. Which she resists, to her credit. But it comes at a tremendous cost: the lack of an early bonding between mother and child. Funder tells us, “It was in offices that the Stasi truly came into their own: as innovators, storymakers, and Faustian bargain-hunters. That room was where a deal was offered and refused, and a soul buckled out of shape, forever” (Stasiland: 227). 

In her essay, “The Migratory Imagination,” (in Crossings, 2013) scholar Kate Mitchell notes that not everyone in East Germany was welcoming of Funder’s book, and questioned her right, as a foreigner, to tell their story. “As an Australian writer revisiting German history, she [thus] attempts to recuperate a past that does not ‘belong’ to her.” But is this charge justified? Mitchell uses the concept of prosthetic memory, or mediated cultural memory of events that we have not witnessed or experienced first-hand, as an acceptable explanation for her (and our) interest in faraway global events. Moreover, Funder bases her book on many interviews that she conducted with both the victims and the perpetrators of atrocities by the Stasi. Funder’s familiarity with the story she narrates comes from the voices she has channeled and the emotions they evoke in the reader. Borders and walls assume a reality that is ever-present and shared across cultures and nations. Appeals to epistemic nativism, while familiar, can hardly be sustained in our interconnected world. It is more important than ever for us to take on the “migratory impulse,” to revisit acts of memory like Stasiland in order to learn crucial historical lessons, both of how authoritarianism works and the myriad ways in which ordinary people undermine its power. 

The fall of the Berlin Wall signalled an optimistic moment in European and world history. The large number of books and articles that have recently emerged on the subject of authoritarianism make clear that we are in need of another such moment.

Recommended:

1. I’m Still Here (film) 2024; dir. Walter Salles.
2. Navalny (documentary) 2022; dir. Daniel Roher.
3. W. Adorno et al. The Authoritarian Personality (NY: Harper, 1950).