Political trauma…….

“To remember or forget—which is healthier? To demolish it or to fence it off? To dig it up, or leave it lie in the ground?” (Anna Funder referring to the Berlin Wall in Stasiland)

“Does telling your story mean you are free of it? Or that you go, fettered, into your future?”  (From Anna Funder’s book Stasiland)

In the previous post I wrote about war trauma. In today’s post, on a similar note, I have chosen to write about trauma inflicted by the state, by authorities and others linked to the state, trauma related to oppression, manipulation, severe freedom violations, and discrimination based on political views. I’ve been reading Anna Funder’s book, Stasiland, which as the title suggests is about former East Germany, perhaps, she writes, the most perfected surveillance state in history. It happened that I came across this specific book as I was cosidering the themes of this post. The kind of crimes and rights violations committed by the Stasi secret police in former EG have occurred and are currently taking place, to a lesser or greater extent and with variations, all over the world, definitely in dictatorships, but also, in democracies.

Funder sheds light on the human condition in times of extreme authoritarianism and severe surveillance. It is similar to Svetlana Alexievch’s book [see previous post], in the sense that Funder also meets with people to listen and document their stories, in order to reveal to us an era and bring events to light. I think that she situates her self and experience in the narrative to a greater degree perhaps than Alexievich. At some point during this process of gathering stories she reflects on her decision and intentions and realizes that she desires to make portraits of people, East Germans, of whom there will be none left in a generation. She writes: “I’m painting a picture of a city on the old fault-line of east and west. This is working against forgetting, and against time.” Similarly, Alexievich wanted to write down the stories of the Soviet women who fought in WWII before they had all passed away. She too, was working against forgetting and against time. Funder’s book contains fewer and longer interviews, whereas Alexievich’s narrative was far more polyphonic.

Anna Funder is an Australian writer. She has studied English literature, German and law and is committed to human rights. In the 90s she was Counsel in International and Human Rights law for the Australian Government before leaving to live in Berlin and write. She is a University of Technology Sydney Luminary and Ambassador. In 2011 she was appointed to the Literature Board of the Australian Council for the Arts. Her books have received awards, including the Samuel Johnson (now Baillie Gifford) Prize for best non-fiction published in the English language for Stasiland, which has been adapted for the radio and stage by The National Theatre, London, and is studied both as literature and history in schools and universities around the world.

Funder spent time working in television in Eastern Berlin in the mid 90s when, as she writes, she developed a feeling for the former German Democratic Republic, a country that no longer exists, but its remains are still there, a feeling she describe as horror-romance. She writes: “The romance comes from the dream of a better world the German Communists wanted to build out of the ashes of their Nazi past: from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs. The horror comes from what they did in its name.” She became interested in the Stasi, the former East German ministry of state security, and in human fortitude, that something within a human being that resists corruption despite the fear and the price one has to pay.

The Stasi was the internal army by which the government kept control. It was obsessed with detail and its job was to know everything about everyone, using any means it found convenient. They had a nationwide system of post and telecommunications surveillance.  They knew who visited, whom you telephoned and what you said on the phone, read letters and diaries, confiscated books and children’s cards to grandparents, knew about your partners, spouses, extra marital affairs, what you ate, purchased and read, and collected smell sample jars. Funder notes this procedure was “overt or covert”, and there was someone reporting to the Stasi on their fellow citizens in every school, university, sports club, factory, apartment block, and pub.

Historical factors and reasons for the development of this police state and surveillance machine, is gradually revealed through the stories of the interviewees. The Stasi had files on everyone and pried into every aspect of people’s lives. Armies of paid and unpaid informers, official and unofficial collaborators, kept this machine going for decades. Ordinary citizens were recruited to spy on their fellow citizens, friends, colleagues and family members, and some estimates run as high as one for every six and a half members of the population. One interviewee mentions that it was about one in every fifty people. Funder mentions: “Stasi had 97,000 employees—more than enough to oversee a country of seventeen million people. But it also had over 173,000 informers among the population.”

