Dictatorships depend on the willing

May 30, 2024 1:19 AM

The Stasi files offer an astonishingly granular picture of life in a dictatorship—how ordinary people act under suspicious eyes. Nearly three hundred thousand East Germans were working for the Stasi by the time the Wall fell, in 1989, including some two hundred thousand inoffizielle Mitarbeiter, or unofficial collaborators, like Genin. In a population of sixteen million, that was one spy for every fifty to sixty people. In the years since the files were made public, their revelations have derailed political campaigns, tarnished artistic legacies, and exonerated countless citizens who were wrongly accused or imprisoned. Yet some of the files that the Stasi most wanted to hide were never released. In the weeks before the Wall fell, agents destroyed as many documents as they could. Many were pulped, shredded, or burned, and lost forever. But between forty and fifty-five million pages were just torn up, and later stuffed in paper sacks. from Piecing Together the Secrets of the Stasi [The New Yorker; ungated]
posted by chavenet (21 comments total)

“Dictatorships need the middle to function, and the vast majority of people are in the middle,” Hovestädt said. “They don’t stick up their heads.”

People just need to shut the fuck up and just read the fucking article. There's a lot here about East Germany that people need to understand if we want to stop the spread of fascism elsewhere in the world, if not in the United States, where Republican gangsters want to set up the same kind of regime. If not worse.

Look at Texas as a prime example, where its government had tried to surveil its citizens — even when they travelled out of state for healthcare procedures. The gears are in place.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 2:19 AM on May 30 [15 favorites]

Marx seems orthogonal to fascism, the topic of the really quite interesting article.

Fascism isn't the topic of the article; calling the GDR "fascist" just lets communism off the hook. The article is about the system of surveillance developed in a totalitarian communist country, and about how people can allow ideology to blind them to a country's crimes and even make them complicit in them.

Just because we're seeing a resurgence in fascism in the twenty-first century doesn't mean every crime of the twentieth can be described as fascist.

The issue is totalitarianism and authoritarianism: so yes, fascism today, but also communism as it was practiced from 1917–89 (and fascism from the 1920s–40s—and beyond, in places like Spain and Portugal—but that wasn't the GDR).
posted by rory at 2:19 AM on May 30 [18 favorites]

and fascism from the 1920s–40s—and beyond, in places like Spain and Portugal

There's a book* that compiles several letters that were willingly written by people to the Portuguese state police (PIDE) during the dictatorship. Reasons for writing vary. There are people with a genuine belief in some ideology (e.g. wanting to denounce communist behavior, anti-state sentiments, or people not being religious enough), but also people asking for favors (e.g. a job at PIDE for their son) and people who just want to harm someone due to some personal dispute.

* The book is "Tenho o prazer de informar o Senhor Director...", by Duncan Simpson. The title is the opening sentence of many of the letters, and translates to something like "I have the pleasure of informing Mr. Director...". I don't think that there's an English version, unfortunately.
posted by JSilva at 3:10 AM on May 30 [13 favorites]

[⚑]
posted by fairmettle at 3:38 AM on May 30 [4 favorites]

Duncan Simpson's blog is in English and has many examples of these letters. It’s a fascinating dynamic.
posted by chavenet at 4:15 AM on May 30 [4 favorites]

This seems like a good place to mention the amazing film "The Lives of Others."
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 4:27 AM on May 30 [17 favorites]

This seems like a good place to mention the amazing film "The Lives of Others."

Amazing doesn't begin to describe it, it's one of the best films of the last 25 years. The last twenty minutes of the movie will take your breath away even though it's just dialogue (and one shocking but not gratituous act of violence).
posted by fortitude25 at 4:48 AM on May 30 [6 favorites]

Much of my reaction to this comes from my position as an American of a certain age. If that's a problem for you, skip this comment.

This article is fascinating. I was learning German in the United States, late in the Cold War, and discussion of East and West was a big part of learning the culture of the time, including the Stasi. I think they, like much history from 30+ years ago, are simply not known to Americans who didn't have a particular reason to learn about them after they fell out of anything like popular consciousness in the United States. A colleague made a passing reference to the Stasi the other day, and I wonder now whether their comment was sparked by having read this or having it floating around on social. I have not heard a reference to the Stasi from someone under 30 any time in the last 10+ years (who wasn't specifically researching German history).

