Word: stasis
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...will remember, of course, that Bernard Samson, England's rough-cut intelligence agent in Berlin, was bamboozling communist Stasi operatives with great success until his beautiful and highborn wife Fiona defected to East Germany and set up shop as a KGB colonel, no less. This breach of marital etiquette caused Samson endless problems -- how to find a suitable nanny for the children, whether to marry his young mistress, how to prove that he himself was not a Soviet mole, and so on -- detailed moodily and lengthily in the two most recent novels of Deighton's double trilogy, Spy Hook...
...virtually everyone in East Germany cooperated with, or was compromised by, the enforcing agencies of a totalitarian state. Some 2.3 million people -- effectively, the elite -- were members of the Socialist Unity Party, the communists. Then there were the 85,000 full-time employees of the Ministry for State Security (Stasi), as well as its 109,000 still mostly anonymous informers. Finally, thousands of journalists, judges, mayors and policemen gave at least lip service to what they knew to be a gigantic...
Some commentators argue that just as West Germany had to live with the shame of the Nazi years, it is now the East's turn to expiate collective guilt. Margarete Mitscherlich, a Frankfurt psychoanalyst, rejects that equation. "The Stasi is not the Gestapo, and Honecker is not Hitler," she says. "Whatever one can say about the Stasi, we are not now confronted with Auschwitz as we were after Hitler." Another Frankfurt law professor, Erhard Denninger, agrees that comparisons with the Nazi era are inexact. "The Nuremberg trials dealt with crimes against humanity and genocide," he argues. "You can't charge...
...rapid political and economic unification of the two Germanys is paying an unexpected dividend: a combined attack on terrorism. After pooling information from West Germany and the impounded files of the now defunct East German secret police, the Stasi, East German authorities this month arrested seven people believed to be members of West Germany's notorious Red Army Faction, whose bloody campaign claimed more than 20 lives between...
...married to an East German scientist, is accused of taking part in the 1977 killings of Jurgen Ponto, chairman of the Dresdner Bank, and industrialist Hanns-Martin Schleyer. East German Interior Minister Peter- Michael Diestel said the arrests provided evidence of a "devilish connection" between the R.A.F. and the Stasi -- a connection that is now certain to be further investigated...