European Document/The Stasi Files

...True, the first call I got this morning was from Moni, the incredibly kind Iranian woman at my bank, telling me I was overdrawn...

...the animal's hair, he explained, "would substitute wonderfully for the feathers used to decorate the Yanomami headdresses...

...Information recently uncovered in Stasi documents indicates MN agents were to place a poisonous substance, which would enter the victim's bloodstream on contact, on the door handle of Eigendorfs car...

...I'm assuming the Czechs will feel obligated to shoot, but the Germans will consider it their duty always to hit their target...

...The other patients in the tower, crammed into the tiny elevators—why do medical buildings and hospitals never have enough elevators?—looked literally demented with fear...

...Those who would not bend were treated harshly...

...Others were "unknown colleagues," a secret layer of informers devoted to checking the reliability of other informers...

...Animal rights activists, call your office...

...Eigendorf died in a mysterious auto accident in 1983...

...She seemed so little and scared and terrified and wasted that it was hard to believe she had ever had such power over by Benjamin J. Stein me...

...would be strung together to form a net around a particular subject, as when more than a dozen informers were used to envelop East German author Reiner Kunze in the years prior to his emigration to West Germany in 1977...

...While speaking to the reporter he lovingly eyed a poodle on the street...

...The Stasi kept more than three-and-a-half times the number of informers maintained by their Czechoslovak counterpart, and put a country like Hungary to shame, with Budapest's state security managing only five to ten thousand informers in a population of 10.3 million...

...The Stasi's 20,000 case officers ran some 109,000 active informers in 1989, the year the East German regime capitulated...

...All the races aremixed...

...In Stasi jargon, they were die Blauen (the Blue Ones, as their informers' files originally had blue covers) or, more romantically, die roten Lampen, the "little red lanterns" that kept the Communists' project aglow...

...In my whole life, no one else has ever been so sadistically cruel...

...Even if the boss asked why his employee couldn't take the trip, I'd simply say I have sources and information I can't reveal...

...Others were devoted to counter-intelligence...

...its agents could even threaten forced adoption to elicit cooperation.2 For efficiency, the Stasi divided its minions into seven categories according to their function: Some "colleagues" were all-purpose informers...

...But Professor Wolf and his fellow-travelers had better watch it...

...Yes, and he's also going to press my pressure points to determine if I might have some elevated levels of toxins in my system which might require a high colonic...

...Mielkeeven had a tap on the phone of his number-two, the spymaster Markus Wolf, who orchestrated Stasi efforts abroad...

...When I asked what made him think the Czech border guards would react any differently from their East German comrades, he answered, "Ah, but that's the law of averages I've chosen to play...

...Fischer 'Paschenbuchverlag, 1990...

...In a country the size of Ohio, with fewer people (16.7 million) than Mexico City, the MIS employed some 85,000 staffers, with 5,000 full-time tails, 6,000 listeners, and 2,100 mail censors (600 in East Berlin alone...

...He's often at home and in the evenings can watch Kunze's front door at all times...

...In his cavernous waiting room, there 28 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1991...

...Moreover, even the Times conceded that the Yanomami were a "fierce people" because of their tendency to, well, kill each other with axes, clubs, and long, bamboo-tipped arrows...

...This source informs me that the electrical work in Kunze's home was done by a certain M. . . . He could be used, through a third party, if we want to know what's inside the house...

...A student at the university of Jena was to raise questions in dissident circles about the authenticity of the author's anti-socialist beliefs by posing questions like "Why is it that nothing ever happens to Kunze...

...Though he had already played to SRO audiences in London and Oslo, in New York Kopenawa ran into problems, since he turned out to be something short of a Politically Correct Indigenous Person...

...His book The Hidden Hand: Gorbachev and the Collapse of East Germany, will be published in January by AEI Press, aspects of totalitarian proficiency...

...The MIS was a formidable instrument, to be sure, but the real success of the feared and despised Stasi agents, or GHG (Gucken, Horchen, and Grejfen —watching, listening, and nabbing), as the Stasi were also known, depended on an army of Mitliiufer—those average, respectable citizens of a dictatorship who, for a thousand reasons, some pardonable, others unforgivable, agree to surrender their consciences and collaborate with the state...

...The Columbus celebrations may set ordinary folk to thinking about things—like comparative civilization and universal values—that might not otherwise have occurred to them...

...No one could check this out...

...EckDeckname 'Lyrik.' Frankfurt-am-Main...

...Her doctor was not only a nutritionist, but also a Sikh, an expert on toxins, an acupuncturist, and a first-class ganef as far as I was concerned...

