German film prompts open debate on Stasi

BERLIN -- A new movie that has grabbed this country by the throat depicts the ways in which East Germany's Ministry for State Security, or Stasi, infiltrated and subverted the lives of ordinary people, long a touchy issue in the once-divided land.

In a peculiar coincidence, the release of the film has come just as former Stasi officers are waging an aggressive campaign to shed their image as brainwashing torturers who infiltrated every aspect of East German life.

The film ``Das Leben der Anderen" -- ``The Lives of Others" -- has triggered what some call the first debate in the reunified nation about the realities of the communist regime, a Soviet satellite state that came into being in 1949 and collapsed with the Berlin Wall four decades later.

``In trying to rebuild a unified country, Germans have to some extent put the topic off-limits," said Jochen Staadt, a researcher at Berlin's Free University who is a specialist on the German Democratic Republic, or GDR, the formal name of East Germany. . ``Criticism of the GDR has been muted because many East Germans have felt that it was criticism of their lives."

Indeed, a recent poll found that 56 percent of Germans surveyed felt it was inappropriate to discuss wrongdoing of the fallen communist system.

But the drama directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, a dark tale of love broken by the manipulations of the state security apparatus, has made the Stasi the talk of Germany and beyond. The movie this month won seven top awards from the German Film Academy and is quickly moving into theaters across Europe.

``German cinema has tended to portray the GDR as this funny place with quirky characters that no one takes seriously," Henckel von Donnersmarck told Der Spiegel magazine. ``This is really very different [from the true] atmosphere of great fear, of great mistrust."

The unsettling film comes just as former officers of the Stasi are mounting a controversial campaign to revise their image. With articles and books, rallies and swaggering takeovers of public meetings, the former officers seem determined to paint themselves as upholders of a firm but fair system that provided stable jobs, safe streets, and state-run day-care centers.

``We harmed no one," said Gotthold Schramm, 74, a former Stasi colonel who has authored recent books asserting that the secret police have been unfairly demonized. ``The GDR was not a criminal state. With good conscience, I can say the Stasi only served the people and obeyed the laws that were the laws of that time."

Sipping coffee in a train station in eastern Berlin, Schramm spoke of his 37 years of service in the Stasi with pride and affection. ``We protected the people from their enemies, at home and abroad," he said. ``There were perhaps dark sides to the GDR -- perhaps there was some repression -- but there also was a sunny side. Most people felt secure and happy."

But victims of the GDR carry different memories.

Matthias Melster, 40, says he still suffers nightmares from his time at Hohenschoenhausen, a notorious Stasi prison that today serves as a museum. He was inmate number 312. As with all Stasi prisoners, his guards and interrogators addressed him only by the number of his solitary confinement cell. Melster was more fortunate than most inmates -- he at least knew why he was shoved into a windowless van in 1987 and hauled away to prison. He and his girlfriend had plotted an escape to West Germany, a major offense.

``I liked the idea of freedom, and that made me an it antisocial element," Melster recalled as he led visitors along the same dimly lit corridors through which he was frog-marched as a terrified teenager. He passed rows of solid cell doors to the monotone chamber -- looking like the lair of the blandest of bureaucrats, with its wooden-veneer desk, clunky telephone, and metal file cabinet -- where he was grilled 10 hours a day for five months before being sent to another prison.

``At first you think, `I'll tell them nothing,' " Melster said. ``In the end, you tell them everything. Whatever they want to know, you tell."

Melster's life has never quite gotten back on track. He's nervous. He chain-smokes. His voice is flat, affectless.

``Was I beaten? No, I was never beaten. I have no scars to show," Melster said.

``Stasi torture was psychological. It was sleep deprivation and disorientation," he said. ``It was intimidation through insinuation -- the guard who would start screaming and touching his weapon, as if you were just seconds away from a bullet. The interrogator whose hints of `worse to come' were somehow more terrible than an actual fist to the face.

``It was months of never seeing another human, except for guards and interrogators. It was never hearing your own name, only your cell number," he said. ``It was being stripped of your humanity, layer by layer."

