The whole course of Mario’s life has been dictated by his ill-fated escape attempt in June 1987. It is hard to imagine that the man I am talking to has been through so much, but the absolutely enormous impact of living in the GDR is abundantly clear in his story. He will not rest from his mission, he says, until every school textbook acknowledges the brutal side to life in East Germany. A survey conducted twenty years after his imprisonment in 2007 showed that 31 per cent of former East Germans do not think that the GDR was a dictatorship. Such figures merely underline to Mario the importance of his work. Furthermore, under the terms of German unification, those East Germans who worked for the Stasi could not be prosecuted. ‘The biggest shock for me was that hardly anyone was punished’, Mario explains. Erich Mielke, who had been Minister of State Security (Head of the Stasi) for thirty-two years from 1957 to 1989, was imprisoned for less than three years, and notionally he was not being punished for his Stasi activities, but rather for murdering two policemen many years previously in the Weimar Republic. He was one of only three Stasi officials who served a jail sentence in unified Germany.35 Erich Honecker, who had ruled East Germany for twenty-eight years from 1971 to 1989, also evaded prosecution for violating human rights on the grounds of his poor health and his advanced age, and in 1993 he moved to Chile where he died a year later.36 What a farce, one might think, that so few people have been brought to justice for their actions. Mario certainly takes this view. The scale of involvement with the regime was so vast, however, with an estimated one in six East Germans working for the Stasi in some capacity, that punishment was simply not practical. At least this is what decision-makers at the time of the Wende claimed. The level of complicity with the regime is certainly often difficult to quantify and categorize.37 A central difficulty in untangling this challenging situation was the fact that actions which were legal in the GDR could not be termed illegal retrospectively in the united Germany.38 It is also important to avoid the dangers of hindsight, in that those who lived in the GDR did not know that communism would break down. From their perspective at the time, communism was the system they would be living within in the long term. It is therefore understandable in some sense that the vast majority of East Germans sought ways to align themselves with the prevailing system.39
From the perspective of someone like Mario, however, whose life in many ways has been ruined by the SED regime, it seems grotesque that so many who were perpetrators retain positions of power, in the police or in local government, for example, in the new Germany. As historian Cornelia Heins so aptly puts it, ‘Nobody wants to be responsible for stirring up a political and legal hornets’ nest, but sweeping the Stasi past under the carpet is a slap in the face both of all of its victims and of justice.’40 Anger at this injustice will get him nowhere, Mario explains, but by doing tours and raising awareness of the crimes against humanity in the GDR, he aims to counteract the whitewashing of Germany’s past.
5
Katharina ~ Believing in God under Pressure
The Stasi prison Hohenschönhausen is in an area of East Berlin known for the high number of ex-Stasi officials who live there. Rumours abound of old socialists giving misleading directions to enquiring tourists who are hoping to visit the prison.1 Having got wind of this, I decided to embark on one of the more ludicrous activities connected with this project: doing a mailshot in the area in the hope of drumming up some interesting candidates to talk to. As an afterthought, I also put up a poster outside the prison itself. A few days later, I received an email from a tour guide at the prison, offering his wife as a suitable candidate. We exchanged a few jovial messages, in which he signed off ‘Gilbert Furian, the Private Secretary’. His wife Katharina is now a very busy parish vicar, and so he made all the arrangements for her.
In the same year that the Berlin Wall was built, Katharina was born into a family that opposed the socialist regime. Her father was a vicar, leading a Protestant congregation in a country village called Golzow on the eastern side of the River Oder in the Seelow area. Whereas some Protestants made small concessions to the regime to make their own lives easier, Katharina’s family stuck uncompromisingly to their beliefs, having faith that God would protect them. Her parents consistently refused to vote in elections in the GDR, for example, risking the wrath of the Stasi. Under normal circumstances, voters who approved of the one available candidate simply had to put their voting slip into a sealed box at the polling station. Those who risked voting against the candidate had to step into a separate booth in front of all the polling officials and cross out the name of the candidate. There were usually huge costs to stepping out of line in this way—costs that included losing one’s job and often close surveillance by the Stasi.2 Fully aware of the potential consequences, Katharina’s parents remained adamant that they would not vote while the elections were rigged. And when Stasi officers knocked on the vicarage door offering them a lift to the polling station, they simply said no.