...The wife is the sister of H.F., who works for the MIS in Gem...

...When East Berlin became impatient with the inability of Poland's regime to control the re-emerging Solidarity virus in the early 1980s, Honecker ordered the MfS to keep tabs on exiled Polish dissidents in Western Europe...

...In casing their victim, the MIS was amply assisted...

...Another East German writer who's already had a peek into his dossier came upon a full thirty-one volumes devoted to himself and his family...

...Insults, belittlements, rejection, every kind of mockery, and other bad stuff...

...W.," I said, "I'm just going to assume that you're kidding...

...Above all, Wawrzyn's documentation helps explain how informers foster mistrust and uncertainty, the glue that can hold a Communist state together...

...Naturally, others might have different views...

...Some IMs received small cash payments, others a phone, a car, a better job, or a chance to travel West...

...Here began the process of KM/men ("bending"), the wringing out of the individual's integrity and will to make him pliant and acquiescent, ready for servitude to party and state...

...At least that's what the officer of East Germany's Ministry for State Security (MfS) thought at the time, as he monitored the couple's conversation from his listening post...

...They don't have blood of their own...

...and primary hunter-gatherer of his family," was in the United States to raise money for an emergency health project and a school, as well as to lodge a protest at the United Nations and the Organization of American States against the gold prospectors who have recently invaded Yanomami territory—decidedly post-Columbian activities, one would have thought...

...There are still roughly 500 "top sources" of the old MN on West German soil, a number of whom have been taken over by the KGB, according to German intelligence officials...

...Of neighbor or colleague, friend or relative, even a spouse, "everyone was forced to consider," recalls one ex-Stasi officer, "that he might be an informer...

...Comrades Mr...

...And as MIS chief Erich Mielke liked to say, "Every individual is a potential security risk...

...The Stasi bugged phones, faxes, offices, homes, hotels, restaurants, automobiles, and gas stations, even Catholic confessionals and seats in the Dresden Opera House...

...She wasn't...

...Even before perestroika, the MfS had taken it upon itself to serve as Communist Europe's beacon of orthodoxy...

...Of these, Lien-hard Wawrzyn's The Blue One: The Informer System of the GDR' is particularly illuminating...

...And from them one begins to grasp why it will take the East Germans quite some time before they are free to leave the past behind...

...Berlin: Klaus Wagenbach, 1990...

...F. . . . ca...

...BEN STEIN'S DIARY COMRADES AND PATIENTS Thesday isa great day...

...nearly half a million were actu26 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1991 ally on the books, and ready to be activated...

...M.'s sister is married to a comrade at the police station in Greiz...

...O different types of colleagues...

...The Stasi wanted to know which of its citizens traveling abroad committed adultery, and who at home would steal a visit to a trash dump in search of foreign literature (Authorities kept watch at special sites for refuse collected from the highway linking West Germany to Berlin...

...Kunze may consider himselflucky, though...

...tam incidents...

...Kunze first became a problem for the East German regime when he expressed his sympathy for the Prague Spring in 1968...

...By high school, every adolescent was to know, as one ex-Stasi official puts it, that "nothing happened without our approval...

...or told that no child should be permitted to wave goodbye to his mother in the morning ("Otherwise all the children would want to do the same...

...One can estimate that, in due course, one out of every thirty-two East Germans served as an inoffizielle Mitarbeiter (IM, for "unofficial colleague") of the MfS...

...Kunze to understand that her medical colleagues do not identify with the views of her husband...

...the Stasi continued its efforts to damage the author's reputation and professional standing by using "contacts in the Western media...

...Nothing is separated...

...the MfS could move behind the scenes to decide a child custody case...

...But the worst problems I have at this stage of my life—loneliness, general lassitude, worrying about money—are all so small by comparison with what happens to people in this world that I sometimes laugh out loud with gratitude when I think about the contrast...

...In a society where so much was forbidden, there was simply an abundance to keep track of...

...According to one former Stasi officer, "The Soviets were never able to get themselves properly established in Poland...

...Based on Stasi documents and a collection of interviews with former East German informants and their controllers, The Blue One offers a glimpse of how a model police state works: how informers are cultivated, enlisted, and controlled...

...limits to parents for "reasons of hygiene...

...Certain people put their apartments, phones, or cars at the disposal of Stasi 2Marc Fisher revealed a particularly harrowing instance of forced adoption in an August article in the Washington Post, and showed that West German politicians were at times guilty of turning a blind eye to the practice...

...You're having an attack of MS and you're going to see your nutritionist...

