Stasiland

Funder gets lots of responses to her ad in the paper: most of the responders are curious how much money they’ll be paid for their insider account of the Stasi. One caller explains that it’s almost impossible for a Stasi officer to get a job in the new German government. The caller claims to have been an IM—an unofficial collaborator with the Stasi, who reported on family and friends. Nevertheless, Funder isn’t sure that she can offer any money.

Funder describes the offices of a man named Erich Mielke, the Minister for State Security, whose name is still synonymous with the Stasi. Mielke kept tabs on thousands of Germans, and after the collapse of the government, Germans raided his offices in search of “their unauthorized biographies.” Under Mielke, the Stasi became one of the most powerful surveillance forces in history. There were almost 100,000 Stasi employees, with an additional 173,000 full-time informers. Under Mielke, there was one Stasi agent or informant per sixty-three people. Counting part-time informers, it’s been estimated that there was one informer per 6.5 citizens.

Mielke was born in 1907, and as a young man he quickly rose through the Communist Party. During the Nazi years, he fled to Moscow, where he attended an elite training school for Communist officials. After World War Two, he returned to Berlin and worked for the Soviet police. Then, in 1957, he masterminded a coup against the Soviet leadership, and appointed himself Minister for State Security. In the seventies, he organized another coup that resulted in the appointment of Erich Honecker to Secretary-General of East Germany.

“The two Erichs” ran East Germany for nearly two decades. Honecker was the “face” of East Berlin, and Mielke was in charge of surveillance. Honecker had also attended the Soviet training school, and worked against the Nazis throughout the 1930s and 1940s. Without the Stasi, Honecker could never have maintained his power over East Germany.

The Stasi headquarters is now full of tourists. Funder listens as a guide explains that demonstrators broke into the building—known as “the House of One Thousand Eyes”—in early 1990. By that time, Funder recalls from her own research, Honecker and Mielke were old men, yet still in excellent health. They spent most of their lives convinced that West Germany was the successor to the Nazi regime. But when Mikhail Gorbachev rose to power in the Soviet Union in 1985, he began liberalizing Russian society and cutting off ties with East Germany. Without Soviet aid, Honecker and Mielke had no way of fighting off demonstrators. By 1989, East Germany had become more Communist than the U.S.S.R. itself, as the government desperately tried and failed to stave off the liberalization of the Communist states.

By 1989, the East German demonstrators had become emboldened by news of the disintegrated Soviet state. In Hungary, demonstrators tore down the barrier between their country and East Germany, inviting in tens of thousands of East German citizens, many of whom continued into West Germany. Honecker tried to maintain control by incarcerating demonstrators in Berlin and Leipzig. However, there were so many demonstrators that the Stasi had no way of imprisoning them all. Stasi officers tried to use guns and tear gas on their people, but the demonstrations continued as strong as ever. Toward the end of 1989—the fortieth anniversary of the East German state—Honecker was forced to step down.

As a last resort, Honecker’s successor tried to relax travel restrictions between East and West Germany. Within hours of the announcement, East Germans had rushed to the Berlin Wall to cross into West Berlin. The next day, “people from east and west were climbing, crying, and dancing on the Wall.”