Movie about East German secret police gets raves

Stasi is still striking fear into German hearts
By Hannah Cleaver in Berlin
(Filed: 24/03/2006)

The Stasi, the feared East German secret police, has returned to haunt victims more than 15 years after the collapse of the communist regime it served.

About 200 former officers disrupted a debate on changes to its old headquarters in the main Berlin prison, calling many of its victims, present at the meeting, "liars".

Those involved in the disturbance included the Stasi's head before it was disbanded in 1990 as well as the deputy to the notorious Stasi chief, Erich Mielke.

A Left-wing politician at the meeting has been forced to apologise after describing the Stasi men as witnesses to history rather than condemning their outburst.

"What made the strongest impression upon me was the thought of how their tirades of hatred must have affected the victims," said Hubertus Knabe, the director of the site, known as the Hohenschönhausen. "One former prisoner wrote to me that he was shaking all over afterwards."

Last night the Stasi was the topic of a new German film, the first to tackle the sinister topic of how its agents spied and manipulated those considered enemies of the state. Previous films, such as Good Bye Lenin, preferred a more sentimental portrait of the dictatorship.

The Lives of the Others tells the story of a Stasi officer who spies on an artistic couple but falls in love with their lives and ideas and ends up protecting them from persecution.

The Stasi's return to the national consciousness could herald a repeat of West Germany's traumatic reckoning with the Third Reich in the 1960s.

Then, to the discomfort of many and the outrage of a militant few, it transpired that former Nazis had done very well for themselves in the new system and had not changed their views.

Now, again, some characters in the drama are in prison or dead, a substantial length of time has elapsed and the country as a whole has attained a measure of normality.

This time Germans hoped they had learned from the mistakes of the past and carefully saved the Stasi archives showing that almost half the population spied on the other half. The files were made available to their subjects, enabling many to discover who had informed on them under the communist regime.

Many Stasi officers were put on trial and convicted, as were some soldiers involved in shooting East Germans trying to cross the border to the West.

So last week's events at the Hohenschönhausen - now a museum of the secret service and its deeds as well as a memorial to its victims - were all the more shocking.

It emerged that, of the 350 or so people at the debate in the complex, at least 200 were ex-Stasi officers, several senior enough to be identified by those present.

When the prison was described as a place of terror, abuse and suffering, the veterans shouted the speaker down with cries of "liar" and demanded that the museum be closed.

They denied the existence of special water-torture cells in the building, while one shouted: "You are presenting yourselves as victims and declaring us to be perpetrators". Berlin's state culture minister, Thomas Flierl, of the Linke.PDS party, successor to the East German Socialist Unity Party, was forced to apologise after failing to condemn the disturbance.