...An acquaintance of mine, a blacklisted academic in Erfurt, traveled every few weeks in the mid-1980s to neighboring Czechoslovakia to inspect spots along the border where he might slip into the Bavarian countryside...

...0 ince early 1990, publishers have LI flooded the market with books chronicling Stasi abuses...

...One Stasi agent recalls: If an individual was to take a business trip [to the West], I could go to his boss and say, "Choynowski is a security risk...

...Hence "the firm" kept six million personal files (two million on West Germans), on everyone from the maintenance man at a high school in rural Thuringia to Communist leader Erich Honecker himself...

...Everything in the world here, everything in these countries is mixed up," he complained to the Times...

...Teachers were instructed in what manner and how many times a day children should wash their hands (eight times...

...This is a great day...

...Perhaps also because German discipline and Grlindlichkeit allowed East Germany to outpace its Slavic neighbors in most Jeffrey Gedmin is a research associate at the American Enterprise Institute...

...For the ever-reluctant, the Stasi could see to it that, say, medicine was withheld from a pensioner's spouse...

...Anti-Russian sentiment . . . was strong, even with people in the security apparatus...

...Comrade R. lives across from Kunze, and by opening the window can keep watch on Nr...

...MfS boss Mielke was so personally incensed by the 1979 defection of soccer star Lutz Eigendorf that he put a contract out on Eigendorf in West Germany...

...The physician in question was in an unnamed hospital in another part of town...

...Guidelines from the Ministry of Education stipulated minutely precise measures contributing to conformity and arinung...

...When 150,000 people marched in the streets of Leipzig during the 1989 revolution, chanting "We are the people," 50,000 might have intoned "We are the Stasi," since, by the MfS's own estimate, between their full-time personnel and IMs, one out of three demonstrators was linked to the firm...

...The harassment did not cease when the Kunzes finally emigrated to West Germany...

...MfS officers, first approaching him under the guise of regular police after an accident with homemade firecrackers had caused serious injury to a friend, threatened him with jail and a prohibition on university study...

...The Stasi carefully outlined behavior for its IMs...

...It was particularly stressful, for example, to "stand around with your notebook in your hand" while young braves dragged a woman into the forest for what the braves must have regarded as a bit of naughty fun...

...80m away...

...I mean scared stiff, twisted, out of their minds...

...For the MfS the optimal age for the recruitment of an informer was 14 or 15, according to a Mielke memo, though what the Stasi specialists called the "informer mentality" was to be nurtured much earlier...

...Already in nursery school, children were weaned from their families—certain schoolrooms were designated off'Der Blanc Das Spitzelsystem der DDR...

...A retired KGB officer recently put the number of his organization's informers at 20 million, 7 percent of the Soviet population...

...A December 1972 Stasi report reads: Regarding the individual H. . . . he could be used for operative tasks in Leiningen...

...I've . . . used him often as a source...

...H. can see Kunze's property from his home . . . ca...

...After I drove her there, W. sort of shuffled along, and I had to hold her up...

...She was calling, in tears, to tell me that she was having a bad relapse of MS, and that she could not drive but needed to see her doctor...

...live, I woke up tired and with a sore throat...

...When it comes to domestic surveillance, the Stasi was likely the most impressive apparatus of its kind in the Soviet Bloc, perhaps because it was able to draw on the tradition of the Gestapo as well as that of the KGB, perhaps because a divided country gives an excuse for greater ideological vigilance...

...Kindergarten and primary school served as the lathe upon which we shaped our IMs," one former MfS case officer tells Wawrzyn...

...The poisonous mushroom, the Stasi itself," he reflected, "is in fact relatively small . . . but [our] network of informers—the Jasager, the opportunists—is vast...

...A poisonous mushroom with the mycelium, the network of countless strand-like threads that run beneath the surface of the ground, stuck to nearly every one of us...

...Still others managed other informers (usually three to four...

...lime, it's raining in I the middle of July, in Los Angeles, California...

...SL Martin's Press...

...G' by simple, direct company slogans like "Everything is suspicious" and "Get everything," the MfS collected intelligence with great zeal: sexual habits, personal finances, medical records, books checked opt from libraries (who, for instance, might expressinterest in the operation of hot-air balloons or scuba gear...

...Good, trained not to "take sides and make value judgements," discovered painfully (though not as painfully as the luckless Indian woman) that his values (you know, the kind associated with Western civilization) were not current just now in the jungles of the Amazon and, as long as the Yanomami are kept in their edenic state, are not likely to be anytime soon...

...how they are used not only to extend the scope of the security organs' surveillance, but also to ruin the lives of "unpleasant citizens" by destroying a reputation, a marriage, a circle of friends, or the mental or physical health of the "target...

