The logic of illogic

In "Stasiland," writer Anna Funder talks to former members of the Stasi -- the communist East German security apparatus -- and to the people whose lives they destroyed.

By Charles Taylor

Jun 25, 2003 | Some writers have to inflate their subject to make it worthy of them. Others take what I call the wrong-end-of-the-binoculars approach: They shrink what they're talking about so they can seem superior to it. The prime exponent of that school is Louis Menand. A few months back, the Incredible Shrinking Critic brought his method to bear on George Orwell in a New Yorker essay. In a sustained misreading of nearly every major Orwell work from "Down and Out in Paris and London" to the great essay "Politics and the English Language," it was inevitable that Menand would find fault with "1984." Treating it mistakenly as a prophetic (that is to say, clairvoyant) fable, Menand basically dismissed the book because its warnings hadn't come true. It's embarrassing to have to point out that by the time Orwell published the book, in 1948, his portrait of a totalitarian future, where thought as well as action is controlled, where the leaders have bought into the essentially religious notion that thought is the same thing as action, had already come close to being completely true in Stalin's USSR.

The Australian writer Anna Funder began living in West Germany in the '80s, eventually working for the state television station answering inquiries from viewers. After the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, she took it upon herself to interview both former members of the Stasi, the East German security apparatus, and the people they spied on. The result, "Stasiland: True Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall," is a mixture of personal and investigative journalism and a reminder that Orwell's vision kept coming true. As the stories Funder hears bear out, the totalitarian logic of illogic was perhaps pursued more rigorously and completely in East Germany than in any other Communist dictatorship.

Funder relates the statistics: "At the end, the Stasi had 97,000 employees -- more than enough to oversee a country of seventeen million people. But it also had over 173,000 informers among the population. In Hitler's Third Reich it is estimated that there was one Gestapo agent for every 2000 citizens, and in Stalin's USSR there was one KGB agent for every 5830 people. In the GDR [German Democratic Republic] there was one Stasi officer or informant for every sixty-three people. If part-time informers are included, some estimates have the ratio as high as one informer for every 6.5 citizens."

One of the worst aspects of culture shock for the East Germans who, overnight, found that their country no longer existed, was dealing with the revelation that the state's spies were their neighbors, family, friends, lovers, co-workers. That's what East Germans have learned from Stasi documents -- and what they are still learning in a steady, painful trickle. When the Berlin Wall fell, one of the Stasi's immediate concerns was to shred their voluminous files. Since then, a group called the "puzzle women" have been working to piece together the shredded files. Their story provides Funder with one more daunting statistic: With 40 workers reconstructing 400 pages a day between them, it will take 375 years to reconstruct all the files.

Like all the stories and statistics "Stasiland" relates, those numbers bespeak a paranoia that's both comic and horrible. One former Stasi official tells Funder that by the end of East Germany, 65 percent of the clergy were working as informers. And 65 percent of the members of one particular East German resistance group were informers. The delicious irony was that these informers swelled the public support for these groups, making it look like there were more East Germans openly against the government than there were.

So we have here the ultimate absurdist spectacle, a state spying apparatus so far-reaching that it nearly ran out of things to spy on. Which isn't a problem in terms of a totalitarian mind-set that can see enemies anywhere. The function of the Stasi was, as Funder relates, to arrest, imprison and interrogate anyone it chose, to open all mail, intercept phone calls, bug hotels, spy on diplomats, run its own hospitals and universities, and to train Libyan terrorists and West German members of the Red Army Faction.

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