This is a long article that I really found worth the time to read. I do think it's helpful for Europe and the U.S. right now to think about the story of the Stasi and quiet, complicit middles right now. I don't usually read longreads, but I did read this, and I'm glad I did. Thank you for posting, chavenet.

The "is it Fascist or isn't it" question is both specifically valid in discussing the time and useless right now: "fascism" has come to mean an umbrella of behaviors and actions that have historically been taken by many governments with various ideologies. You can have a little fight about it if you want, but if you live in a country, state, province, canton, city, etc. with secret police, non-public trials, informant hotlines, etc., this seems to me like a useful thinking tool.

I live in a state (Virginia) that recently piloted a statewide tip line to call in about classrooms in public schools where 'divisive concepts' were being taught. It failed, but the ideology behind that approach remains strong (whether it's in earnest or designed to motivate useful idiots, I think that's a debate or a both/an). And they did try it. Literally: call in to report on your fellow citizens who teach and are, you know, saying that the U.S. Civil War was about slavery. That's not the Stasi, but I did think of the Stasi and other surveillance agencies when it was first announced.
posted by cupcakeninja at 4:49 AM on May 30 [11 favorites]

Mod note: A few comments removed. Please focus on reading the article and talking about what it's saying, thanks!
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 5:00 AM on May 30 [2 favorites]

This seems like a good place to mention the amazing film "The Lives of Others."

And, even more amazing, Anna Funder's Stasiland.
posted by rory at 5:07 AM on May 30 [6 favorites]

The Stasi was remarkable in how many people it involved, even compared to other communist countries. In Poland, with 38 million people, there were only 100 thousand secret collaborators at the highest point in the eighties (rising chiefly to investigate the Solidarity movement). It still was enough that in the fifties, my grandmother arranged to baptise her baby during a holiday in the country because in the city someone could notice and get my grandfather in trouble with his military job. The DDR attitude to surveillance was really a whole different level.
posted by I claim sanctuary at 5:25 AM on May 30 [3 favorites]

but if you live in a country, state, province, canton, city, etc. with secret police, non-public trials, informant hotlines, etc., this seems to me like a useful thinking tool.

I don't want to have a little fight about it, but if we're trying to make sense of, say, the invasion of Ukraine, it helps to understand the underlying mechanics and the historical context to make sense of why each side is calling the other fascist. Russian devotees of Vladimir Putin fervently believe that they're fighting fascism in Ukraine. They really believe that Ukraine's Russian-speaking Jewish leader, whose great-grandparents were killed in the Holocaust, is fascist.

It's entirely legitimate to argue that the GDR continued using and even perfected many of the totalitarian tools of the Nazis, but ideologically the two states were fundamentally at odds. It's important—and relevant to today—to contemplate how ideology can blind us to what we're doing in its name, as it did for the woman at the heart of this article. She willingly left a Western life and embedded herself in a totalitarian one because she saw only its positives.

We have too many examples today of people willing to overlook totalitarian and authoritarian policies and actions because they're in service of an ideology they share. At the moment, we see them used in service of the right, but the pendulum could so easily swing: a generational swing to the left might at first have all of the hopefulness of past revolutions (literal and figurative), yet end up bringing us new Stalins. The enemy is authoritarianism, and its features are the ones you've described, whatever the ideological dressing.
posted by rory at 5:40 AM on May 30 [13 favorites]

I have an interesting perspective on this, I think. My mother's family is from a town called Chemnitz near Dresden, but before the reunification it was called Karl Marx-stadt. (You may remember it from the James Bond movie Octopussy.)

One of her relatives, her cousin Gert, wanted to be a forester. He loved the forest, wanted to take care of it. And then the Stasi came to inform him that he'd done well on his exams and they wanted him to be a lawyer and work for them. When he told them he wanted to be a forester, they made it clear that no, they wanted him to be a lawyer and work for them. As he told the story, he showed a sense of fear.

