East Germans cringe over Stasi files
By Harry Bhaskara
POTSDAM, Brandenburg, Germany (JP): Michael Erbach hastily opens his Stasi file. After reading it, he is relieved to find that he is not considered a "harmful" person.
That was an unforgettable occurrence described by the young eastern German journalist after Germany's reunification.
"I was one among a few people who were allowed to look at my Stasi file immediately after the change," Erbach said referring to the 1990 historical event.
Erbach is now chief editor of Potsdamer Reuefte Rachrichten daily.
Stasi, the formidable former East German secret police, has a huge file for each of the 16 million eastern Germans. After 40 years of German Democratic Republic reign, it has 180 kilometers of files and 40 million index cards. In 1989, Stasi employed 90,000 full-time officials and 175,000 unofficial assistants.
Now, ordinary eastern German citizens want to know how their former government spied on and oppressed them for decades.
The United German government set up a commission in 1992 headed by Joachim Gauck, an eastern German pastor from Rostock. Gauck, who had been spied upon and harassed during the German Democratic Republic days, now heads the federal commissioner for the documentation of the state security service of the former German Democratic Republic.
The commission intended to give citizens access to the information stored about them and to prevent its misuse.
To date almost one million people have applied to look at their files.
Every day some 200 people sit in the reading room at the commission's office and read their files. Some sit rigidly on their chairs, others break down in tears on reading their files.
From the files they might learn the malice of people in the past or even of members of their own family.
"When they know what it was like, this makes it easier for them to bid farewell to the past," Gauck said in a recent interview with Deutschland magazine.
Eastern Germans lived under dictatorship since 1933, Gauck said. The dictators had their own ideological principles and they called religious and democratic values into question, he said, adding that living in this condition had led to an erosion of a sense of values.
"Looking back, I have learned that you don't only resist dictators when they foment war, build concentration camps, torture and murder.
"No, I have learned that resolute resistance must begin when any sort of dictatorship arises that calls into question or gradually eliminates the values upon which democracy is based, the values which play a positive part in human society."
Communism attacked these values on all fronts, he said.
"It especially hindered the development of conscience because it postulated that the party, which supposedly served the interests of the workers and farmers, deserved the highest authority and therefore unconditional loyalty," Gauck said.
As a result, he said, the realm of conscience of innumerable people who subscribed to communist ideology was severely undermined.
In addition to spying on their own people, the Stasi also spied on the West. When unification became a reality the agency came under scrutiny.
More than 5,000 suspected Stasi collaborators have been pursued in the last five years. In May, however, the German Constitutional Court ruled that former East German spymasters cannot be prosecuted for conducting cold war espionage against the West.
The decision effectively granted a blanket amnesty to dozens of former top agents for the Stasi.
"They are very efficient," a western German journalist said of the Stasi, "they are better than us."
Window: "I have learned that resolute resistance must begin when any sort of dictatorship arises that calls into question or gradually eliminates the values upon which democracy is based..."