Many Christian parents chose to enrol their children in the government-led youth movement, the Young Pioneers, irrespective of their reservations about it. They rightly feared that not joining would adversely affect their children’s chances of taking A levels or going into higher education. Katharina’s parents, by contrast, were clear from the start that this was not something that they would bend on. Teachers tried to encourage children like Katharina to join, pointing out the nice uniform and the camaraderie as selling points. ‘You would make such a good Pioneer,’ they said. ‘Don’t you want to wear the uniform like everyone else?’3 In spite of the pressure, Katharina did not join. She was one of only three children in her class who had opted out and as a result she was an outcast at school. ‘Other children could tell that I did not fit in,’ she explains. ‘They sensed that I was best avoided.’4 Like the 8 million other Christians living in the GDR during the 1980s, Katharina faced many difficulties on account of upholding her faith in an increasingly secular society.5
As in other dictatorships, the East German government was keen to remove any rival claims to the loyalty of its people. Religion was therefore never welcomed by the SED, even if it paid lip-service to toleration in the early years after the war. From the 1950s onwards the government began to take away youth work from the churches, bringing it under state control. The state also decreed that, instead of confirmation, from 1955 young people should prepare for a Jugendweihe ceremony: a secular ritual which marked a young person’s development into a socialist citizen. Swimming against the secularizing tide came at a cost and those who persisted in their loyalty to the church were subject to penalties: many were barred from doing A levels and few were allowed to study at university. Perhaps surprisingly, given the state’s position on religion, Christians in the GDR were able to read theology at university—a move that was likely a half-hearted attempt to demonstrate religious tolerance. Nonetheless, once out in the wider world, Christians were discriminated against in the workplace.6
School was the most difficult time in Katharina’s life. ‘The teachers who supported the Party tended to be the worst,’ Katharina recalls. ‘They hated religion and projected that hatred onto me.’ When Katharina failed to give the correct answer to a question, those teachers would humiliate her, asking in a mocking tone, ‘Where is your God then?’ Katharina believes she was also given worse marks and school reports as a result of her Christianity.7 And on one notable occasion, when the young Katharina refused to take off her crucifix in class, the school called in uniformed Stasi officers to reprimand her. ‘I was treated like I was a serious criminal’, she recalls. Normally, Katharina’s mother expected Katharina to fight her own battles at school, explaining that Katharina should trust in God that nothing bad would happen to her. However on this occasion, she came to the school to defend her daughter against the authorities.
