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THE DAILY ASTORIAN • FRIDAY, DECEMBER 9, 2016
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Sobering
stories from
behind the
Berlin Wall
Thinkstock
image
For national security, a culture of
informants, betrayal and brutalism
By STEVE FORRESTER
The Daily Astorian
hile waiting for a fl ight
from Budapest to Prague,
I browsed the airport’s
newsstand. It was an array
of magazines that you would fi nd in
many other European terminals. But
in one corner of the literary section,
I spotted a quarterly with an arrest-
ing, provocative cover. On the front
of New Eastern Europe was a draw-
ing of a man whose mouth was pad-
locked. His eyes were framed by a set
of glasses that could be used to blind
him.
The issue’s theme was Silencing
Dissent: The Plight of Political Pris-
oners in Eastern Europe.
When I took it to the sales clerk,
her look evinced disapproval.
Hungary today is free of its Soviet
overseers. But my airport moment
reminded me how one may feel
watched in a totalitarian society.
Some 40 years ago, on a tour to
Moscow and Leningrad, I watched an
interchange between a Soviet customs
offi cial and a traveler from New York.
The Soviet in a military uniform
seized a book they found inside of one
of my fellow passenger’s luggage.
Earlier I observed the Soviet gate-
keepers seize posters from a young
Russian athlete returning home.
When we attempt to grasp another
nation’s culture, there are two levels
of understanding. One is to compre-
hend it intellectually; the other is to
feel it emotionally — to know what it
looks like, feels like, smells like. To
do that, you have to go there or know
someone who’s been there.
W
The Wall
We know there was a wall separat-
ing East and West Germany. We know
the wall was built to keep Germans
inside the Russian sector — the Ger-
man Democratic Republic, or GDR.
We know the wall came down on
Nov. 9, 1989, in one of the most dra-
matic events of the late century. But
few of us in the West grasp just what
went on behind that wall.
I’ve completed reading “Stasiland:
Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall.”
The book was recommended by a
young guide whom my wife and I met
in Dresden. The Australian author,
Anna Funder, researched her book by
advertising for former agents of the
East German secret police, the Stasi,
to tell their stories.
Funder conveys the emotional
intelligence behind the East German
secret police and East Germany’s cul-
ture of informants, betrayal and bru-
talism, off which the Stasi fed. With
its vast network of employees and
informants, the Stasi constituted what
Funder calls the most extensive sur-
W riter’s
N otebook
veillance society in world history —
beyond the scope of Hitler’s Germany
or Stalin’s Russia.
Frau Paul
The ingredients of “Stasiland”
are a set of encounters with former
Stasi agents and their victims. The
most disturbing chapter is titled “Frau
Paul.” Sigrid Paul’s troubles began
when her child was born with a rup-
tured digestive tract. From infancy to
5, the boy lived inside a West German
hospital while his mother lived in the
East. The Stasi recognized that this
woman’s distress would lead her to an
attempted escape.
Frau Paul faced a classic dilemma
between the option of informing on
someone in exchange for free access
to her son or being imprisoned. She
fell into the Stasi’s trap.
The former prisoner takes Anna
Funder to the Hohenschonhausen
prison of East Berlin, where politi-
cal prisoners like her were held. Now
empty, it is a nondescript building,
but with its instru-
ments of degrada-
tion intact. Frau Paul
has Funder sit inside
a small cell within
the paddy wagon in
which she was trans-
Anna Funder ported. She shows
Funder the small
stools on which she sat in interroga-
tion rooms. She describes the revolt-
ing smells that accompanied the tasks
forced on her.
Frau Paul is a free woman. But
it is not a story with a happy end-
ing. There are no happy endings in
Funder’s book, except for a 16-year-
old girl whom Funder encounters in
a park. The girl was 6 when the Wall
fell.
At a time when racial purity par-
ties are gaining ground in France and
Germany and with a new American
president who thinks he can do busi-
ness with a former KGB agent, this
book is sobering.
Clearly
written,
“Stasiland”
describes a culture that is somewhat
similar to what Blaine Harden paints
in “Escape From Camp 14” — a book
about North Korea’s unfathomable
culture of informants and mass impris-
onment or Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s
“One Day in the Life of Ivan Deniso-
vich,” about Stalin’s Gulag.
Steve Forrester is the former edi-
tor and publisher of The Daily Asto-
rian. He is president of the EO Media
Group board of directors.
Sue Ream/Creative Commons
People atop the Berlin Wall near the Brandenburg Gate on Nov. 9 1989. The
text on the sign “Achtung! Sie verlassen jetzt West-Berlin” (“Notice! You are
now leaving West Berlin”) has been modified with an additional text “Wie
denn?” (“How?”).
East
Germany’s
surveillance
culture
was more
extensive
than Hitler’s
Germany
or Stalin’s
Russia.
An American will
fi nd this book
about the East
German secret
police sobering.