Unlike the Nazi period, a constant reference point for contemporary Germany, oppression by the GDR is seldom discussed in a country that was politically reunified in 1990. Even the Wall itself has nearly vanished -- only a few out-of-the way sections remain.

Recent efforts to revisit the Stasi past have lately drawn loud opposition from former officers. They blocked a plan to install plaques to 40,000 East Berliners arrested for political crimes, for example, and have pressured schools to stop allowing field trips to the Berlin prison.

``Laws were enforced, our methods were clean," said Schramm. ``We should not be portrayed in schools as worse than criminals."

The Stasi employed 90,000 officers and 175,000 informants to keep tabs on East Germany's 16.7 million people. By comparison, Hitler's Gestapo employed 30,000 secret police for the entire country.

``The reality of those days was fear and constant surveillance," said Ulrike Poppe, 53, a former human rights activist in East Germany who as a high school student was first questioned by the Stasi after making an offhand remark about politics. She would later face charges of ``state treason for passing nonsecret information" to a foreigner -- giving a pamphlet promoting world peace to a visiting New Zealander -- and interrogated for weeks at the Hohenschoenhausen, one of 17 Stasi political prisons.

She recalled being required to sleep on her back in ``at attention" position on a wooden pallet. The Stasi guard who peered through a slit would flick on the light in her cell every 15 minutes to check that her arms were correctly placed.

``Later, when I was under house arrest, my apartment was full of electronic bugs, and a Stasi man would come and sit every day from 6 a.m. until 10 p.m. My children were small and asked whether he wanted to play. `Shut up,' he'd say," recalled Poppe, now an organizer with Berlin's Protestant Academy, an organization of churches. ``My mail was opened -- they'd purposefully leave smudged fingerprints as a sign. It was not very subtle. Four big men followed me everywhere. And four more men followed those men, I suppose spying on them."

German films and television have routinely treated the communist era in a light manner -- showing Stasi as lovable buffoons and portraying as hilariously incompetent a system that killed 1,000 people trying to escape over the Berlin Wall. There's even a word, ``Ostalgie," describing nostalgia for the East's dysfunctional Trabant cars, barely palatable Little Red Riding Hood wine, and syrupy pop music, whose lyrics spoke of socialist discipline.

``The Lives of Others" has broken sharply with that tradition, winning applause not just from film critics but also historians and political scientists.

``Germans in many ways have lost touch with reality when it comes to the East," said Hubertus Knabe, a specialist on Stasi history who recently won a court order to stop harassment by former officers. ``It's forbidden by law to deny the crimes of the Nazis. But it's almost forbidden by custom since reunification to really discuss the crimes of the regime that turned East Germany into a prison."

The Stasi, known as the ``Shield and Sword" of the East German Communist Party, was born in 1950, and in that first year alone charged 78,000 people with such political offenses as selling eggs (``abetting capitalism"), church attendance (``social parasitism"), and reporting potholes (fostering social negativism).

The Stasi also ran the GDR's foreign intelligence service, although the vast majority of secret police were deployed against the East's own citizens. ``The Stasi started out as just ordinarily vicious Soviet-style secret police, torturing people and beating them up," said Staadt. ``But by the '70s it had evolved into an entity that broke people with psychological ploys, instead of violence."

``But mainly it had spies on every level -- spies in schools, spies in factories, spies on the street, spies in families," he said.

In a stranger-than-fiction twist, The star of ``The Lives of Others," Ulrich Muhe, whose acting career started in the East, found upon examining his Stasi file some years after the communist meltdown that his former wife had informed on him to a Stasi ``controller" through the six years of their marriage.

Last year, the Left Party, whose leaders are former Stasi and other onetime communist functionaries, won 54 of the 614 seats in Germany's Parliament to become a formidable minority party.

``There is a kind of creeping rehabilitation going on," said Knabe. ``Germany failed to prosecute communist-era crimes except in a very few instances. This was a criminal system. But now all we're supposed to remember is the factory jobs and good day care."

Petra Krischok of the Globe's Berlin bureau contributed to this report.