21 May 2010
Triumph of the Will
My associate led the way up the gray steps to that led to the tall glass doors that secured the lobby of the Ministry for State Security. She walks with purpose, and is accustomed to taking the stairs of the city like a billie goat as my creaking knees send shocks up my legs and on a direct path via my spine in little electric shocks to the fore lobes of my brain.
An older German man was coming out, face impassive. I thought he might have been one of the people who had files compiled on him that rested in the MfS archives over in Mitte, Berlin’s central district that used to be in the Soviet Sector. Or maybe he had contributed information. Or maybe both.
Nearly everybody did. East Germany was the most effectively policed nation that has ever existed. That was the purpose of this museum: to demonstrate the triumph of the people’s will over oppression. Quite the reverse of the most famous propaganda film ever made, Leni Riefenstahl’s account of the 1936 Nazi party rallies.
The lobby was dominated by two large bronze statues and the flags of the DDR. A glass case contained a physical reconstruction of the sprawling complex of gray Stalinist-style buildings. A window to the right of the doors had a sliding glass panel like a bank must once have contained a severe individual who controlled access to the offices above.
This morning it contained an older gentleman in a black beret with a merry manner. He was happy to take my euros for basic admission, and I asked for the additional privilege of taking pictures, a euro extra.
My associate grimaced at my Germlish, and for about the two hundredth time I realized what a boor I have been in dozens of countries around the world down through the years, happily mangling the syllables of proud tongues and grating the ears of our host nationals, whoever they might be.
She had studied German for seven years and knows it’s gender and verb forms. She speaks elegantly and with precision. I just insert English words into the pigeon and speak louder.
I forgot to ask for a guidebook, and had to go back and request one in English. It was five euros deposit to take one on the tour, with return on completion, and three euros to purchase outright. I wanted to take it home, and it appeared to be a bargain.
The Anti-Stalinist Action Normannenstraße (ASTAK), is the organization that operates the museum. They are the lineal successors to the DDR Citizens' Committees and are dedicated to an educational mission about the function and activity of the Stasi.
I looked at the guidebook and discovered that the collection on public display is divided into three floors. The ground floor lobby has been maintained essentially as it was.
Upstairs there were galleries in former interrogation rooms, and the Director’s suite of offices.
Throughout the Cold War, both sides maintained the fiction that the residents of each zone were wildly enthusiastic about the political systems imposed on them. West Germany, created from the French, British and American zones of occupation became a legitimate democratic system over time, with their capital in Bonn and actual popular elections.
With Uncle Joe’s acquisition of The Bomb, there was a new Main Enemy, and some of the inconvenient appurtenances of the former monstrous regime got a pass- including apparatchiks of the former Nazi military intelligence service.
The DDR was much more a wholly owned junior partner of the Soviet Union. Although the MfS was granted independence from the Soviets in 1957, until 1990 the KGB maintained liaison officers in all eight main Stasi directorates, each having his own office inside this compound and with deputies in each of the fifteen district headquarters around the DDR.
Collaboration was so close between that Stasi was invited to establish bases in Moscow and Leningrad to monitor visiting East German tourists, and in 1978 Stasi Chief Erich Mielke granted KGB officers in East Germany the same rights and powers they employed in the Soviet Union.
I cannot imagine what that might have been like, living under a lap-dog of oppression that grew more entrenched and calcified over time. The symbol of defeat is the big monument to the Soviet victory that was created, T-34 tanks and all, in the immediate shadow of the Reichstag. The former capital and the monument wound up in the British Sector by a few yards. The Brandenburg Tor was the symbol of division, just inside the east.
The Victory memorial, with the possible exception of the artillery pieces and tanks, is a Stalinist but sober monument to victory.
The Soviet Military Cemetery, built across town in the former working-class park at Treptower, wound up in the DDR. It is heroic in scale and didactic in message. Enormous marble panels on either side of the mass graves depict the mobilization of the Proletariat against the Hitlerites in stark Socialist Realist tradition. The heads of the figures are small and the torsos are buffed.
On left and right sides the panels are identical. Facing the gigantic statue on its massive base, the ones on the left are captioned in Russian, while the ones on the right are in German.
They are all quotations attributed to Uncle Joe.
Walking slowly up the line of the stiles, I wondered what it was like for a German to see this bombastic nonsense planted on their soil.
There had to be a strong and massive apparatus to maintain order and ascertain loyalty. The MfS was just the thing.
Like I said, it is hard to imagine how that all worked as an enduring and continual presence. One of my pals was a junior officer at the US European Commad HQ at Stuttgard. He was assigned to make periodic visits to East Berlin to exercise access rights guaranteed under the Allied peace treaty. The treaty stipulated such visits were to be made in Class “A” uniform, which lent a certain surreal air to the tours, though the device ensured that the visitors were always highly visible.
While in the East, the US Berlin Brigade took him through Checkpoint Charlie and treated him to a tour of the Soviet War Museum, where he saw the wreckage Gary Francis Powers Drago Lady U-2, and then to the Pergamon Museum. Stasi operatives or Volks Polezei were in trail at all times, taking pictures. A husband-and-wife collection team got a full frontal picture of him in the Persian collection.
My pal thought they might have been KGB.
After the cultural activity was done, my pal went looking for a liquor store to buy some Stolichnaya Vodka, which in those days was hard to get in the West. He bought two bottles, but naturally there were no bags.
He knows that somewhere in the Stasi archives there is a picture of him in his blues with a bottle of Stoli in each hand crossing the street heading back to the tour bus. It was a different world. He once got a helicopter tour of The Wall and near Spandau Prison was startled to see the only remaining inmate, Hitler’s Deputy Rudolf Hess at his daily constitutional.
That is a Cold War perspective about the funs and games we used to play. The crushing nature of the organization on its own people was much more intrusive. Looking at the book, I saw that the details on how you run a a terror organization were neatly cataloged and on display upstairs.
I was surprised to discover in the guidebook that bastards like the last MfS director, Wolfgang Schwanitz, is active in leading the Society for Legal and Humanitarian Support (GRH). The organization supports former high-ranking officers and employees of the Stasi. In addition to being a mutual benefit society, agitates to have the museum closed down. They are supported by the German Communist Party, among others.
I turned to my associate, who was examining a SIGINT collection van near the Central staircase. “Say, why don’t we go upstairs and see how a police state works?”
She shrugged. This all ended the year she was born. “May as well,” she said. “If we don’t remember, it will happen again.”
Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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