Anne-Marie B., a schoolgirl in the GDR like Katharina, also ran into difficulties with the Stasi as a result of her Christian faith. She later recounted that a Stasi car had drawn up beside her as
she was leaving school one day. Anne-Marie was told to get in and was driven to a forest, where they would not meet or see anyone. There she was asked to inform on the Christian community she lived in. The Stasi worker mentioned that he knew Anne-Marie wanted to study medicine at university. If she informed for the Stasi, he explained, he would make this possible. Conversely, he said, if she did not comply, her path to higher education would be blocked for good. Anne-Marie’s parents, however, had prepared her for this eventuality. She said to the Stasi worker, ‘The community I live in is so close-knit that if I started keeping secrets or changing my behaviour, they would notice.’ Because of what she had said, the Stasi let Anne-Marie go and she did not have to act as an informer. A rejection letter in response to her university application did, however, follow shortly afterwards.8
It is a common misconception that many East Germans were forced into informing for the Stasi. The Stasi did ask some East Germans to spy on friends and acquaintances and threatened career blocks and other penalties for refusing to comply. However, this applied only to a minority as most informants were voluntary, the thinking being that genuine supporters of the Party would provide more reliable information than informers who were forced into it. If people did not want to refuse the request directly, they could simply tell friends and acquaintances that they had been asked to inform, meaning that they would no longer be able to report their views or monitor their behaviour unsuspectingly. This would render them useless to the Stasi and the recruited informant would be released from his duties.9
Having heard about the challenges that Christian children experienced out in the wider world, one vicar was so concerned that he decided to delay his daughter Angela’s schooling by a year.10 He reasoned that when she was a year older she would be better equipped to withstand the disparaging remarks made about her family’s values and beliefs. Angela’s father took other steps to shield his daughter from the regime, by encouraging her to pursue an interest in music. Whereas the Party took a keen interest in the physical prowess of young people, either so that they could wow the world with the GDR’s brilliance in international sports events, or as a good basis to serve the country in a military capacity as a soldier, they were less interested in music. Parents from nonconformist backgrounds like Angela’s and Katharina’s therefore often sent their children to music classes instead of sport practices in the hope of avoiding the gaze of the state as far as possible.11 However, in spite of such efforts to protect his daughter, Angela was singled out in class on the basis of her family’s faith. Once, for example, her class was studying a poem in class which made reference to eternal life, and Angela remembers that the teacher said, ‘That’s the kind of nonsense that Angela and her family believe in.’ It was hard being an outsider at school, and there were times when Christian children like Katharina, Angela, and Anne-Marie wished they could just blend in with their conforming peers.12
Looking back on her childhood in the GDR, Katharina remembers how important it was to watch what she said, in public, at school, and above all when talking to Party members. If she breathed one word too many, she knew that her parents could be sent to prison and she and her siblings could be sent to a children’s home.13 Coming from an oppositional background, it was more likely that children like Katharina would speak out of turn inadvertently and land themselves in trouble with the regime. Christian parents therefore counselled their children very carefully, explaining what they could and could not say outside the home. Katharina explains that her parents did not want to raise her as a liar, but they advised her to be careful about repeating what she heard at home. ‘I did not want to harm my parents,’ she says. ‘I sensed when I could or could not say certain things.’ As a young child, however, it was sometimes difficult to know what might get you in trouble. The contexts of conversations were always shifting, so no hard-and-fast rules could apply about when it was safe to talk freely and when it was not. ‘I was often silent rather than saying yes to something I disagreed with’, Katharina remembers. From a young age she got used to ‘double thinking’. What was said at the supper table within the four walls of home could be open and frank, but such conversations were not for repetition outside. Katharina did not grow up expecting to be able to express her opinions freely.14 Interestingly, although in some senses Katharina had to be more careful about what she said in public than children from regime-supporting families, in other senses she had more freedom about what she could say. As a vicar’s child, it was not really expected that she would toe the Party line and therefore she could more boldly overstep the boundaries of acceptability. Katharina also felt that the regime could not really touch her because she felt protected by the church.