They participated on the grounds of ideology, or in order to gain power, privilege or money, succeed, belong, out of fear or because they were blackmailed.  One ex-Stasi man, working as a detective today, recounted how he was never very ideological, but he was a stickler for the law, and he’d been brought up to think this way from his kindergarten days. A Stasi psychologist, mentioned in the book, accounts for the willingness of people to inform on their countrymen, as an impulse to make sure your neighbour was doing the right thing. And more disturbingly, many simply engaged in this activity because of the gratification that the sense of having power over others gave them. For others it provided an outlet to their feelings of aggression, envy or antagonistic feelings.

She met people, who were victimized, as well as, ex-Stasi employees and officials, in order to make visible an era and the stories of pain, loss, courage and resistance that it generated, and to provide a more global understanding of what took place and how it was experienced by the local people. By placing an advertisement in a newspaper Funder arranged meetings with a number of Stasi men, including the noble renegade Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler, who for years used to host a television programme critiqueing the west. He viewed his work as the work against imperialism. These men were still living in the same houses on the outskirts of Potsdam or high rise blocks in Berlin, some with their beliefs and faith intact, some cynical and power driven, and others like the regime’s cartographer, Hagen Koch, a model citizen, who as a young recruit drew a chalk line along the street where the Berlin Wall was to be erected, had their own stories of victimhood when their superiors meddled with their own life, their families’ lives and their marriage.

In the book Funder has included talks with several women, who perhaps are the main characters. These are women who suffered, lost, were punished and who exhibited courage and integrity, women whose life was greatly impacted by the Berlin Wall. One is Miriam Webster. Her story is a central strand of the book. She and her later murdered husband, Charlie, could be said to be the heroes of the book. She is still seeking answers and justice for her husband’s untimely death.

Miriam tells Funder that she “became, officially, an Enemy of the State at sixteen,” in 1968 the Prague Spring was in full swing, and the Russians had not yet brought the tanks into the streets to crush the demonstrators. The demolition of a historical building in her hometown became the focus for the expression of a widespread malaise the locals had caught from their Czech neighbours. The Leipzig demonstrations were interpreted by the East German regime as a cinder likely to ignite, and so the police doused people with fire hoses and made many arrests. Miriam and her friend Ursula felt this was not right. She says, ‘At sixteen you have an idea of justice, and we just thought it was wrong. We weren’t seriously against the state—we hadn’t given it that much thought. We just thought it wasn’t fair to rough people up and bring in horses and so on.’ So they decided to get creative and make their own leaflets, which they stuck around the town. They also left leaflets in the letterboxes of two boys they knew from school, and one of the parents rang the police.

This was the end of her adolescence and life as she had known it. Both girls were placed in solitary confinement for a month, without any visits or phone calls from their parents or lawyers, books or newspapers. And then they were let out to await their trials! Terrified of being sent back to prison, the next morning Miriam got on a train for Berlin, a place she had never been before, with the intention to somehow go over the Wall. And she almost made it, if it weren’t for a trip-wire she didn’t see. The sirens went off and she was arrested.

At sixteen she was back in isolation, interrogated every night for ten nights for six hours. The torture of sleep deprivation was intended to make her zombie like, and therefore, break her and make her remarkably pliable. She was convicted to one and a half years in the women’s prison at Hoheneck. Miriam told Funder that when she got out of prison, she was basically no longer human. She described the Baptism of Welcome in a bathtub full of cold water, the only time she thought she would actually die, and the brutality of the adult criminal prisoners, who received privileges for abusing the politicals. When she got out she was prohibited from studying, and couldn’t get any kind of job. She says. ‘Everything I applied for, the Stasi made sure I was turned down.’And then after she and her husband Charlie started living together they were constantly under surveillance, and their house would be searched from time to time.

Julia Behrend is another woman, whose life was damaged by the State in adolescence, the reason being, a mostly long distance romantic relationship, with an Italian man, she met when she was sixteen. Julia, who is subletting a flat to Funder and has become a kind of friend, talks to Funder about her family and her past. Her parents were both high-school teachers, and like most people they were somewhat ambivalent about their country, but they weren’t dissidents, and none of them had ever had a run-in with the state. She notes: we “lived with a distinct sense ‘from the minute we woke up’, of what could be said outside the home (very little), and what could be discussed in it (most things).”