...that she, as a doctor and humanist, must feel obliged to deter her husband from such unreflective and impossible activity...

...One recently unmasked Stasi informer, a member of the state parliament of Mecklenburg, explained how he had been coerced into service at age 16...

...In the case of Herr Honecker, Mielke sought to document the East German leader's less than heroic behavior during ten years of Nazi incarceration in Berlin and Brandenburg...

...Simon & Schuster, 352 pp...

...I was madly in love with her a few years ago, and she was staggeringly mean to me...

...Egon Franke, minister for inter-German affairs in the Social Democratic government of Willy Brandt, went so far as to deny categorically before parliament that any forced adoptions were taking place...

...21.95...

...H. can also use his wife when he's at work...

...Although Stasi materials must be considered damaged assets—some files were spirited off to the Soviet Union, others were deliberately falsified, and many, of course, were destroyed—from them flow a rich, textured documentation of one of Eastern Europe's most successful totalitarian projects...

...Benjamin J. Stein is the author of Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow...

...and Mrs...

...65-70 years old, live directly across the way...

...She resumed work—at a job I had gotten her in a desperate effort to make her love me—and resumed her usual shenanigans of mockery and contempt, as if possibly they night help her treatment...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1991 27 art Werthback, head of German countterintelligence, recently told me that he had come to the conclusion that the Stasi were suffocating themselves in vast, unmanageable mounds of information they were often simply unable to process...

...It was the perfect analogy...

...For one thing, he is an unabashed racist...

...In Cover Name "Lyric, "3 Kunze shares a portion of what he discovered in his Stasi file—a twelve-volume collection of 3,491 pages of meticulously compiled data...

...Good eventually married a woman from the tribe, but they now live in the United States—in Tbrrance, California, I hope) Since the death of socialism, the only thing the left has left in this country is anti-Americanism—a provincial branch of the larger phenomenon of Self-Hatred...

...The American label is not a neutral label," intoned Bryan J. Wolf, professor of American Studies and English at Yale, at a recent symposium on the American West at the Smithsonian Institution...

...Rape crisis activists, check your beepers...

...The MfS agents would skillfully mix carrot and stick to "bend" their candidates, and the reasons for collaborating were varied...

...Anthropologist Kenneth Good, whose book on the Yanomami' was published earlier this year, confesses that even after living among them for several years, he found it difficult to endure cer'Into the Heart...

...Eventually the MfS decided to "show the sloppy Poles how it's done" by dispatching special units to the East German embassy in Warsaw and the consulates in Gdansk, Wroclaw, and Szczecin, with orders to monitor subversive ongoings in Catholic Church and Solidarity circles...

...No," she said...

...Anyway, I wrote for a few hours about my old pal Michael M., one hell of a guy, and then I had a call from mypal W. She is a beautiful woman of about twenty-nine from Mississippi...

...In Poland as elsewhere, the Stasi often did proxy work for the KGB...

...Three years later, frustrated that "the current political situation [i.e., detente] does not permit us to legally bring Kunze to accountability for his literary activity," the Stasi decided to move against him under Guideline 1/76, by initiating the "systematic organization of failure, both in career and socially, with the aim of undermining the self-esteem of the individual...

...There was this Choynowski who wouldn't be bent, wouldn't become my IM...

...You're kidding," I said...

...Nobody can argue with that...

...EUROPEAN DOCUMENT THE STASI FILES by Jeffrey Gedmin rri he Stasi is like a poisonous I mushroom," the woman said in a dark, musing way to her husband as they lay in bed just before falling asleep...

...He made his first trip November 9 [the day the Berlin Wall fell...

...IMs working with Kunze's wife Elisabeth were "to give Frau Dr...

...Poor Mr...

...As we walked down the hall, a narrow, dark hall that reminded me of the hall that the prisoner walked down en route to eternity in Darkness at Noon, I asked W. if we were going to see her neurologist...

...agents...

...And the conclusions they reach may not be the ones printed in the Teacher's Answer Book...

...Fate, gnarled McFate, that old nightclub stand-up act that no one can ever top, had it in for W. Two years or so ago, she was diagnosed as having multiple sclerosis and was laid up in the hospital for about a month...

...Special colleagues" penetrated leadership circles in industry, agriculture, and civil administration...

...This is my nutritionist...

...that her husband's public stance does not do service to our state, and that it may have consequences for her and her medical work...

...Certain informers were party members, obliged to cooperate with the Stasi...

...Comrade H., . . . 68 years old, a pensioner, [also] lives across the way and has denounced Kunze in my presence...