Why I'm Afraid of My Family's Secret Police Files

This article originally appeared on VICE Germany.

Last summer, I was hanging out with my family when my aunt Else* mentioned in passing that dear old uncle Holger* was in the Stasi. We all stood there in disbelief. For those unfamiliar, the Stasi was East Germany’s secret police agency, also known as the Ministry for State Security, which spied on thousands of private citizens in the German Democratic Republic (GDR).

Between 1950 and 1990, the Stasi relied on a huge network of unofficial and professional informants to find potential resisters to the socialist regime. Back then, anyone could have been an informant: friends, neighbours and even family members. Many were coerced into collaborating with the state, and the environment of uncertainty and fear ruined many relationships beyond repair.

It turns out my uncle wasn’t an informant; he was a salaried member of the Department of Industrial Espionage, with a comfortable life and pension scheme. No one deliberately hid these facts, but Holger has been dead for a while now, so it never really came up. And I never asked.

The Stasi officially employed 12,000 GDR citizens, and today there are still almost seven miles of documents in a Berlin archive containing the information they gathered on individuals. To find out if they were informed on, the only thing East German families need to do is request their file. But so many refuse to apply for it, precisely because they don't want to know who in their inner circle betrayed them.

For Germans born after the revolution, it’s hard to imagine what our parents went through, and even harder to understand why they might not want to know what part their loved ones played back then. I spoke to three young people about how they broach the sensitive subject with their parents.

Mascha's family and mine are similar in many ways. We both had single mothers and strong grandmothers, with Mascha’s family living in Weimar, about one and a half hours from Leipzig and not far from where I grew up. But Mascha’s family did well out of the end of the Republic, and while my mum never held a job for more than two years, her mother’s career thrived.

A study by the Otto Brenner Foundation in 2019 found that families who feel they were better-off during the GDR are often nostalgic for the old world. They might reminisce about surface-level aspects, like the price of oranges and holding a steady job, and think less about the hard parts of those days.

But Mascha’s family also avoided the difficult conversations. "I was upset for a while that we never watched the news at home,” she says. “My mum explained that she tried to keep our childhood free of politics."

As a young woman, Mascha’s mother didn't totally comply with the GDR. "She read the books [on Marxism] very carefully and saw the discrepancies between what was in the books and everyday life in the GDR. We were a dictatorship," says Mascha. Her mother was vocal in criticising the system in class and was suddenly kicked out of college. Someone had informed on her.

Mascha was told not to talk at school about the problems her mother was having. When the “Wende” or turning point came, her mother was allowed to go back to college and her grandma started a career. Mascha often talks to her mother about this, and about how she was spied on by someone in her vicinity. Mascha's grandparents advised her mother to simply keep her head down. The topic is still taboo at family gatherings.

But Mascha isn’t angry. "Our parents were very young at the time, the same age we are now. There were no goodies and baddies, it wasn’t black or white. I think most people just wanted to get on with life."

Things are different for families who felt worse-off after the GDR, who see their memories as a mission and often defend the GDR. This is something I recognise in my own family, as does Helene.

Helene comes from a "shit hole between Dresden and the Czech border", in her own words. In those days, the area was part of the "Valley of the Clueless", one of the few spots where you couldn't get Western TV on the sly.

Helene’s father was a college dropout from a farming family who became a journalist. Her mother, on the other hand, had topped her university class in chemistry, but for some reason could never hold down a job in academia. Helene’s parents said her father earned more money than her mother because her father was from the West, and her mother the East.

"My mother was always good at school, but others were given jobs over her because they were in the Party,” said Helene. Her mother joined the [Socialist Unity Party competitor] Social Democratic Party out of frustration. That was the end of her career during the GDR.

Helene learned about the existence of her mother’s Stasi file a few years ago. Her mother said she wasn’t interested in seeing it, but told Helene she could apply for the file on her behalf. Helene doesn't dare. She doesn’t want to unearth information that could destroy her family. "If she doesn't want to know anything, do I have to carry the burden alone?"

Jonas works for the German government as a counsellor for victims of the Stasi who seek reparations, and has heard dozens of these stories. His own family history is one of the reasons Jonas chose the job. One of six kids, his family was involved with the Protestant church but lived a closed life, rarely spending time with people outside the family.

Jonas remembers his parents sometimes being frustrated by the regime: “When my older brother came back from a school trip to the NVA (National People’s Army) barracks, he had a photo of a Russian soldier with him.” Jonas’ mother tore up the picture, and was later asked by the school what she had against the “peace army”.

"My parents weren't heroes, they weren't resistors. But they weren't foolish either,” Jonas tells me. “That taught me something."

Jonas sometimes counsels people still loyal to the GDR. “They miss the community, the cohesion, the neighbourhood help,” he says, but he thinks that’s bullshit. “Nobody said you had to stop being a community after 1989.”

*Names changed to protect identities