"Stasi: Östtysklands hemliga polis" is a short book in Swedish written by Daniel Rydén. The book describes the workings of the East German secret police, nicknamed Stasi but actually called Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (MfS). In English, that would be the Ministry for State Security, or words to that effect. The author visited the "German Democratic Republic" (GDR), as East Germany was officially known, as a journalist and therefore has firsthand experience with Stasi, since its handlers followed him around constantly.
East Germany was a Communist state established in 1949 at German territory occupied by the Soviet Union. It was a de facto one party state, dominated by the "Socialist Unity Party" (SED), really the Communist Party of Germany under a different moniker. The Communist regime fell in 1989, and one year later East Germany was re-united with democratic West Germany (the Federal Republic of Germany or FRG). East Germany is mostly known for two things: the Berlin Wall and Stasi. OK, they actually had good athletes...
At its zenith, Stasi directly employed 91,000 people. In addition, there were 189,000 informers. This was a staggeringly high number even for a repressive Communist state. One in 55 adults in East Germany worked for Stasi in some capacity! The vast network of spies and informers virtually guaranteed that everyone in the GDR encountered Stasi agents at some point in their lives. The agents could be your friends, neighbors, family members, teachers at school, and so on. Phones or apartments were bugged, letters were opened, reports were filed on millions of citizens. Stasi also spied on West Germany. Often, the agents and their handlers would meet on neutral ground in Sweden. Sometimes, Stasi worked in the open to show who was really in charge. As already mentioned, Rydén was followed by explicit Stasi handlers when visiting East Germany as a critical foreign reporter. The handlers even made sure that he knew his hotel room was bugged!
Most of Rydén´s book consist of case studies. We get to meet the daughter who helped Stasi kidnap her own father, a former Stasi agent who absconded to West Germany. Even the author admits that this case was complex: the father was by all accounts a real bastard! Another case deals with a long term Stasi spy living in West Germany who had to return to East Germany in a hurry with his family, only to be disillusioned by the cold realities of the Communist state he was serving. He tried to defect back to West Germany, but to no avail. We also get to meet various confused "socialist intellectuals" who criticized the Communist regime, but didn´t want to leave East Germany, instead hoping for reform (?!).
Above all, there is a chapter on Erich Mielke, the effective head of Stasi for most of its existence. Mielke seems to have been an almost stereotypical secret police chief: ruthless, efficient, with an excellent memory and an ability to work around the clock, vain, arrogant, and a complete intellectual mediocrity. As behoves a Communist, he had a real working class background. Stasi was organized in such a way that all information flowed vertically, never horizontally. Only Mielke knew the full extent of Stasi´s operations. He apparently had files even on the other party leaders!
Why would anyone want to work for this vast repressive apparatus? Honest Communist convictions (such as they are) was one factor. The Communist Party of Germany had fought a life-and-death struggle with the Nazis and obviously didn´t like the new top dog, the United States, either. West Germany was seen as a virtual Nazi successor state, since many middle-ranking and low-ranking Nazi officials remained on their posts. West Germany actually banned the Communist Party in 1956. Originally, most Stasi employees were working class. Later, I suspect corruption and privilege became more important. The Ministry for State Security became a virtual secret kingdom, a state within a state, with its own housing projects, hospitals, vacation resorts and even kindergartens.
All this came down in 1989, together with the Berlin Wall. Democracy activists stormed Stasi offices up and down the country when they realized that the secret police were methodically destroying all their files. Stasi did manage to destroy perhaps half of them. Incredibly, Erich Mielke almost got away. He was given a short prison sentence, but not for anything he had done as Stasi head. Instead, Mielke was tried and convicted for the murder of two police officers in 1931, during the Weimar Republic! The handler who had followed Rydén around in 1988 moved to Sweden and started working as a college teacher...
"Stasi: Östtysklands hemliga polis" comes across as an extended journalistic article, rather than a "real" analysis, but I admit that it was quite interesting to read nevertheless. Maybe one day I´m gonna tell you about my own visits to East Germany...
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