Her mother told her four daughters they could be anything they wanted to be. Her father Dieter was sensitive and wanted to better what he saw as a flawed system, but one which, from its founding premise, was fairer than capitalism. For his pains, she says, “his country made him a pariah and his life a misery. Living for so long in a relation of unspoken hostility, but outward compliance to the state had broken him.” Like her father, Julia was aware of the problems and the lack of freedom, but believed in East Germany as an alternative to the west During her talks with Funder, despite the way her life was derailed by the interference of the state, Julia compares the two mentalities, the two systems, West and East. She notes that having lived in both east and west without moving house, she can discern “a difference between sexual stalking, and stalking……. in the GDR you could go out alone at night as a woman! You could leave your apartment door open….No-one was homeless as they are now.”

As a young girl Julia had loved languages and dreamed of becoming a translator and interpreter. She had pen-pals in several countries and spent her free time writng letters in French, Russian and English. Later she wrote letters to her boyfriend in Italy. She topped her year in middle school, and wanted to go to a school renowned for its language teaching, but, for reasons never made clear to her, the authorities sent her far away to a boarding school with no reputation at all, despite her mother’s complaints. Then one day in 1984 the headmaster made an appointment to see Julia’s parents at home to convince them to influence Julia to break it off with the Italian boyfriend.  After that she couldn’t get any kind of job. She was a top student who spoke German, English, Russian, French and a little Hungarian. She tried to find a position as a receptionist or a waitress, without success, probably because every hotel and every restaurant was required to check the names of all new employees with the Stasi.

Then she was summoned by a Stasi officer, who after reading to her the letters she had exchanged with her boyfriend and telling her about all the information he had about her family, he proposed she assist the Stasi and meet with them every now and then for a chat, but Julia knew she would not inform on anyone.  He had shown her that with one phone call to him “she could be in, or she could be out. She could be with them, or she could be gone.” She writes that she “felt sundered, suddenly and irrevocably, from life….It was as though all at once I was on the other side, separate from everybody.”

Julia talks about the awareness she has gained gradually. At the beginning she was angry about not being allowed to study or have a career, but now looking back on it, she has realized that it’s the total surveillance that damaged her the worst. She describes this: “It was the loss of everything until I had disappeared too.” Funder writes of Julia that today she doesn’t see a talented linguist, but “a woman, whose part-time study and part-time rental agency work keep her only partly-attached to the world,” and “who by no fault of her own, had fallen into the gap between the GDR’s fiction and its reality. She no longer conformed to the fiction. Loyal and talented as she was, she was now being edged out of the reality.”

Funder uses Alice in Wonderland as a metaphor to describe the gap between fiction and myths, and reality. Of course, national mythology and fiction, to one extent or another occurs in every country, and as a matter of fact, on different levels and variations, everything else described in the book is relevant to countries all over the world. One myth, for instance, was that Easterm Germany was not part of the Nazi Regime, whereas, in reality from being a Nazi regime one day, they became a socialist regime the next. She writes: “I’ve been having Adventures in Stasiland. I’ve been in a place where what was said was not real, and what was real was not allowed, where people disappeared behind doors and were never heard from again, or were smuggled into other realms.” During one of their talks Julia mentions that “people were required to acknowledge an assortment of fictions as fact,” and that many people withdrew into what they called internal emigration. They sheltered their secret inner lives in an attempt to keep something of themselves from the authorities. She explains that one could only avoid contact with the regime if one opted out, and went into internal emigration, but this left little room for one to belong, to move on in life, to succeed and fulfill aspirations.

