The Stasi (1 Viewer)

[egg_]

People who live in Berlin - Tom, Richie, anyone else - what is the story with the former GDR? The wall only fell in 1989, and up until then those people lived in an iron-fisted communist state with a fearsome secret police force with 100,000 employees, most of whom are presumably still alive and still going about their business ... it just seems mental to me. I suppose it's the same all over eastern europe, isn't it? The Nazis are such bogeymen, but there's other more recent scary regimes so close by, and no-one ever talks about them much

 

[sarah]

People who live in Berlin - Tom, Richie, anyone else - what is the story with the former GDR? The wall only fell in 1989, and up until then those people lived in an iron-fisted communist state with a fearsome secret police force with 100,000 employees, most of whom are presumably still alive and still going about their business ... it just seems mental to me. I suppose it's the same all over eastern europe, isn't it? The Nazis are such bogeymen, but there's other more recent scary regimes so close by, and no-one ever talks about them much

ooh i read an interesting book called stasiland http://www.amazon.com/dp/1862075808/?tag=thumpedcom-20

this australian journalist who worked there just after the wall fell and was wondering the same as you why no-one seemed to talk about it... so she advertised for people who had been in the Stasi, or had had dealings with them.

it's about 5 tales from different perspectives. recommend it.

another book i keep meaning to get is Stasi: secret history of the german police (or something similar) its been highly recommended, basically all their archives presented in a systematic manner from what i gather.

 

[broken arm]

similar issues in rwanda and other such places.

 

[egg_]

similar issues in rwanda and other such places.

Ay
I know a fella from Wexford who's engaged to a Rwandan chick. He says when he's over there they kinda slag each other off about the genocide ... seems kinda hard to believe to me, but maybe it's true, it's just too fucked up a subject to bring up with someone (or to expect a real answer if you did)

 

[taubstumm]

i agree with sarah; get a copy of stasiland. it's a really fantastic book, with a real humanity and curiosity to it. i was completely blown away by it, and i can't recommend it highly enough.

the situation with the ex-stasi people is, as you thought, completely mental. for example, a friend of mine was telling me that she only figured out in the last couple of years that her maths teacher was in the stasi. the teacher used to ask the kids about where they had been on holidays, what their parents thought about stuff, what they were doing. to the kids, it was just someone who was interested in what they had to say, but in retrospect it's obvious what was going on.

also, not stasi per se, but another friend of mine has an older brother who was a 19-year-old border guard at the berlin wall in 1989. he had been given orders to be on high alert for people trying to escape - the next order that they would have received, in the hierarchy of military orders, was to open fire on protesters. they were apparently all sitting there, scared shitless, waiting for the phone to ring to tell them to go out and kill people. it didn't ring.

there are plenty of ex-stasi people around, many of whom ended up 'jumping systems' and getting rich in the years after the wall fell; often as estate agents - the stasi had better knowledge of the buildings and urbanised areas of berlin than anyone else, so buying and selling property seemed like an obvious step to take. meanwhile, the wendeverlierer (literally, 'change-over losers') lost their jobs and livelihoods, and many of them became alcoholics and drug addicts.

the whole system is something i find endlessly fascinating; mostly because it was such a bizarre combination of high ideals and dreary police-state oppression, but also partly because the system is being carefully and deliberately recreated today in russia, which seems more and more to be a state run by the k.g.b., but without communism - presumably because of the advantages to the elite of having a police state without the burden of having a genuinely emancipatory underlying ideology muddying the waters.

 

[taubstumm]

also, i have this whole theory about how if stalin had let german reunification happen in the early postwar years, communism would quite possibly have survived the 1989 revolutions, china-style. but that's another thread...

 

[Carlow Punks!]

Been living in small-town east germany (Dessau) for a for a month or two now, where the physical traces of the old DDR are everywhere - in a less spectacular, but more pervasive manner (in my limited observance) then in Berlin, due to almost the whole town being rebuilt in the post-War period, and the continued air of depression that hangs around. All the same it seems people are more likely to discuss the Nazi era then the DDR era, maybe due to it being more historical. I think there may be a general culture of silence for the sake of social coherence...so people don't get caught up in cycles of vengence etc. Not sure...haven't mastered the language yet so have only got views off limited range of people.