Autism confused

Germans argue about the future of the GDR state security archives

Another sensation surrounding documents from the former East German Ministry of State Security (MGB) turned out to be fake. The other day, Marianne Birtler, a former human rights activist and fighter against the regime of Erich Honecker, and now the government commissioner for the Stasi archives, announced a rare find. In Magdeburg, its employees came across a document containing a well-known order from the leadership of the GDR MGB to shoot at defectors to West Germany. He demanded that the border guards open fire even on children. However, it soon became clear that there was nothing new in this: German researchers had been working with the document almost since the very beginning of the 1990s.

This is not the first embarrassment of the official custodians of documents from the former department of Erich Mielke. Everyone has long been accustomed to the fact that the activities of the apparatus subordinate to Ms. Birtler, numbering more than 2 thousand employees, periodically make it into scandalous headlines in the local media. Thus, last summer the public learned that the department shelved a research report on the files of the main intelligence department of the GDR MGB, which was headed by the now deceased Markus Wolf. Journalists were the first to raise a fuss, seeing this as an attempt to “slow down” the investigation into the collaboration of some former West German Bundestag deputies with East German intelligence. At the same time, the liberal weekly Zeit demanded that Ms. Birtler strictly fulfill her official duty and threatened legal action against her and her department.

Following this, Marianne Birtler came up with an unusual initiative - to abolish the legal verification of the facts of cooperation with the Stasi for all applicants for government bureaucratic, political and other positions. Ex-chekists and their unofficial assistants are strictly prohibited from entering government institutions of the Federal Republic of Germany on the grounds that the law recognized the MGB of the GDR as a “criminal organization.” Many leading political parties, including the ruling coalition, supported Frau Birtler's idea that it was time to stop delving into the dirty laundry of a bygone era.

However, the real reason for the demarche of the main custodian of the KGB archives was soon revealed. In the office of the Stasi documentation commissioner, as it turned out, 50 ex-employees of the “criminal” MGB were quietly working. State Minister of Culture Bernd Neumann was then assigned to understand how former security officers ended up in government positions paid for by taxpayers.

The examination carried out under his supervision came to an extravagant conclusion. She discovered “forms of autism” in the behavior of the Stasi department’s leadership. Autism is a concept introduced by the Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler, by the way, the author of the term “schizophrenia.” By autism, psychologists understand a schizophrenic’s refusal of external contacts and his withdrawal into the world of his own experiences. Nevertheless, all 50 ex-Stasi employees both worked for Ms. Birtler and continue to work there. After all, bureaucratic positions, unlike security officers, are given for life. And it is no longer possible to punish the bosses responsible for the scandal. It was Ms. Birtler's predecessor, former GDR priest and human rights activist Joachim Gauck, who arranged for them to work with her.

Today, many politicians and public figures in Germany are demanding that the office of the Stasi documentation commissioner be closed and that the materials stored in it be transferred to the federal and state archives. After each scandal, the number of people wishing to get acquainted with the dossier on themselves grows leaps and bounds. Back in the early 1990s, the law provided this opportunity to all German citizens, and not only to them. Many millions of people have taken advantage of this right. And today, 17 years after the disbandment of the “shield and sword of the revolution,” every day Marianne Birtler’s department receives an average of 250 requests to review the dossier.

In addition to German citizens, about 12 thousand residents of other countries wanted to know what the Stasi had collected about them. The largest number of such requests came from Switzerland (1749), Poland (1733) and Austria (1334). The United States is in fourth place with 1,260 requests. Almost all those interested at one time left Germany and settled abroad. The history of East German state security does not leave people alone, even in countries such as Indonesia or Monaco. From there, Berlin received two requests to familiarize itself with their own “case.”

Yuri Shpakov, Berlin