Frau Paul was another courageous woman, who was forced to make an impossible choice, and whose family life was literally torn apart by the Wall and the system that sustained it. Along with the Great Wall of China, the Berlin Wall was one of the longest structures ever built to keep people separate. The Wall out there in the world became a structure in peope’s heads. Frau Paul put it clearly:“The Wall Went Straight through My Heart.” She woke up one morning with the Wall separating her from her seriously ill newborn baby, who had been transported to a hospital in Western Berlin, in order to remain alive. Their son remained in West Germany and was returned to them after several years, when he was able to eat without assistance.

She told Funder: “My husband and I decided to attempt illegally to leave the territory of the GDR……..I am not your classic resistance fighter….. I was not even part of the opposition. To this day I am not a member of a political party…… And I am not a criminal.’” She and her husband were each given four years hard labour. Frau Paul took Funder on a tour of the prison. Not one of the torturers at Hohenschönhausen has been brought to justice.

Finally, I will end this article with a brief reference to what happened to this mountain of files.

The Runde Ecke, the building of the former Stasi offices, which was seized by protestors in 1989, is now a Stasi museum. Funder writes: ….”it was huge…… I shrank like Alice.” In its forty years, ‘the Firm’ generated the equivalent of all records in German history since the Middle Ages. Laid out upright and end to end, the files the Stasi kept on their countrymen and women would form a line 180 kilometres long.” When the files were opened, she says, “Large and small mysteries were accounted for. Not least, perhaps, the tics of the ordinary man in the street.” For instance, a document was on display with signals used by the Stasi and informers, like touching one’s nose, stroking one’s hair, raising a hat, laying a hand on the stomach or retying shoelaces, and so on, and what these signified.

Stasi officers had been instructed to destroy files, starting with the most incriminating. They shredded the files until the shredders collapsed, and then they started destroying the files by hand, putting them into sacks in an orderly fashion. Now in Nuremberg, the puzzle women (although there are also some men) are piecing them back together, a horrendously slow process considering the small number of puzzle people working currently.

From 1989 to October 1990 there was a heated debate in Germany as to what to do with the Stasi files.

“Should they be opened or burnt? Should they be locked away for fifty years and then opened, when the people in them would be dead or, possibly, forgiven? What were the dangers of knowing? Or the dangers of ignoring the past and doing it all again, with different coloured flags or neckerchiefs or helmets? “

In the end, some files were destroyed, some were locked away, and some opened. In the summer of 1990 the parliament of the GDR passed a law granting the right for people to see their own files, to have access to all this stolen personal information that allowed their lives to be manipulated. Funder writes: “Germany was the only Eastern Bloc country in the end that so bravely, so conscientiously, opened its files on its people to its people.

Many countries have had to confront this type of issue, and decide on whether to destroy or open files.  Greece has its own long painful history concerning millions of files with citizen’s personal information, with an emphasis on their political views, information, which was used to discriminate against, terrorize and punish its people. To write about this very long and painful page of Greek history would require at least another equally lengthy post.

I have provided some links to Greek newspaper articles, two interviews and a talk below:

And always, there are the pressing questions: What are the dangers of knowing? What about the rights of all those victimized, of all those these files belonged to? And more importantly: What are the dangers of ignoring the past and doing it all again?

1. Οι φάκελοι «πολιτικών φρονημάτων» που γλίτωσαν την πυρά: https://www.tovima.gr/2016/05/28/society/oi-fakeloi-politikwn-fronimatwn-poy-glitwsan-tin-pyra/

In August, 1989, files were transported to the blast furnace of Eleusis and the furnaces set up in the rest of Greece to burn the “archives of hate.” Αrchival material valuable for historians, as well as, important documents of the Left, was put into the incineration funnel in the name of “national reconciliation.” More than 17 millions of documents of the 20h century, from the dictatorship of Metaxa to the junta of the colonels, recorded the lives of the “stigmatized,” mainly from the Left, but not only, were turned to ashes. In 1989, only 2,100-2,500 files, of political leaders of the Left that had been executed, as well as, files of some artists, athletes, figures from the conservative scene, but also lesser-known ones, escaped the fire.

