Peaceful Revolution: When the people triumphed over the Stasi

Peaceful Revolution: When the people triumphed over the Stasi

Peaceful revolution
When the people triumphed over the Stasi






35 years ago, thousands stormed the GDR state security headquarters in Berlin. For many, a historic moment and an act of satisfaction. And at the same time the nucleus of the dispute to this day.

Ralf Drescher had posted the leaflet in a church. “Defend yourself! Take to the streets!” was written on the hand-printed note. Monday, January 15, 1990, 5:00 p.m. “It was clear to me: That’s where you’re going,” remembers the photographer. And so on that winter day he stood in the crowd at the steel gate of the state security headquarters in Berlin-Lichtenberg and experienced a decisive moment of the peaceful revolution in the GDR.

They pushed from behind, the first ones climbed onto the gate at the front, cut cables to surveillance cameras, raised their fists. “Stasi out,” some shouted. “Open the gate.” And sure enough: the steel wings moved. Crowds streamed from Ruschestraße onto the huge Stasi compound. The people took over the hated secret service. At least symbolically, at least for a few hours in the wild turning winter 35 years ago.

“It had an enormously large and positive psychological effect at the time,” says historian Stefan Wolle, who was there during the occupation. “You can’t overestimate that.” The campaign helped to secure 111 kilometers of Stasi files for the investigation of the SED dictatorship. According to the Federal Archives, it was the first comprehensive opening of secret police files in the world. For many it’s a satisfaction, for others it’s an imposition. To this day, the Stasi legacy creates deep rifts, including between East and West.

“The government doesn’t take the people seriously”

After the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, the state dominated by the unity party SED was already teetering towards its end. The GDR opposition had a say at the round table. The Stasi, which had spied on and harassed citizens for decades with tens of thousands of official and unofficial employees, was now called the Office for National Security. The dissolution was announced. But when a debate about a new “constitutional protection” for the GDR and the destruction of files gained momentum at the end of 1989, opposition members sounded the alarm.

“The government is not taking the round table and therefore the people seriously,” says the yellowed leaflet from the citizens’ movement New Forum, which Ralf Drescher has kept to this day. “The SED feels powerful again, the Stasi becomes the ‘constitutional protection’, everything in the companies is the same.” The civil rights activists did not want their revolution to be reversed. “Back then, people were of the opinion that you could live just fine without the secret service,” says Drescher, who was 30 years old at the time and had been in opposition circles for a few years. The SED opponents called for resistance. Thousands came.

“That was a big act”

A “psychological rollercoaster” awaited them, as historian Wolle calls it. “There was tremendous fear of the Stasi for years,” he remembers. “And just running there, opening the gates and negotiating with them and having them show you everything, that was a big act.”

Joachim Gauck, then in the New Forum, then the first head of the Stasi records authority and later Federal President, once spoke of an “element of satisfaction” among the demonstrators in the Stasi buildings. Some things were broken, including the Stasi’s own hairdressing salon in the so-called supply wing in House 18, and papers were scattered across the hallways. But the occupiers didn’t really know what exactly they wanted to achieve, as several contemporary witnesses report. After two or three hours they left again. Representatives of a citizens’ committee took charge of the files.

“The knowledge of power in the hands of the oppressed”

According to Gauck, the main line was also far from being discussed. “What was clear is that we didn’t want the files to be destroyed,” said Gauck in a panel discussion in 2011. “The knowledge of power should be in the hands and minds of the oppressed, that was important to us. But what happens next?” Only after another occupation of the Stasi rooms in Lichtenberg, including a hunger strike, was it finally clarified shortly before German unification that the files would be preserved and remain accessible.

To date, according to the Federal Archives, which is now responsible, more than 7.5 million applications have been made to inspect Stasi documents, of which more than 3.4 million were citizen applications. More than three decades after the end of the GDR, a further 28,571 applications from citizens were added in 2024.

reconciliation and bitterness

“Inspection of Stasi documents is a success story for society as a whole,” says the President of the Federal Archives, Michael Hollmann. “It was absolutely right and important to secure and open the Stasi files. This transparency counteracted new traumatization of the victims and also made reconciliation possible.”

There was reconciliation, but also a lot of bitterness. Ralf Drescher, for example, applied for access to files in the early 1990s and found out that his former best friend had been spying on him. Something similar happened thousands of times.

There were also checks for public service applicants, revelations about celebrities and politicians, and wrangling over the release of files, not least about former Chancellor Helmut Kohl. Journalists from major West German media outlets became obsessed with individual cases.

The comparison with the Office for the Protection of the Constitution “totally limps”

Suddenly there was an East-West conflict and the assumption that the West wanted to reduce the entire GDR to the Stasi and make it bad. In the mild light of the past, the crimes of the GDR secret police no longer seemed incomparable to some. Today, demonstrators critical of the state and AfD politicians are drawing parallels between the Stasi and the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, such as AfD MP Horst Förster in the Schwerin state parliament in the summer of 2024.

The comparison not only upsets former civil rights activists who were spied on, intimidated or imprisoned by the Stasi. Historian Wolle also finds: “The comparison is totally flawed, in every respect, in absolutely every respect.” There were no limits for the Stasi. “The Stasi was allowed to do everything. They were allowed to tap telephones, they were allowed to take photos of letters, look at bank accounts, look at health records.” Today it is completely different.

The Thuringian Office for the Protection of the Constitution has listed the differences. He refers to legal requirements today and the “control by all state powers”. There are 6,000 secret service agents nationwide – in the Stasi alone there were 91,000 full-time employees.

This is one of the reasons why the Stasi files are so important, says Federal Archives chief Hollmann. “35 years after the storming of the Stasi headquarters, it’s about educating younger people about state security.” They would not have experienced the terrible side effects of the SED dictatorship. “By remembering injustice and setting facts against fake news, archives are an important voice for democracy.”

dpa

Source: Stern

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