| STASILAND |
[Jul. 18th, 2008|08:13 pm] |
A while ago I read Stasiland and it really blew my mind, learning about this part of history which I was never taught at school. I don't know about you, but at school we learnt about Nazi Germany, in great detail, up until the troops finally arrived and those remaining escaped from the Concentration Camps. Nothing afterwards about the Communist rule or the seperation between East and West. I was utterly ignorant about Germany after that, save for knowing that the Berlin wall existed!
I know most of you probably know all of this already, but it blows my mind that 1984 HAS already happened in so many respects! In Hitler's Third Reich it is estimated that there was one Gestapo agent for every 2000 citizens, in Stalin's USSR there was one KGB agent for every 5830 people. In the GDR (the rule in Eastern Germany) there was one Stasi officer for every sixty-three people, and if part-time informers are included it's been estimated that the ratio was as high as one informer for every 6.5 citizens.
Talking to people who have lived in or come from Eastern Germany, I find it amazing that there is such a high level of nostalgia. Not only from those who were GDR supporters, but from teenagers and young people today who wear and buy t-shirts with pro-Stasi slogans and promote the GDR's rule. I guess what I find so interesting is the capacity of people to forget, to forget the tortures and disappearances and negative things they endured so quickly once the new system doesn't work as effectively as they hope for them. What they choose to remember is the fact they had food and housing, not what quality or circumstances they were delivered under.
This is coming from someone who knows very little about it (obviously), so no insight is meant to be provided here, just what I found most striking! |
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