Stasiland by Anna Funder

the GDR had the oldest leadership in the world, ‘We have got to have broken some kind of a record there.’ But unlike in China, where the leaders were wheeled out virtually dead for display, the old men here showed remarkably little sign of physical decay. ‘They were up to it all,’ she explains, ‘injecting sheep cells, ultra-high doses of oxygen, you name it. Those blokes wanted to live forever.’ She starts to talk about the beginning of the end.
    Mielke and Honecker grew up fighting the real evil of Nazism. And they kept on fighting the west, which they saw as Nazism’s successor, for forty-five years after the war ended. They had to, as a Soviet satellite state, and the Eastern Bloc’s bulwark against the west. But in East Germany they did so more thoroughly and with more pedantic enthusiasm than the Poles, the Hungarians, the Czechs, or the Russians themselves. They never wanted to stop.
    When Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the Soviet Union in 1985 he implemented the policies of perestroika (economic reform) and glasnost (‘openness’ of speech). In June 1988 he declared a principle of freedom of choice for governments within the Eastern Bloc and renounced the use of Soviet military force to prop them up. Without Soviet backup to quash popular dissent, as there had been at the workers’ uprising in Berlin in 1953, in Hungary in 1956, and in Prague in 1968, the GDR regime could not survive. The options were change, or civil war.
    By comparison with other Eastern Bloc countries, East Germany never had much of a culture of opposition. Perhaps this was in part due to the better standard of living, perhaps to the thoroughness of the Stasi—or, as some put it, to the willingness of Germans to subject themselves to authority. But mostly it was because, alone of all Eastern Bloc countries, East Germany had somewhere to dump people who spoke out: West Germany. It imprisoned them and then sold them to the west for hard currency. The numbers of dissidents could not reach a critical mass until 1989 when the changes in the Soviet Union gave ordinary people courage and they took to the streets.
    But the men running the GDR were ossified. They were not interested in reform. As late as 1988, they disallowed Soviet films and magazines in an attempt to stop the people being infected with new ideas. And they cracked down, exiling waves of ‘negative-enemy’ elements to West Germany. Miriam’s summary expulsion in May 1989 was one of the last of these purges.
    They couldn’t, however, all be thrown out. That would be impractical, and, worse, might amount to giving the people the freedom they craved. ‘So,’ the guide says, ‘the old men had another scheme: they would contain the dissenters at home.’
    Documents found after the Wall fell reveal meticulous plans, current throughout the 1980s, for the surveillance, arrest and incarceration of 85,939 East Germans, listed by name. On ‘Day X’ (the day a crisis, any crisis, was declared), Stasi officers in the 211 local branches were to open sealed envelopes containing the lists of the people in their area to be arrested.
    The arrests were to be carried out quickly—840 people every two hours. The plans contained exact provisions for the use of all available prisons and camps, and when those were full for the conversion of other buildings: former Nazi detention centres, schools, hospitals and factory holiday hostels. Every detail was foreseen, from where the doorbell was located on the house of each person to be arrested to the adequate supply of barbed wire and the rules of dress and etiquette in the camps: armbands, ‘green, 2cm wide’ for the oldest in the room, ‘green, three stripes 2cm wide’ for the oldest in the camp, yellow with the letters ‘SL’ in black for the Shift Leader to be worn on the left upper arm. And there were written instructions for packing to be given upon arrest to each prisoner:
2 p. socks
2 towels
2 handkerchiefs
2 × underwear
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