Magazine / Society / Communist Secret Services / Article | 05/02/2008

18 years after the opening of the Stasi archives

For many countries in Middle and Eastern Europe, Germany is seen as a trailblazer in dealing with the communist past. There is however still one analysis, the end of which is not in sight. Matthias Schlegel gives an interim report.

When, on 15 January 1990, an agitated crowd of people in the East Berlin urban district of Lichtenberg besieged and finally forced their way into the expansive site with the grey block buildings of the hated Ministry of State Security (MfS), no-one had the slightest idea what historical meaning would be conferred upon this action.

Reconstruction of ripped Stasi files.
Photo: AP

The people had, on that Monday and in several GDR urban districts days before, already achieved a decisive victory in the peaceful revolution, and had wrested away the omnipotent "sword and shield” from the SED party. At the same time, it had disempowered a state within a state, and - measured against the population figures - had overpowered one of the largest secret services in the world, And they came upon an absurd counter-reality: a huge number of files, nearly too many to oversee, in which both the perfidious methods of comprehensive observation and inhuman repression against a country's own people were registered, as well as downright meticulous accounts of daily life in a society dominated through and through.

The beginnings of analysis

"Comrades, we must know everything”, were the words which Stasi boss Erich Mielke, who headed the Ministry from November 1957 to November 1989, once hammered into his employees. And so this totalitarian demand for power by the SED and the Stasi, as well as a fundamental mistrust in the country's own people manifested itself as a manic acquisitiveness. In 1990, determined and far-sighted protagonists of the peaceful revolution first had to prevail against those voices – including those from the Federal Republic – who wished to lock up the "devil's work”, or even to destroy it. When the former Rostock clergyman and civil-rights activist Joachim Gauck, as authorised representative for the Stasi documentation, began with a band of employees to secure, survey and to analyze the huge store of files, the true extent of the undertaking had not yet been realised.

Today, we know that the Stasi legacy comprises of 112 kilometres of files, all arranged in rows. In addition, there are 39 million record cards, filmed documents and 15 517 sacks full of documents ripped up by the Stasi themselves during the last weeks of their existence. According to standard archive conversion factors, this brings the total file stock to 158 kilometres.

Stasi documentation law and file access

In the confusion of the peaceful revolution, no-one could have imagined that even almost two decades later, dealing with the Stasi files would still be a most controversial political theme. The Volkskammer (People's Chamber) of March 1990; the first democratically voted and at the same time the last GDR parliament, had created the legal basis for securement and use of the Stasi legacy via a law which was passed in August 1990 with an almost unanimous vote. At first, these regulations were not intended to be included in the unification treaty. Yet politicians and civil-rights activists protested, forcing a passage into this agreement whereby a special law, still to be executed, should regulate dealings with the Stasi files. In 1991, this Stasi documentation law was passed by the Bundestag (Lower House of German Parliament) according to the intentions of the Volkskammer.

The law provided for the establishment of an independent authority who were to administrate the Stasi files as well as allowing access to them and analyzing them. Among other things, they were also tasked with informing the population about the structure and working procedures of the GDR Secret Service – meaning that they also had research and education duties. Furthermore, the law ruled that every person upon whom the Stasi had gathered information would be allowed to access "his/her” file at the Stasi documentation authorities in Berlin or at one of its 14 branch offices. Nearly 2.5 million people exercised this right during the last seventeen years. The authorities provided files for journalists and scientists, too – since 1991, around 20,000 applications were recorded. And finally, the law determined that the authorities must carry out examinations of employees in public service as to possible previous Stasi employment. Over the past seventeen years, nearly 1.8 million such cases have been examined. In the meantime, the so-called "regulatory examinations” for public services have been finished. According to the latest amendment of the Stasi documentation law, a "Stasi-check” is only now required for a very small group of people in prominent public positions.

That this special legislation on dealings with Stasi files would cause heated discussions - and continues to cause them today – is as understandable as it is useful, as it enriches the self-assurance of the democratic constitutional state, which must be repeatedly reinforced. The debates do not focus purely on how far personal rights and the right for informational self-determination should be protected when using the files. From the beginning, the argument instead flared up around the question of whether the written attestations of a repression apparatus such as the Stasi could be legally binding according to constitutional state criteria. In other words: how true are they really, these files?

The end of this analysis remains unpredictable?

