20 May 2010
 
Touring Terror


The bastards are not gone and for the most part, they have not been tried for their crimes. Oh, sure, they went after Honecker and the old chief of security Erich Mielke, and those poor blue collar guards who shot the last people in the dead zone.

They got a commendation and a nice dinner after they killed their fellow citizens, and then a few years later a trial for murder after the Welte. Go figure.

But for the most part, the old police state of the DDR became something that people had a preference for ignoring.  There were bigger problems with the unification of the Germanies.
 
There is an eerie similarity to the last collection of bastards who hid in plain sight for generations, and only some of them, pathetic old bastards like the Ukrainian prison guard who might- or might not- have been Ivan the Terrible- ever paid even a token for the things they did.
 
The alumni of the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, the Ministry of State Security of the Deutsche Demokratic Republik are mostly still out walking around.
 
For short, the ministry was known as the MfS, and the operational end of the organization was popularly- or unpopularly- called the Stasi.
 
To have hunted down all 91,000 Stasi personnel in the immediate days after unification would have been called “Victor’s Justice,” and an exercise in the arrogance of the Westies. It would have brought back all too much pain to those who had lived under their tyranny in the East.
 
It was like the reaction to “A Woman of Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Occupied City” when it was published in the mid-1950s. Things had just settled down. Life was starting to assume some sort of normalcy in Germany. The revelation by the accomplished journalist who published her anonymous recollection of the repeated mass rape of the women of vanquished Prussia and Berlin by soldiers of the Red Army was an inconvenient and unacceptable truth at the time.
 
Inconvenient in the extreme for the Communist government of the DDR, since the Soviets and the Red Army based in the Fatherland were their new best pals.
 
Embarrassing for the West Germans, too since it was still trying to deal with the consequences of the greatest forced movement of people from the east in human history. It showed the abasement of the German people to invaders, and the powerless nature of the men who could not defend their families.
 
Anyway, since I happened to be in the neighborhood, my associate suggested we tour the Stasi Museum, which is housed in Building One of the sprawling security complex that imposed the will of the State on the citizens of the DDR. I thought it was a great idea, and we trooped out of Kruezberg on the long walk to the Ostbahnhof and the train north to transfer at Alexanderplatz for the suburbs.
 
I cannot stress how cool it is to have an agent on the ground who speaks the language. It was a little like the Congressional travel I used to do, except that I was VIP instead of the gopher. I didn’t have to know anything, speak the language or maintain situational awareness of what was happening around me.
 
I was able to look out the window at the graffiti-covered buildings, and deconstruct what had happened to the neighborhoods we passed and how they had been put back together after the devastation.

She leaned over to me and said that we would detrain at the Magdalennestrasse and take the steps up to Frankfurterallee, which is the main drag past the Stasi complex. As we left the train, I glanced at the great rectangles of public art that lined the opposite walls of the platform, highlighted by the gleam off the pale green ceramic tiles that surround them.
 
Like everything in Berlin, I had to deconstruct what I was looking at. This tunnel had been planned by the Kaiser’s engineers, and decorated by the Nazis. The current murals showed abstract scenes of heroic labor, so the Communists must have chartered them, and the capitalists had not got around to papering them over with ads. They reminded me of the subway in Pyongyang or Moscow.

There are so many layers to Berlin, and I was not completely prepared for the additional layers we were about to see.
 
It was chilly that morning, the skies gray above Frankfurterstrasse. Just outside the subway entrance a simple sign was painted on the side of a building, directing us up a narrow alley toward the headquarters of an organization that billed itself as the Sword and Shield of the State.

If you arrived here in the back of a van, it would have been very bad news indeed. And with a ratio of one security officer of informant to every seven DDR citizens, there was an awful lo of bad news o go around.
 
It was a lot to take in. The Museum is housed in the headquarters building, one of dozens that tower over a campus bigger than Whitehall in London. There was a sign on one. My associate pointed it out.
 
“For rent,” she said. “You could set up shop right here at State Security Central.”

(For Rent)

I thought about that for a moment and tried to deconstruct how that would feel, having an office in the heart of bad karma-land.

There was one of those portable beer gardens in a corner of the courtyard in front of the main entrance to the most feared organization in a whole country. A couple was having an early beer. A tour bus was drawn up next to a steel booth that had been a checkpoint for the examination of credentials. Under an overhang were some gray steps that led to a tall glass door.
 
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s meet the Secret Police.”
 
I will have to tell you more about that tomorrow. Building One is the evil twin of a place I used to work. It was really emotional for an old spook, and I can’t for the life of me get my brain wrapped around it yet.

Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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