So he went to college and got his law degree and went to work for the Stasi. He didn't want to talk about that at all - I got the sense that he really didn't want to talk about anything he might have done for them.

But I can tell you that some people who worked for them were compelled by threats.

(After the reunification, he couldn't get a new law license, so he ended up opening up a travel agency and helps people vacation in the area.)
posted by mephron at 5:58 AM on May 30 [15 favorites]

rory, I think you bring up some good points, using Ukraine as an example, about which we are largely in agreement. Despite training in historical analysis, and awareness of the importance of specificity, I am sometimes prone to reductionist thinking. (This has been amplified by frequent invocation on MetaFilter of the "the purpose of a system is what it does" heuristic; as with conflict generally, these days I tend to think the conflict is key to focus on, not just the offered pretext.) The extensive focus in the article on the materiality of the Stasi and the process of controlling, destroying, and reconstructing the archives need not be particular to any left or right ideology, but, yeah, the conditions leading to the creation of the Stasi and its apparatus are important.
posted by cupcakeninja at 6:07 AM on May 30 [2 favorites]

Absolutely amazing article. Thanks for sharing!
posted by tafetta, darling! at 7:12 AM on May 30 [1 favorite]

[dropping out of perma-lurk for a moment] I am not certain this is real, but it seems relevant here: The Texas GOP enters the chat. (Source article)
posted by zaixfeep at 8:06 AM on May 30 [2 favorites]

The issue is totalitarianism and authoritarianism: so yes,
Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism may help here:
“Antisemitism (not merely the hatred of the Jews), imperialism (not merely conquest), totalitarianism (not merely dictatorship)--one after the other, one more brutally than the other, have demonstrated that human dignity needs a new guarantee”
posted by HearHere at 8:32 AM on May 30 [2 favorites]

If you're in Berlin and interested in this stuff, it's worth visiting the museum at the former Stasi HQ. It's not the most exciting museum and not everything is accessible in English. But it's a remarkably preserved bit of Stasi history. Also fascinating for what it is, today, and how it grapples with the danger implicit in these files. A particular choice they make is to obscure the names and identities of victims of Stasi surveillance, blacking out names and faces. But that same courtesy is not applied to Stasi agents, those are visible for public awareness.

Interesting companion reading to this piece, today's NYT: ‘Not Everything Was Bad’: Saluting the Mercedes of Eastern Europe and a Communist Past. There's this whole problem in Germany of "Ostalgie", the very reasonable desire of former East Germans to want to remember their history with some pride and fondness. The most popular Berlin museum of them all is the DDR Museum, a very entertaining private museum that's all about the wacky life of the past. It talks very little (if at all) about the Stasi. Contrast with the much-less-visited Museum in the Kulturbrauerei, the German state's version of a museum about life in the DDR that tries to strike a complex balance of critical of impingement of freedom but still having some cool old cars and consumer products to marvel at.

The best museum in Berlin for recent history is the Topography of Terror. It's mostly about the Nazi history with incredibly detailed explanations of how the Nazi state functioned and the abuses it perpetrated. But the museum also has a section on the DDR, indeed presents it almost a continuum of totalitarianism.
posted by Nelson at 8:44 AM on May 30 [9 favorites]

Also the "Round Corner" Stasi Museum in Leipzig.
posted by rory at 9:52 AM on May 30 [3 favorites]

Came here to recommend The Lives of Others. So many great scenes, like the one with the ball.
posted by doctornemo at 12:53 PM on May 30 [3 favorites]

One of the disturbing things about reviewing the Stasi past, or re-reading Arendt's "Origins of Totalitarianism" is realizing that the conditions that were new and extreme and achieved through brute scale bureacracy, are now ubiquitous and unremarkable. We're discussing a relatively small and underpowered surveilance state within a much more comprehensive and thorough surveillance state. Each of our workplace HR departments is awash in snitches and plotting. The very method of communicating about this (online) is transparent to the worlds governments, large corporations, and the wealthy and powerful people in them.

The stasi are remarkable because they did it on paper. It's like finding a wood-burning tow-truck or push-mower.
posted by No Climate - No Food, No Food - No Future. at 12:55 PM on May 30 [10 favorites]