By Niels C. Sorrells, DPA,
Berlin : Like an unwanted gift, files from the spying machines of the former East European dictatorships continue to come into the public eye 20 years after their creators did their utmost to destroy them.
Sometimes the revelations border on the asinine — a recent report showed that the East German secret police, or Stasi, kept tabs on Michael Jackson fans to see who had pro-Western tendencies. Others are weightier, such as when accusations of his cooperation with the state secret police forced Warsaw’s Archbishop Stanislaw Wielgus to resign in a blaze of controversy in 2007.
But what is clear is that secret police agencies across Eastern Europe employed thousands of agents and informers to track every detail of peoples’ lives, keeping an eye out for any sign of subversive behaviour.
For some whose lives were laid bare in the files, the mere existence of these documents can be a continuing painful reminder of life under communism. Others find the chance to read their files cathartic.
“You can learn a lot about yourself,” said Uwe Richter, the public relations officer for the Robert Havemann Society, an archive focussed on maintaining files from East German groups that worked in opposition to the Communist regime.
In one noted case, Vera Lengsfeld, an activist in East Germany and a politician in today’s Germany, discovered while viewing her files that her husband had been a secret informant against her.
But, said Jens Planer-Friedrich, a counsellor with the Berlin city-state office for Stasi files, most people who access their files rarely discover such earth-shattering news. Indeed, many are shocked to find that there is so little recorded about their lives.
However, the minutiae can also be surprising, added Planer-Friedrich, who was 20 when the Wall fell and eventually read his own file.
“A lot of people can’t cope with that,” he said, noting that he himself was amazed by the trivialities — and occasional falsehoods — in his own file. “It upsets a lot of people. (They ask) how did they know that?”
In his case, Richter was an aspiring actor who was rejected from state theatre schools after failing entrance exams three times. Convinced he was untalented, he gave up that career path, only to discover decades later upon reading his files that he failed only because his political views did not gibe with the state’s.
“It gives you back a piece of your biography,” he said.
Masses of other people face the same challenge — deciding whether or not they want to look at their files, which were kept and refreshed right up until the last minute of the Communist regimes.
“They worked until the last day,” said Stefan Wolle, director of research at Berlin’s DDR Museum, which focuses on life in then East Germany (the Deutsche Demokratische Republik).
Wolle, who worked as a historian in East Germany, viewed his files but found “nothing exciting there”.
In many ways, it is a wonder that any of the files were saved. When it became clear to East Germany’s Stasi that their regime was about to collapse — East Germans stormed Stasi headquarters at one point — they began shredding every document they could find.
When the shredders jammed, Stasi officers began simply tearing the paper by hand. To this day, employees of the federal office for the Stasi records are at work, restoring those torn documents.
By most accounts, Germany has the longest-running, most comprehensive system for accessing the files. Eastern German citizens insisted during talks to reunify the two Germanys that there be provisions for that access, said Wolle, who participated in the talks.
Under German law, the files are stored in a separate archive where any person can request access to his or her own file. Historians and journalists can also access files, usually redacted to protect people’s private details.
But because of the massive number of files that still need to be repaired — more than 15,000, according to the German federal offices — locating particular documents can be difficult. It can take two to three years to fulfil a request, said Steffen Mayer of the federal Stasi records office.
Access to secret police files varies in other countries. The Czech Republic liberalised access to secret police files in 2004, making it one of the freest file-access regimes in the region, though historian Peter Blazek admits that “the Polish and German archives are far better organised”.
But curiosity about the documents hasn’t faded, said Planer-Friedrich. One area of new interest comes from the younger generation as its members seek to find out more about — or clear the names of — parents and grandparents, though access can be limited to relatives’ files.
“There will still be requests in 10, 20 or 30 years,” he said.