Life behind the Berlin Wall: An Orwellian Nightmare

Twenty-five years ago this week, the Berlin Wall fell. The Intercollegiate Review is marking this anniversary with reflections on the historic events of November 1989, as well as the lead-up to and aftermath of the wall’s collapse. Here, Mike Dennis looks at life behind the Berlin Wall, focusing on how the Ministry for State Security, or Stasi, exercised “almost complete control over the captive population of East Germany.”

The Ministry for State Security (MfS), popularly known as the Stasi, was an integral element of Communist rule in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) from the ministry’s establishment in 1950 to its dissolution in 1989. The GDR itself was founded in 1949, as Stalin’s “unwanted child” of the Cold War. Despite the popular uprising in 1953 against the Stalinist system which had been imposed on the GDR and despite the mass exodus of East Germans to the West, the new state managed to survive until its next major test in 1961. The Berlin Wall, erected by the East German Communists with Soviet endorsement, arrested in a brutal manner the hemorrhaging of the population—thereby stabilizing the system behind the ugly barrier which soon came to symbolize the totalitarian nature of communism. A combination of social incentives, economic growth, and more subtle forms of coercion subsequently enabled the GDR’s rulers to consolidate their position and, in the era of superpower détente, to gain international recognition for their country. However, the Soviet Union’s retreat from empire under Gorbachev and the GDR’s chronic economic malaise exposed the frail legitimacy of the Communist social and political order. When the Berlin Wall eventually fell, on the evening of November 9–10, 1989, it was an act of desperation by East Germany’s bewildered rulers to save an obsolescent system which neither they nor their security and military forces could prevent from disintegrating under the twin pressures of popular demonstrations and mass flight.

Following in the footsteps of its Soviet counterpart, the KGB, the Ministry for State Security functioned for almost four decades as the sharp sword and trusty shield of the GDR’s key institution, the ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED). Such was the ministry’s power and ubiquity that one author, Alexandra Richie, refers to it as exercising, in the 1980s, “almost complete control over the captive population of East Germany.” And, indeed, the comprehensive surveillance of the population by a vast army of informers and a plethora of scientific and technical devices lends substance to the claim by the historian Christoph Klessmann that George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four was realized to a greater extent in the GDR than was ever the case in the Third Reich. When, in addition, the Stasi’s success in planting agents in all areas of West German political and cultural life is borne in mind, then it is tempting to concur with Anne Applebaum’s verdict that it was “the most pervasive and efficient secret service in history.” . . .

The Stasi is sometimes depicted as a “state within a state” whose clandestine operations were not rigorously controlled and monitored by party organs. Egon Krenz, the former head of the SED’s Central Committee Department for Security Questions and the SED’s last leader, subscribes to this argument, partly because it helps to relieve him of some of the burden of responsibility for the Stasi’s excesses and abuse of human rights.

The myth of an ultra-efficient and omnipotent intelligence and security service has come under challenge on the grounds that the Stasi was submerged in a flood of data, much of it mindless trivia. Tina Rosenberg has depicted the minutiae, or what she calls the thousands of tons of “shit” under the nuggets of gold, in graphic detail:

The Stasi knew where Comrade Gisela kept the ironing board in her apartment . . . and how many times a week Comrade Armin took out his garbage and what color socks he wore with his sandals while doing it. . . . The Stasi kept watch on trash dumps and lending libraries—the names of those who checked out books on hot air balloons or rock-climbing equipment were of particular interest—and tapped the booths of Catholic confessionals and the seats at the Dresden Opera. Stasi cameras monitored public toilets. . . . Some of its dossiers on East Germans had a hundred categories of information—even the number, location, and design of tattoos. The Stasi kept a library of smells: a few hundred glass jars containing bits of dissidents’ dirty underwear, so trained dogs could sniff and match the smell to an antigovernment pamphlet found on the sidewalk.

[ . . . ]

While the interpretation of a floundering Stasi is certainly not without substance, the Stasi cannot, of course, be relegated to a peripheral role in the light of its multiplicity of functions as guardian of the verities of Marxist-Leninist ideology, its ruthless implementation of the Socialist revolution of the 1950s, its upholding of the Communist power monopoly against perceived enemies at home and abroad, its crucial part in the acquisition of hard currency and scientific and technical know-how from the West, and its snooping into the intimate details of people’s lives. Far from being a blunt sword and rusty shield, the Stasi was an indispensable instrument of the Communist power elites in the global struggle against their capitalist rivals in the West, even though it should be stressed that in some spheres, especially the vital one of the economy, the Stasi’s autocratic minister, Erich Mielke, often resembles a Don Quixote tilting at Socialist windmills. . . .

One of the most striking features of the Stasi was its sheer size—91,105 full-time staff and about 176,000 informers shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall—which, together with an elaborate system of postal and telephone monitoring, enabled the ministry to conduct an almost blanket surveillance of society. The ratio of Stasi employees to the East German population as well as the intensity of surveillance may well have been unprecedented in modern history. . . .

Although [East Germany’s legendary spymaster] Markus Wolf has admitted to having qualms about the excesses of Stalin, the methods pursued by the Stasi, and the shortcomings of the GDR, he has sought to rationalize his position by reference to the grand ideals of communism. Wolf justifies the East German Communists’ resort to repressive practices as a defensive reaction to the imperialists’ efforts to destroy the GDR’s Socialist experiment. And as for Stalin’s crimes, he pleads that “We German Communists had perhaps the most complete blind spots of all the foreigners in Moscow . . . since we had been rescued from death or imprisonment by the Soviet Union. Any other doubts about what was going on were overshadowed by events under Hitler’s regime, and I was incapable of seeing our Socialist system as a tyranny.” Determined to ensure that “Nazism would never infect the Germans again,” he appealed to the greater cause by quoting the lines from Bertolt Brecht’s play The Measure Taken:

What baseness would you not commit,
To stamp out baseness?
If you could change the world,
What would you be too good for?

Mike Dennis is professor of modern German history at the University of Wolverhampton in England. This essay is adapted from a selection in From the Gulag to the Killing Fields: Personal Accounts of Political Violence and Repression in Communist States, edited by Paul Hollander. It was originally drawn from Dennis’s book The Stasi: Myth and Reality (2003, Pearson Education Limited).