Communist-era police files still elusive in ČR

By Markéta Hulpachová

For the Post

In 1983, Dresden mechanic Michael Schlosser vacationed in Doksy, a north Bohemia town in what was then Czechoslovakia. Though only about 70 miles from his home, Doksy offered Schlosser a range of relative freedoms he was deprived of in the German Democratic Republic (DDR). Away from the prying gaze of neighbors and spies, he could, for example, sit and listen to West German stations on the radio of his Czech friend.

One afternoon, something they heard during an advertisement piqued their interest: A powerful publishing house was giving away 1 million West German marks to any East German who managed to fly over the Wall and land a helicopter on the roof of its headquarters, just on the other side in West Berlin. The two friends stared at each other, disbelieving. They called the station and asked if the contest was serious. The secretary confirmed it was, and Schlosser started drafting plans.

Back home in Dresden, the all-powerful Stasi secret police had a sense for the poetic. When they began a clandestine operation against Schlosser at the behest of an informant who suspected him of building a homemade aircraft, they code-named the file "Icarus."

Clipping Icarus' wings involved two informants and 4,000 sheets of observation reports. When they finally had enough evidence to arrest Schlosser and sentence him to two years in a regional political prison known as "the yellow misery," it was because an agent had correctly fingered a chicken coop as the place where Schlosser was hiding the aircraft, citing a suspicious "lack of chickens."

In the DDR, living next to the world's most fortified border heightened the "us and them" hysteria but also instilled in the minds of citizens a possibility of escape. This reality subjected ordinary life to a higher level of systemic control than was common in other communist countries. Before the collapse of the Iron Curtain, Czechoslovakia and the DDR were seen as the most unyielding dictatorships in the Eastern bloc. However, though the political trajectory of these two countries is comparable, it was East Germany that saw itself as the potential flashpoint of Central Europe.

The resulting sense of paranoia allowed DDR politicians to build the most effective totalitarian mechanism of the Eastern bloc. In Czechoslovakia, the secret police (StB) are estimated to have spied on one out of every 10 citizens. In the DDR, the ratio of observers to the observed was 1:3. The Stasi laid out psychological traps for their victims, broke down private social networks and recruited collaborators as young as 16. Unlike Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968 or Poland in 1981, there was no opposition movement in the DDR to warrant a Russian intervention. The presence of a parallel, West German entity allowed the DDR to dispose of perceived enemies in ways other Eastern bloc dictatorships could not.

One such "subversive element" was Siegmar Faust, a fledgling writer and activist who once tried to sue the Stasi for human rights law violations. After serving more than two years at a notorious political prison in Cottbus, including 742 days in a dank subterranean solitary cell, in 1976 Faust was sold to West Germany for around 10,000 Western marks. So ended a 10-year period of persecution during which the Stasi amassed a 4-foot-high stack of observation reports on him.

"These were in-depth, minute-by-minute accounts of my life," Faust says. "By the time you are arrested, the Stasi know you better than you know yourself. During interrogation, they try to tap into your paranoia and inner fears. The interrogator is tailored to your psychological type."

Against the Orwellian image of the Stasi, the contemporaneous attitudes of the Czech StB seem at times almost amicable. At the height of Normalization, the era following Prague Spring that sought to restore in Czechoslovakia an acceptable level of Soviet-ordained social repression, Prague underground magazine editor František Stárek poured a shovelful of coal over a stack of issues of Vokno, the publication he self-published. After a four-year prison stint and countless career demotions, Stárek devoted most of his time to finding ways to publish and distribute Vokno under the noses of watchful StB agents. Working as a boiler man in Malá Strana offered an ideal opportunity to discreetly meet writers and distributors, as well as a suitable hiding place for contraband issues. When the StB officer came to search the premises, the man's eyes would glaze over as he surveyed the mountains of coal.

"He basically said, 'F*** it, there's no way I'm digging through all this," Stárek recalls. "Then, he left."

Had Stárek been dealing with the Stasi, it is likely he would have been surveilled before the introductory issue of Vokno could reach its first reader. Although samizdat activities flourished in much of the Eastern bloc from the 1960s onward, the mass publication of underground writings was unthinkable in the DDR until the 1980s. When Tom Sello, a Berlin environmental activist whose dissent eventually contributed to a viable opposition movement, secretly distributed 2,000 homemade flyers protesting mandatory military service in 1982, more than 200 people were summoned to Stasi offices in Berlin and Dresden for questioning. When Sello first read the police files 10 years later, he became nauseous.

"At 25, I was not aware of the risk," he says. "They never found out [it was me], but the files indicated I could have gotten at least two years."

Paradoxically, the Stasi's pedantic documentation of the lives of its citizens has become a key to East German reconciliation. Inside the central offices for the Stasi archives, or the BStU, some 2.8 million citizens have applied to see their files since the archive opened in 1991. More than 43 kilometers of accessible secret police files have given citizens of the former DDR a clear advantage over their truth-seeking counterparts in other areas of the former bloc. In the Czech Republic, StB files endured an opaque lustration process and 18 years of political debate before a public archive became accessible in 2008. Unlike countries such as the Czech Republic, where the exiting powers had ample opportunities to destroy incriminating documents and shatter public trust, much of the Stasi files have remained intact. Still more are being reconstructed.

For many victims, piecing together their lives is a way of making sense of the system that persecuted them. "The files let us review our biographies from the viewpoint of a stranger," says Jorg Drieselmann, a former political prisoner now in charge of the Stasi Museum, a sprawling East Berlin panel-housing complex that once housed the Stasi headquarters. "The Stasi mirrored your life, every action, better than you yourself could document it. Now we can look at our own lives honestly, in hindsight. That's what makes dictatorship understandable."

Markéta Hulpachová can be reached at news@praguepost.com