At first, many GDR citizens did not see matters this way. Once again, they resented it that their government was sinking millions of marks into a gaudy project in Berlin while a severe housing shortage gripped the nation as a whole. Such critics believed that the new building would serve only the
When GDR television broadcast segments of Milva’s concert, it left out the part about walls being blown down. For all the early talk about openness and experimentation, Honecker’s regime continued to keep its citizens on a very tight leash. Indeed, Honecker and his colleagues ended up refining and perfecting the police state apparatus they had inherited from Ulbricht. “Real existierender Sozialismus (Real, existing socialism),” as the regime described its system, amounted, in the end, to a real suppression of dissident voices.
The main enforcer of ideological conformity remained the omnipresent Stasi, which grew even more formidable in response to the challenges of East-West détente and increased exposure to the West. By the early 1980s the Stasi had about 85,000 regular employees and about a million and a half full- and part-time informers. (By contrast, the Gestapo at its height had about 15,000 staff employees for a much larger area, and an undetermined, but certainly much smaller, cadre of regular informers.) Although there were Stasi branch offices in every East German town of any consequence, East Berlin remained the center of the agency’s operations. The headquarters in the Normannenstrasse bristled with high-tech communications and listening devices, rendered all the more sinister by the complex’s false windows, potted geraniums, lace curtains, and innocuous signs. In addition to its over four miles of files, the facility now included thousands of little bottles, called “smell conserves,” containing samples of the personal odor of known dissidents. Should the dissidents go underground, the thinking went, their scent could be given to bloodhounds for more effective tracking. Of course, GDR citizens knew that the agency had informers spread throughout the society, but they often could not know precisely who “was Stasi” and who was not. Only after the wall came down and people were allowed to examine the detailed files kept on them by the agency could they find out who among their associates had been working for the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (Ministry for State Security, MfS).
Western students and scholars who spent extended periods in the GDR also came under surveillance. In 1978 the Oxford historian Timothy Garton Ash, then a Ph.D. student, went to East Berlin to conduct research for his dissertation. As he discovered when he returned to investigate his file fifteen years later, some of his associates and supposed friends had been Stasi informers, busily keeping the agency informed about what he said and whom he saw. The authorities were particularly interested in his ties to members of the Polish Solidarity movement, for the GDR rulers were deeply afraid that their state might catch what they called “the Polish disease”—a thirst for freedom. When, on his return to Berlin in 1993, Ash managed to track down some of the people who had informed on him, none would take personal responsibility for their actions; all blamed the Communist Party, which they said had “forced” them to act as they did.
Such claims sometimes had a measure of validity. The Stasi often recruited its low-level informers with blackmail, offering them a choice of working for the agency or facing punishment for some crime or transgression. However, the surveillance system could not have been as pervasive as it was had not millions of ordinary citizens been willing to help the state enforce ideological orthodoxy. It has been estimated that one out of ten employable East Germans was a Stasi informer.