Throughout the 1980s in particular, the Protestant Church provided a shelter for dissidents, whether or not they were religious. As a vicar, Katharina’s father believed it was the church’s duty to protect freedom of speech and therefore to protect those who wanted to discuss their ideas freely. He therefore opened his church to anyone who wanted to talk about reforming GDR society. This became more feasible following the uneasy truce agreed between church and state in the Concordat of 1978. The Concordat allowed the church greater freedom of action which it used to allow campaigners for peace, freedom, and environmental matters to meet on its premises.15 Within the church, too, Christians became increasingly vocal in their criticism of the militarization of GDR society, following the introduction of compulsory ‘defence education’ in schools in the 1970s. As part of the so-called Swords into Ploughshares peace movement, they criticized the regime’s insistence that peace could only be maintained with weapons and complained that pacifists who did not want to be conscripted for compulsory military service were discriminated against. Later, in 1989, it was this movement that began the weekly peace prayers in the Nikolaikirche in Leipzig which contributed to the collapse of communism in the GDR.16
Given that the SED had aimed to create a state without churches and a society without Christianity from the very outset (albeit with nominal religious toleration in the 1949 constitution), and had harassed and discriminated against Christians, the thawing in SED policy towards the church in the Honecker era was certainly surprising. This was yet another example of the contradictions between the Party’s stated aims and its policies in practice. Crucial to this policy shift was the fact that the East German Protestant Church, which had remained a member of the all-German Evangelische Kirche Deutschlands (EKD) until 1969, reorganized itself and became formally independent from the West.17 Offering the church some latitude in the 1970s, it seems, was part of a wider strategy of the SED which was seeking to shore up East Germany’s identity as distinct from West Germany. With this in mind, the regime allowed the church a freer hand in its own matters in return for acceptance of the SED’s political authority. Teaching about Martin Luther was apparently also reinstated as part of the GDR’s plan to differentiate its cultural heritage from the FRG. This reflected the fact that SED leaders, who had paid lip-service to the idea of German unification in the 1950s and 1960s, abandoned this commitment in the GDR constitution of October 1974, which no longer had references to the ‘German nation’ and instead stated that the GDR was ‘forever and irrevocably allied with the USSR’. There were profound consequences of this change of policy, particularly in terms of how this filtered down to GDR policy towards the church.18
From the 1970s, small groups took advantage of the safety of the church to print underground journals, which covered topics including the environment, freedom, and human rights.19 And in an unusual turn of events, Blues musician Günter Holwas collaborated with Protestant pastor Rainer Eppelmann to put on so-called ‘Blues Masses’, gatherings where East Berliners came to hear Blues music intermingled with Bible readings. From 1979 onwards these ‘Blues Masses’ attracted large crowds, their subcultural and increasingly political character led to trouble with the state and tension within the church, and they were abandoned in 1986.20 Overall, though, the SED’s acceptance of ‘the ch
urch in socialism’ and the subsequent Concordat of 1978 meant that churches offered unprecedented opportunities for opposition activists to meet and organize, which in turn played a crucial role in the events of November 1989 and beyond.21
Despite its increasing role as a haven for nonconformists in the GDR, the church could not protect Katharina from all the Party’s discriminatory measures. With only a limited number of places for pupils to do A levels available, there certainly was not room for a Christian nonconformist. School therefore ended for Katharina aged 16.22 She began training to be a nurse, but switched tack when she found out that it was possible for her to do A levels in the humanities from home, with a view to later studying theology. Katharina received nowhere near the amount of guidance that pupils got at school, but she prepared for her A levels privately, learning from textbooks, and passed her exams in 1983. She then studied theology for five years, before taking up her first job as a vicar. ‘Being a housewife was never an option for me’, Katharina tells me. Growing up in the GDR, where 97 per cent of women were employed, it was simply the norm for women to work. Given her Christian faith, alongside the restricted opportunities available to her as an outcast in society, a career in the church seemed the obvious next step.23
It was through her connection to the church that Katharina gained a more detailed knowledge of life in West Germany than many other East Germans were exposed to. From 1950 onwards, every town and village in the GDR had a partner church in the West. West German congregations came to visit their sister parishes in the East, and discussed religious practices in each community. This led many East German Christians to forge friendships with people on the other side of the Wall.24 Through this scheme Katharina’s church welcomed many West German Protestants to their parish every year. The visitors appeared happy and more relaxed than the people from the East. They smelled of a mixture of good things such as perfume, chocolate, and coffee, Katharina remembers. It was ‘like they came from another planet’, one young boy later recalled.25 Such impressions created a sense of wonder about the West for many Easterners. East Germans in general were curious and eager to know more about the West, as the following anecdote shows:
Born in the GDR Page 10