On reading my Stasi files

National Interest, The, Winter, 1994 by Frederic L. Pryor

But such a strategy to achieve unification also brought enormous economic pain in the former East Germany and a strong possibility that his government would fall in a few years following reunification. By bowing to the wishes of the East German citizenry to open the Stasi files, Kohl tried to accomplish two important political goals to offset these difficulties. First, he thought he effectively eliminated all competition from East German politicians. Any East German of ability who had the desire to accomplish something in that country under communism had dealings with the Stasi, since the Stasi had practically unlimited power. As a result, no politician of any stature has been able to emerge in East Germany who has not been tainted by Stasi contacts. Even so decent a man as Lothar de Maiziere, who was East Germany's Prime Minister after its first free election in March 1990, was eventually driven from political life for this reason. In 1993 Kohl wanted the next president of Germany to come from the East, but he had a relatively limited choice because of the wide net of Stasi contacts. His first choice was Steffen Heitmann, a political nonentity who had a singular capacity to enrage a large segment of Germans whenever he opened his mouth. Heitmann withdrew his candidacy.

Second, opening the files also appeared, at least superficially, to reduce the possibility that the East German population would ever re-elect a communist government. Why it did this is best indicated by the now-fading slogan on a building: "Who votes for the [successor to the communist party] votes for the Stasi; and who votes for the Stasi votes for civil war." With the slow opening of the files, the evils of the Stasi would remain in the public eye for many years. According to this argument, the citizens of the former GDR would never follow the example of those in Lithuania, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria, not to mention a number of republics in the former USSR, who have elected former communist officials to head their nations.

The local elections in December 1993 in the state of Brandenburg cast some doubt on this argument: the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), the successor to the former communist party, received roughly the same number of votes as Kohl's Christian Democrats. Moreover, a known collaborator with the Stasi also received a large number of votes. Since that time, the PDS gained roughly the same percentage of votes in other state elections in the former East Germany, and in the fall elections of 1994 they gained thirty seats in the German parliament.

This helps explain, perhaps, why Chancellor Kohl has apparently experienced a change of heart and has recently been quoted as saying that the files "...are poisoning the whole atmosphere because no one knows how much of it is truth and how much is fantasy...we are not getting anything good out of them." Nevertheless, Kohl's current suggestion to close the Stasi files has been vigorously denounced, not just by naive citizens who believe the files will reveal all of the hidden "truth," but also by those who wish to understand their lives. An example is Vera Wollenberger, a current member of the German Parliament and a former East German dissident, who has been particularly articulate. She has learned from her Stasi file that her husband had informed on her for a number of years; she is said to be now trying to obtain additional materials from the files to determine whether the Stasi had commissioned him to marry her.