From the beginning, this much was clear: both the Stasi documentation authorities as well as the constitutional law with its special regulations for file access would at some point become superfluous. Personnel numbers have reduced from 3200 authority employees at the beginning of the 90's to approximately 1900 today. By the year 2010, around 1600 people will still be employed there. The legislators have not yet, however, defined a deadline for the final liquidation of the authority. Most politicians and professionals were and still are in agreement that this time will come once the authority has finished its task. The question remains as to when this point will be reached. When all files have been made accessible, and the last applicant has looked at a file? That will probably take a while: at present, only 87 percent of individual-related and only 44 percent of all file themes or object-related tasks have been made accessible. Is there a continued need for an independent authority for making the files accessible and preparing them? Wouldn't it be possible for the Federal Archive to take over these tasks at some point in the near future, meaning that they would be completed more efficiently and swiftly? The years 2011 (at which point the authority will have existed for 20 years and the term in office of the present Head of Authority, Marianne Birthler, will end), 2015 (as a "medium-term perspective") and 2019 (30 years after the peaceful revolution and the year in which the solidary pact will end) are occasionally mentioned planning intervals for such a task handover.

On appropriate handling of the files

There is a consensus of opinion in all political fields that the files should remain accessible to the public - no matter where they are housed - in the established manner. Yet if they were to be entrusted to the Federal Archive, which administrates its stocks according to the Federal Archive Law, at least part of the so-called "perpetrator files” would be subject to far more limited usage criteria. The hopes of many scientists and journalists, too, who presently complain of much blacking out in the files which they have requested, would hardly be fulfilled: the protection of personal rights for third parties is no more generously dimensioned in general archive law than in the Stasi documentation law. If the Stasi files are to remain accessible in the same way as before, movement of the stocks into the Federal Archive would only make sense if the legal regulations for their use were transferred with them. A double archive law existing under one roof? The legislator will have to consider his decision very carefully.

There would be a further aspect for consideration, if the Federal Archive were to take over the files. On the one hand, things which belong together would be united – the Stasi legacy would join the other SED state documents which are collected under the roof of the Federal Archive, in the Stiftung Archiv der Parteien und Massenorganisationen (SAPMO): "Foundation archives of the Party and Mass Organisations” (Archives of the East German Communist Party). However, the comprehensive stocks, which are presently stored in the branch offices of the Stasi documentation authorities in the former urban districts of the GDR, and which are today available "at the touch of a button”, would probably be divided between the different state archives, depriving people the possibility of central research.

The initial interim report on the analysis so far.

Calls for swift transferral of the files into the Federal Archive always become particularly loud when the Stasi documentation authorities are publicly criticised. In the years 2006 and 2007, there were plenty of such negative headlines. It became clear that more than 50 former full-time Stasi employees were still among the personnel of the Authority which should be dealing with the disreputable intrigues of the MfS. The Head of the Authority, Marianne Birthler, was able to base her arguments on the fact that she herself was not responsible for this personnel policy, but that when the Authority was founded, those responsible resorted to the care-free pragmatical use of what were assumed to be temporary "professional” employees, who have in the meantime had to remain due to employment laws. Last year, the public was extremely bemused when a document containing a firing order appeared, which the Authority first recorded as a sensational find. A short time later, they were forced to admit that the existence of this document had been known for years and that it had already been included in their own corresponding publications; and had even already been presented in the Berlin Stasi exhibition.

Such and similar occurrences damaging the image of the Authority would not be so bad if the whole chapter containing the dealings with the Stasi legacy was not generally discredited. Criticism has often been made that the research concentrates too strongly on the Secret Service; the stories of spying, repression and denunciation by the Stasi. Whoever complains about that simultaneously admits that at least this area has been analysed in an appropriate manner. Early prophecies of witch hunting and revenge campaigns have not been fulfilled. In fact, the opposite has happened: because the analysis took place in a democratically-legitimised manner along legal channels, it became unspectacular and efficient.

The Stasi analysis has not divested the people in East Germany of their dignity, but in fact has returned it to them – because it clears up suspicions and accusations which would otherwise be left hanging in the air. Instead of this, it provides certainties; sometimes painful, sometimes acutely trivial, but always revealing ones. And, in addition, the Stasi files themselves are thousand-fold proofs of refusal and resistance in a dominated society. For most Eastern and Middle Eastern countries and other states which have managed to shake off a dictatorial regime, the analysis of the GDR Secret Service may well be exemplary. Whether it was in fact a success story will be decided in the future by history itself.

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