Demonstrators storming the Stasi headquarters in Berlin with the slogan “No more Stasi and Sozialist dictatorship and Nazism, you have brought too much injustice and misery”.
For more than a month, the topic of whistleblowing has continued to swirl from the print media to the Internet, reminiscent of the 2006 Academy Award-winning film The Wiretap Storm (also known as The Lives of Others), which chose 1984 as its setting and George Orwell’s famous novel 1984.
The most impressive thing about 1984 is that on every floor of the protagonist Winston’s house, there is a poster with a big face staring at it. Wherever you go, the eyes in the picture always follow you. The caption below reads: “Big Brother is watching you.
Coincidentally, in the 1984 East Berlin scene in The Wiretap Storm, the opening caption each time appears is “publicized everywhere”. This “openness” means that the privacy of citizens is completely exposed to the authorities. The secret police monitored people all over the GDR, and their mission was to spy on every detail of “other people’s lives,” gather intelligence, and dismantle suspicious organizations.
As the front line of the Cold War intelligence war, the GDR, with the help of the former Soviet intelligence services, formed in April 1950 the Stasi, the most powerful and efficient intelligence agency of the former Warsaw Pact member states. The “Big Brother” was “everywhere,” and secret files were opened on six million of the GDR’s sixteen million people, or more than one-third of the population.
It was revealed that the Stasi had about 10,000-30,000 people in 1959, 50,000-30,000 in 1973, and 90,000-10,000 in 1989, making one out of every 180 people in the GDR working in intelligence. The official establishment was supplemented by 100,000-90,000 to 200,000 contracted intelligence officers. The Soviet security services had 480,000 personnel, a ratio of 1:595 to the population; the Czech intelligence services had 10,000-80,000 personnel, a ratio of 1:867 to the population; Romania had 1:1553, and Poland had 1:1574.
After the Berlin Wall suddenly collapsed in 1989, Erich Mielke, the former East German Minister of State Security, directed the secret police to destroy the archives. Because there were too many and not enough shredders, Milke ordered them to be destroyed by hand. After a round-the-clock battle, more than 45 million A4 sheets of paper were shredded into more than 600 million pieces and put into 163,500 bags to be taken to a quarry for burning. At this point, people stormed the Stasi headquarters, and most of the documents were preserved. The files, if lined up horizontally, would have been one hundred and twenty-five miles (one hundred and eighty kilometers) long.
After the reunification of Germany in 1990, the Reichstag hesitated to deal with the archives. Some congressmen considered the contents of the archives too explosive and recommended burning them; others, for reasons of social security, preferred that they be sealed for a number of years or partially disclosed after processing. At the insistence of a large number of victims and at the urging of congressmen from the former East Germany, the Reichstag finally passed a bill declassifying the secret archives, so that each persecuted person could have access to his or her own files.
The declassification bill triggered an unprecedented political shockwave, as victims discovered that, in addition to police and officials, informants included close friends, close neighbors, and even their closest husbands, wives, parents, and children. Every day, the scars of history were uncovered in the media, and people were first shocked and then plunged into a nervous breakdown at the darkness and horror of the old system, which led to the disintegration of many families and the suicide of others who could not face their betrayed loved ones. Some politicians, university presidents, bishops, writers, artists, sports stars, teachers, etc., were so discredited that they had to retire from the world, including Mercier, the leader of the Christian Democratic Party of East Germany and the first non-Communist chancellor.
Congresswoman Vera discovered that a report in the case file detailed the minutiae of her private life and that the informant was her husband, with whom she had two children, and the two divorced. Human rights activist Pappis learned from the file that the police had systematically destroyed his marriage and family, encouraged his son to oppose him, lured his wife into divorce with educational opportunities and money, and even used a “manliness ploy. The secret police had sent women to seduce Bishop Eggert, used anonymous letters to spread rumors that he had sodomized boys, and instructed doctors to falsify his condition and provide psychotropic drugs to destroy his health. ……
The Stasi, following in the footsteps of the German people, who were known for their meticulous thinking and diligence, have made their work thoroughly “scientific. Every citizen could become an imaginary “hostile force,” and private space was invaded with impunity to gather so-called “intelligence” on almost everything: from what men and women flirt with each other, to how many times a week they take out the trash, where they store their tools, what flavors they buy, and so on. The sausages, etc.; cameras are installed in public toilets and the images are checked day by day. The unscrupulous surveillance, the bureaucratic boredom and retardation, reveal the totalitarian regime’s deep distrust and morbid fear.
In the sixteen years since 1991, German officials have manually disposed of three hundred and fifty bags of archive fragments as an “intellectual jigsaw puzzle”. At this rate, it would take centuries to process the entire archive. In 2007, the German government decided to spend 6.3 million euros to put the pieces together using newly developed software technology. The designers of the software claim that, if all goes well, the work will be completed in five to six years.
1984 will not end until the human rights of citizens are effectively guaranteed. A system of collective complicity and victimization is created by people and enforced by people. Individual sins in the depths of history will not be absolved by the demise of the system; forgiveness is of course necessary before the judgment of history; but the sins of the soul cannot be redeemed until there is repentance. It is cowardly to be afraid of uncovering the scars of history and shifting the blame to the system.
May 4, 2009, Wind and Rain Reading House
Caijing Magazine, Issue 10, 2009
Recent Comments