Timothy Garton Ash

Amidst the ghosts of secret Germany I was searching for the answer to a personal question. What is it that makes one person a resistance fighter and another the faithful servant of a dictatorship? This man a Stauffenberg, that a Speer. Today, after years of study, and after knowing personally many resisters and many servants of dictatorships, I am searching still.

In 1988 - the last ‘normal’ year of the GDR - the Ministry of State Security had more than 170,000 ‘official collaborators’. [...] The Ministry itself had over 90,000 employees, of whom less than 5,000 were in the HVA foreign intelligence wing. Setting the total figure against the adult population in the same year, this means that about one out of every fifty adult East Germans had a direct connection to the secret police. Allow just one dependent per person, and you’re up to one in twenty-five.

The Nazis had nothing like as many.

She is buffeted by conflicting thoughts and emotions. One moment she says, “Really, it’s good that you’ve shown me this.” The next, “Ah well, perhaps I can sue you and I’ll win a lot of money… No, no, sorry, that was only a joke… But perhaps there is some protection.”
“We repressed so much… Why didn’t I apply to see my file? Because I didn’t want to know what was in it… and about my husband… Who knows what else there is… I think this was the only time I reported so extensively on private matters. I thought it was dienstlich [official?] but… Well, I hope if you do write you’ll try to explain the subjective as well as the objective conditions. How it was then. But probably that’s impossible. Even I can’t really remember now…”

He thought of the Stasi as a channel of communication with the state. In a small way, he says, he was trying to [...] get a political message to the top. The trouble with a communist state like East Germany was that it had ‘no civil society framework’. He was making up for that lack.

When he has left, Werner and I look at each other, shake our heads and start quietly laughing. Otherwise we would have to cry. Here, in that chair, sat before us a perfect textbook example of a petty bureaucratic executor of evil. A good family man. Proud of his correctness, loyalty, hard work, decency - all those ‘secondary virtues’ which have been identified as key to collaboration with Nazism (and which the Prussian Association now hopes to revive). He is incapable of acknowledging, to this day, the systemic wrong of which he was a loyal servant, yet filled with remorse for having stolen a couple of Matchbox cars.

So everyone I talk to has someone else to blame. Those who worked for the state say ‘it was not us, it was the Party’. Those who worked for the Party say, ‘it was not us, it was the Stasi’. Come to the Stasi, and those who worked for foreign intelligence say, ‘it was not us, it was the others.’ Talk to them, and they say, ‘it was not our department, it was XX’. Talk to Herr Zeisweis from department XX and he says, ‘but it wasn’t me’.

When the communists seized power in central Europe, they talked of using ‘salami tactics’ to cut away the democratic opposition, slice by slice. Here, after communism, we have the salami tactics of denial.

Only the new Germany has done it all. Germany has had trials and purges and truth commissions and has systematically opened the secret police files to each and every individual who wants to know what was done to him or her - or what he or she did to others. This is unique. Apart from anything else, what other post-communist country would have the money to do it? The Gauch Authority’s budget for 1996 was DM234 million - about £100 million.

[...]

It must be right that the Germans, and not just the Germans, should really understand how in the second half of the twentieth century there was again built, on German soil, a totalitarian police state, less brutal than the Third Reich, to be sure, far less damaging to its neighbours, and not genocidal, but more quietly pervasive in its domestic control. How this state exploited the very same mental habits, social disciplines, and cultural appeals on which Nazism had drawn.

But I can understand each of the informers on my file, and the officers too, even Kratsch. For when they tell their stories you can see so clearly how they came to do what they did: in a different time, a different place, a different world.

What you find here, in the files, is how deeply our conduct is influenced by our circumstances. How large of all that human hearts can endure, that part which laws or kings can cause or cure. What you find is less malice than human weakness, a vast anthology of human weakness. And when you talk to those involved, what you find is less deliberate dishonesty than our almost infinite capacity for self-deception.

If only I had met, on this search, a single clearly evil person. But they were all just weak, shaped by circumstance, self-deceiving; human, all too human. Yet the sum of their actions was a great evil.