2. Με Κοινή Υπουργική Απόφαση ανοίγουν τα αρχεία της αστυνομίας / Στο φως χιλιάδες διασωθέντες φάκελοι κοινωνικών φρονημάτων: https://www.avgi.gr/koinonia/191146_sto-fos-hiliades-diasothentes-fakeloi-koinonikon-fronimaton?amp

“It was a global first for Greece to proceed with their complete destruction,” stressed V. Karamanolakis, adding that the discussion is not posed in terms of justice but of historical memory and reminding us of the enormous tug-of-war in public debates over whether the files stopped being updated in 1974 or whether they continued to be updated until 1990. The files of individuals’ social opinions began at the beginning of the previous century and flourished during the post-war period, and they were institutionalized in 1947.”

3. Φάκελοι πολιτικών φρονημάτων: Οταν το τραυματικό παρελθόν έγινε στάχτη για να ξεχαστεί κακήν κακώς: https://www.efsyn.gr/ellada/koinonia/196051_fakeloi-politikon-fronimaton-otan-traymatiko-parelthon-egine-stahti-gia-na#goog_rewarded

“The question that permeates the book by assistant professor of history Vangelis Karamanolakis, published by Themelio Publications, concerns the reasons that led to the burning of the files kept in the Security Service, by decision of the ND-SYN coalition government, on August 30, 1989, an event to which the majority of Greek society either tacitly consented or remained indifferent, with almost the only objection raised by historians, for reasons of preserving historical memory, and not of rendering justice to the victims, as happened in other countries.”

“And he concluded: “In the unanimous approval of the burning of the files, we see a society that fears the past, and fears it because it has not faced it, has not discussed it. Politics can remove fear, but not eliminate it. The solution, at a political level, is the rule of law. But the rules of law are not enough, you also need the courage to face the truth, and in Greece, the case of the burning of the files shows that we have lacked this courage.”

4. LIFO Podcast: https://www.lifo.gr/podcasts/istoria-mias-polis/kaigontas-toys-fakeloys-ton-epikindynon-politikon-fronimaton-1989

Agiati Benardou talkswith the historian and author of the book “Undesirable Past – The Files of Social Thoughts in the 20th Century and Their Destruction”, Vaggelis Karamanolakis.

5. ERTECHO      01/06/2019     Ο Δημήτρης Τρίκας με τον καθηγητή ιστορίας στο ΕΚΠΑ Βαγγέλης Καραμανωλάκης στο στούντιο για το βιβλίο του “Ανεπιθύμητο παρελθόν”.https://www.ertecho.gr/radio/trito/show/bookfly/ondemand/77290/vaggelis-karamanolakis-symeon-stampoulou-01062019/
6. Το ανεπιθύμητο παρελθόν. Οι φάκελοι κοινωνικών φρονημάτων στον 20ό αιώνα και η καταστροφή τους: https://www.blod.gr/lectures/fakeloi-koinonikon-fronimaton-bwl/

A speech in two parts, based on the book of the same title, awarded the Academy of Athens Prize, by Professor Vangelis Karamanolakis

Part One

A suffocating present (1944-1974): Files of social/ political opinions, surveillance and control of citizens in post-war Greece

“The certificates of social opinions, the loyalty councils, the files of the State Security, the Army, etc., were parts of a huge mechanism of discrimination of citizens, which determined personal paths and professional outlets. A mechanism that attempted, by controlling the lives of citizens, to educate them in the idea that they should remain inactive, not develop their own political action, or find themselves on the side of the authorities, which otherwise had the power to crush them. It was a “punitive” state, which used a wide repertoire of punitive practices in the context of the reorganization of the state mechanism dissolved by the Occupation and through the experience of the civil conflict. In this orientation, the past was omnipresent, it was a key element in the investigation of the beliefs of the suspected citizen, but also of their relatives and friends. The civil war was a war that had not ended with its military conclusion, it remained a nightmarishly traumatic past that determined a suffocating present.

Part Two

From the Traumatic to the Undesirable Past. Social Thought Files and Collective Memory in the Post-Junta Era

“The ashes of the files covered the reluctance of a society to look at the wounds of the past, they covered its transformation from traumatic to undesirable.”