35 years of the fall of the Berlin Wall – moralizer and executioner

Are you still interested in what this “Federal Authority for the Records of the State Security Service of the Former German Democratic Republic” (BStU) was up to before Parliament decided to dissolve it and transfer the files to the Federal Archives in 2019? Anyone else ask about the three and a half billion euros that were burned there? History has long passed over the institution and the people who gave it its name. Who still remembers Gauck, Birthler and Jahn and asks about them? They did their duty after causing the damage that was expected of them. On June 17, 2021, the inquisition authority was closed. Formally.

Sigurd Amring, a former BStU employee, now allows us a look into the inner workings of the buried authority, that elite circle of self-righteous moralizers and executioners who caused lasting strife in East Germany. They leaked the “Stasi files” and deliberately released them in order to criminalize the country in which they were created by exposing people who once worked there. We know many of these fates, they don’t need to be repeated.

On the occasion of the transfer of the “Stasi Records Authority” to the Federal Archives, the author examines its creation and decades of activity on behalf of the ruling class. This is done matter-of-factly and laconic. Amring does not illustrate the sarcastic, yet accurate statement by lawyer Peter-Michael Diestel that, due to the work of the federal authority, more people chose suicide than there were victims on the German-German border. Looking back, he noted: “The Stasi hysteria was necessary to remove East Germans from their traditional places. It led to the paralysis of the East German intelligentsia. It has led to the questioning of entire generations.«

This is not Amring’s topic. But to show how strings were pulled in the background, files were found and deliberately made public at a time when the damage was maximum. Or how propaganda was made with numbers. Just a comparison: 285,000 citizens read their files – but four million people were “gaucked”, that is, checked.

This alone contradicts the claim that the authority was primarily concerned with shedding light on the past of the persecuted East Germans. Chancellor Merkel, for example, declared after a visit to the authority that the BStU would have to continue to do its work for more years, because looking into their Stasi files had helped many people “to gain clarity about their life in the GDR.” Amring says: “Apart from the fact that we have to pity those people who only looked at their files to help them gain clarity about their lives in the GDR. How much more pitiable were those who had no files at all? Were they even alive?”

The list of government activities characterized by wastefulness is significant, although bitter. External and internal reviews of the use of financial resources presented “sometimes a frightening picture.” The BStU had “purchased expensive work equipment” that was not needed and which, moreover, “were no longer detectable after a while.” The head of the agency, Birthler, bought office equipment that – according to a finding by the Federal Audit Office on January 14, 2004 – exceeded the maximum rate set by the Federal Ministry of Finance by around 5,000 DM. “Furthermore, the services and associated expenses of the interior designer commissioned to equip her office could not be proven to the audit office.”

In 1996, the BStU purchased a total of 239 high-quality dictation machines at a price of around 500 DM each. “Eight years later, the authority was no longer able to prove the whereabouts of 32 devices.” An inspection carried out in 2006 in all BStU offices found that many offices ” “over-furnished”. »For example, the 2,039 employees at the time had 2,862 desks and 3,168 office swivel chairs. Taking into account that some of the employees – drivers, house craftsmen, messengers, security guards, etc. – didn’t need a desk to carry out her work, the whole thing became even more grotesque.”

Of this “excessive sense of entitlement” (Prüfamt), only the matter of the snippets and their assembly reached the public. In 2007, the Fraunhofer Institute was commissioned to carry out a two-year pilot project to test whether the torn archive material consisting of around 16,000 bags could be virtually reconstructed within five years at an economically justifiable cost. The test showed: impossible. Nevertheless, the authority extended the project.

In 2013, the institute itself threw in the towel. In the six years since then, 17 million euros had been spent and a total of 23 sacks – i.e. 0.1 percent of the inventory – had been reconstructed. In 2023, the Federal Commissioner for Culture and Media declared that the project had “clearly failed”. However, instead of looking for alternatives, “we paid for ten more years until today.”

It is therefore understandable when former Interior Minister Diestel said that it would have been better to destroy the files immediately after reunification, “just as Helmut Kohl and Wolfgang Schäuble had suggested in vain.” Amring also reveals why it didn’t happen that way in his entertaining non-fiction book.

Sigurd Amring: End of an authority. Notes on thirty years of BstU. A critical inspection. Verlag am Park in Edition Ost, 154 pages, br., 15 €.

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