Although East Germany’s rulers no longer had to worry that the inadequacies of their system might generate a vast exodus, they feared that frustration with existing conditions might spark popular resistance, even a new version of the 1953 uprising. To nip any “subversion” in the bud, they expanded the size and operational scope of the Stasi. A great deal of time and effort was spent on identifying and punishing GDR citizens who violated the government’s ban on contacts with the West. Simply tuning in to Western radio or television was a criminal offense. To ferret out offenders, the Stasi encouraged schoolchildren to inform their teachers about the programs that their parents received at home. Virtually every workplace had its Stasi spies, as did most cultural organizations, sports clubs, and church groups. The East German churches were under especially close supervision because they were considered potential sources of opposition. The information collected by the Stasi agents and their army of “informal collaborators” became so voluminous that the floors of the agency’s headquarters on East Berlin’s Normannenstrasse had to be reinforced to hold all the files. What could not be adequately reinforced was the human capacity for making sense of this voluminous data. By recording the tiniest details in the daily lives of millions of people, the Stasi soon began to drown in its own “intelligence.”
By the end of 1961, East Germany had more than 10,000 political prisoners in its prisons. Keeping so many “subversives” behind bars, like the process of ferreting them out, was very expensive. It soon occurred to the Stasi leaders that some of these costs might be defrayed by “selling off selected political prisoners to the Federal Republic. The inspiration for this idea was provided by the exchange of the U-2 spy Francis Gary Powers for the Soviet spy Rudolf Abel in early 1961. The famous exchange took place at the Glienicke Bridge, which connected West Berlin to Potsdam. If the West was willing to barter for spies, might not Bonn be willing to “buy out” some of the political prisoners held in East German jails?
To feel out the West Germans on this proposition, the Stasi called on the services of Wolfgang Vogel, a lawyer who had helped with the Abel-Powers exchange. Immaculately dressed and highly pragmatic, Vogel could just as easily have worked in the West (though he probably would not have made as much money). In early 1963 Vogel began negotiating with West Germany’s minister for All-German Affairs, Rainer Barzel, regarding details of the transfers. Although the Stasi was eager to unload some of its prisoners, Vogel was instructed to obtain as high a price as possible for each “sale.” The lawyer claimed that the prisoners sent to the West represented a financial loss to the GDR because of the costs invested in their education. “The training of a doctor costs the state 150,000 marks,” he declared. Eventually a figure was agreed upon, and in September 1963 eight prisoners were shipped west at a total cost to the West German taxpayers of DM 340,000. Over the next twenty-five years, thousands more would follow. These people did indeed represent a “loss” to the GDR in terms of talent, but their expulsion was also an effective means of ensuring political tranquillity at home. The fact that East Germany could use West Germany as a dumping ground for its dissidents was one of the reasons that East Berlin remained largely quiescent well after other Eastern European capitals became hotbeds of anti-Communist protest.
Along with its campaign to isolate East Berlin and neutralize dissent, the Ulbricht regime stepped up its efforts, begun in the 1950s, to wipe out memories of the presocialist past. As far as Berlin’s topography was concerned, this meant replacing some of the city’s most prominent historical landmarks with showpieces of the new, forward-looking era. Having demolished the remains of the Royal Palace in the 1950s, GDR wreckers in 1962 blew up Schinkel’s Bauakademie, another restorable ruin on the old palace square. They replaced this structure, which many considered Schinkel’s masterpiece, with the first of their new governmental buildings, the GDR Foreign Ministry, an eleven-story white slab whose blandness was accentuated by the abstract aluminum sculptures decorating its facade.
