Word: stasis
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What file readers discover is just how pervasive the network of betrayal was. Stasi tentacles extended into the schoolroom, the pulpit, the bedroom, even the confessional: Roman Catholic authorities are investigating indications that penitents' confessions reached the Stasi through hidden microphones or corrupted priests. Stasi technicians bugged homes, telephones, cars and seats in concert halls. The Stasi's "Section 8" dealt with children, requiring principals of every school in the country to keep a file of "dangerous persons" in their classrooms. Teachers filled out forms on "conspicuous" children, some as young as 9, who expressed views critical of the state...
Some who have seen their files are astounded less by the contents than by the sheer volume of a record so large that even the 90,000-member Stasi force could not handle it. "They were drowning in their own paper," said Werner Fischer, a former dissident who supervised the archives in early 1990 during the dismantlement of the hated ministry. In the Stasi's beige concrete former headquarters on East Berlin's Normannenstrasse, files lie in folders, binders, boxes and brown paper bags, stacked in five floors of rotating shelves a total of 125 miles long. Some papers...
...huge as it was, the surveillance operation was a failure in the end. It never fully gauged the true depth of disaffection for the regime or predicted its collapse. By trying to know everything, the Stasi apparatus knew nothing. Barbel Bohley, an artist and organizer of the New Forum movement that led the popular rebellion against the communist regime in 1989, found the information in her dossier ludicrous. "I have never read so much boring nonsense," she said after viewing 25 folders, less than half her file. "If that was my life, then for heaven's sake what did they...
Even Manfred Stolpe, the premier of Brandenburg and the east's most respected political figure, has been accused of having Stasi contacts when he worked as a church leader and civil rights advocate before the Wall fell. Stolpe readily concedes that he met with secret police officers. But, he says, the ministry was ubiquitous, and any attempt to reform the system or protect its victims involved negotiations with it. "I tried to use the opportunities I had to win more freedom at a time when I could not know that the Soviet empire would set us free," he said...
...Stasi files reveal treachery by parents, children, siblings, even spouses...