East German border guards in 1978 at the Berlin Wall. (Associated Press)
Don Murray
Sweating out the memories of East Berlin
Aug. 22, 2007
It was a state but never a country, a strange twilight place ruled by men driven by one imperative — to cage and control their citizens.
It has also become something of a vampire state, periodically rising from its coffin to haunt the memory of Germany. The German Democratic Republic, that Cold War relic, has once again visited the news columns. As usual, the news is nasty.
This was the state that built the Berlin Wall to keep its people penned in, the state that created the Stasi, the secret police whose job it was to keep watchful eye on the 17 million Germans living in the East.
These 17 million found themselves in the Soviet sector after the defeat of Hitler's Germany. In 1949, the sector was turned into a state to be guided by the principles of scientific socialism and one party, the Communist party.
The wall went up later, in 1961, and was breached among scenes of joy in 1989. In the 40 years of the GDR, almost 1,500 people were killed trying to cross into West Germany, according to an East German victims group.
The political authorities of East Germany and the leaders of the Stasi always denied there was a deliberate "shoot to kill" policy in place during that period. That denial, like so much else in the GDR, appears now to have been an outright lie.
Shoot to kill
Give the Stasi credit for one thing: it was thorough, it wrote everything down. As the East German state was collapsing after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it tried to destroy the mountain of paper it had generated. But it only partly succeeded.
Now researchers have found among the papers of an East German border guard, stashed in a provincial archive in Magdeburg, a seven-page document written in 1973 outlining the steps to take when confronted with escapees.
"Do not hesitate with the use of a firearm, including when the border breakouts involve women and children, which the traitors have already frequently taken advantage of," it reads.
One more lie to add to the political pile. Yet the failed state continues to exercise a morbid fascination.
As a symbol, the Berlin Wall became the background for an entire sub-category of modern literature, the Cold War thriller. In this frenetic atmosphere of spy and counter-spy there was even an agreed spot where the trophies of this combat were exchanged — the Glienicke bridge on the edge of Berlin, connecting it to neighbouring Potsdam.
The exchanges began as furtive, early morning affairs, the fruit of hard bargaining over how many spies and how much money to hand over. They ended in a blaze of television lights with journalists, me among them, standing on specially constructed bleachers for a mid-morning exchange broadcast live.
The star of this final exchange on the Glienicke bridge was the Soviet Jewish dissident Natan Sharansky, who walked one way across the bridge along with East German prisoners while those given up by West Germany walked the other way, all watched by armed border guards.
Cameras rolled, reporters shouted questions, the American ambassador to West Germany greeted Sharansky and bundled him into his personal limousine. The moment was remarkable, and, given its public nature, remarkably bizarre.
The scent of interrogation
But no more bizarre than the Stasi itself. This secret police employed more than 90,000 people but its network of informants was even greater. According to some calculations, so thorough was the Stasi that there was one informer for every seven East Germans. The Stasi's penetration of its citizenry was far deeper than that of the Gestapo.
After the collapse of East Germany, the decision was taken to allow East German citizens to consult their Stasi files if they so wished.
I remember vividly the day in 1994 when the researcher in our Berlin office, born in East Germany, went to the former Stasi headquarters to look at her life, as reported by informants.
She left gregarious and cheerful; she came back drained. Two dozen people in her small town had filed reports on her and her family. Among them was her uncle.
I once visited the ex-Stasi headquarters. The rooms of card indexes, each indicating a file on a citizen, appeared to stretch the length of a football field. In the basement were bags and bags of shredded documents, and researchers patiently trying to put the strips together.
There were also shelves with bottles containing rags. These, explained our guide in a tone of slight incredulity, contained the sweat of Stasi prisoners, sweat collected during interrogations. The rags were kept to be given to specially trained sniffer dogs so they could follow up on released prisoners in East Germany's scientifically socialist society.
A certain nostalgia
The Germans, with their well-attested thoroughness, are still working on the bags of documents. There are 16,000 of them. Researchers now have computer programs that may speed up the painful process of deciphering the shredded secrets.
As the East German state recedes in memory, nostalgia for it may be growing. Two of Germany's most successful films in recent years have been about the GDR, one a comedy, Goodbye Lenin, the second a tragedy, The Lives of Others.
At the heart of the second film is the Stasi itself. And some critics have protested that it portrays the Stasi with a far too human face.
There are other shoots of nostalgia sprouting up, including an Ost Hotel, decorated in pure East German style, very popular with tourists. The hotel includes a Stasi suite, complete with a portrait of the late Erich Honecker, the last East German leader, above the bed.
Even the German police seem infected with a mild form of Stasi nostalgia. In the run-up to the recent G8 summit, held in Germany, they resuscitated the Stasi's scent-of-a suspect technique.
Samples of scents were gathered from at least five people who were picked up in police raids before the summit. These were then given to sniffer dogs as they patrolled areas where protesters gathered, seeking out the incriminating odours.
The vampire state lives on, not in blood this time but in sweat.
ABOUT THIS AUTHOR
Biography
During his 30 years at CBC, Don Murray has filed hundreds of reports in French and English from China, Europe, the Middle East and the Soviet Union. He is currently based in London. He wrote A Democracy of Despots, documenting the collapse and rebirth of Russia. From Berlin, he reported the Bosnia peace agreement talks and, based in London, the death of Diana and Northern Ireland peace talks. He authored Family Wars for the International Journal, paralleling Northern Ireland and Bosnia. He has covered wars in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq.