Stasiland_ Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall - Anna Funder [128]
For the Stasi taking notes on the protesters’ cries against them, see Der Spiegel 46/1999 (15 November 1999), ‘Wende und Ende des SED-Staates (8)’, at http://www.spiegel.de/druckversion/0,1588,52264,00.html
p. 65 Günter Schabowski’s press conference speech of 9 November 1989 featured in the TV documentary Die Stasi-Rolle: Geschichten aus dem MfS, Spiegel TV, 1993. The same program also has Stasi border guard Herr Jäger admitting that passports were to be stamped in such a way as to refuse certain people re-entry. Schabowski’s speech is available at ‘1989–40 Jahre DDR’ at http://ddr-im-www.de/Geschichte/1989.htm
p. 69 On the numbers of Stasi informers participating in the Runden Tisch negotiations, see Der Spiegel 49/1999 (6 December 1999), ‘Wende und Ende des SED-Staates (11)’ at http://www.spiegel.de/druckversion/0,1588,52264,00.html
p. 84 Frau Neubert of the Bürgerbüro e.V. Verein zur Aufarbeitung von Folgeschäden der SED-Diktatur told me of porn and ticking-package deliveries; the Neuberts’ car’s brake leads had been cut; the writer Jürgen Fuchs told the puppy story, and his daughter was detained after school. For the threatened acid attack on the border guard, see Koehler, p. 29. Koehler also quotes Manfred Kittlaus, director of Berlin’s Government Crimes Investigation Unit, calling the associations of former Communist functionaries a ‘classic form of organized crime’, p. 30.
In 1998 a federal government parliamentary inquiry found that, in the weeks of the fall of the SED regime in 1989, somewhere between three and ten billion westmarks disappeared. See reference to Untersuchungsausschuss ‘DDR-Vermögen’ at Der Spiegel 50/1999 (14 December 1999), ‘Wende und Ende des SED-Staates (12)’ at http://www.spiegel.de/druckversion/0,1588,52264,00.html
p. 100 Although most people were able to watch western television, the western signal could not penetrate a geographically inaccessible area that included Dresden. The region came to be known as the ‘Tal der Ahnungslosen’, the Valley of the Clueless.
p. 119 Surveys conducted in the immediate postwar years showed that the Hitler period of German history (1933–45) was assessed positively by about 40 per cent of the German population: ‘Umfrage des Instituts für Demoskopie Allensbach 1951’, in Alfred Grosser, Die Bonner Demokratie: Deutschland von draußen gesehen, Rauch, Düsseldorf 1960, p. 22.
In a 1971 survey of the German people, the majority still held that Nazism was a good idea, which had gone wrong in its implementation: Max Kaase, ‘Demokratische Einstellungen in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland’ in Rudolf Wildenmann (ed.), Sozialwissenschaftliches Jahrbuch für Politik, vol. 2, Olzog, Munich, 1971, p. 325.
pp. 130–31 For Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler’s own account of his life, see Meine Schlösser oder Wie ich mein Vaterland fand,Verlag Neues Leben, Berlin, 1989. For more of his views see Provokation, Edition Nautilus, Hamburg, 1993.
p. 191 The Stasi File Authority’s report on the use of radiation against ‘oppositional’ elements is its Bericht zum Projekt: Einsatz von Röntgenstrahlen und radioaktiven Stoffen durch das MfS gegen Oppositionelle—Fiktion oder Realität?’ by the Projektgruppe Strahlen: Bernd Eisenfeld (Leiter), Thomas Auerbach, Gudrun Weber and Dr Sebastian Pflugbeil. Published by BstU, 2000.
p. 200 I later found instructions to operatives on ways of crippling ‘oppositional’ people, which gave more detail than Herr Bock’s little lecture. It comes from the Directive ‘Perceptions’ (‘Richtlinien, Stichpunkt Wahrnehmung’). It aims:
To develop apathy (in the subject)…to achieve a situation in which his conflicts, whether of a social, personal, career, health or political kind are irresolvable…to give rise to fears in him…to develop/create disappointments…to restrict his talents or capabilities…to reduce his capacity to act and…to harness dissentions and contradictions around him for that purpose…
On 18 January 1989—long before anyone could