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Thursday 17th June ended one of the main formal steps to transfer the immense archive of the Stasi, the secret police of the old communist East Germany, to a new location in the Federal Archives (Bundesarchiv). The government agency that in the last thirty years had dealt with the cataloging of documents and making them public to citizens who wanted to consult them was dissolved, and the news brought back to the national debate the discussions on the management of the historical and archival legacy of the Stasi , two years after the announcement of the transfer of documents which had already been criticized by politicians, historians and former dissidents.
The critics fear that the transfer will make it more difficult to consult the documents, breaking the tradition of transparency of the archive and thus obscuring the memory of the communist period. But the authorities assure that access will continue to be guaranteed, and several historians are in favor of the reorganization of a structure that had hitherto had a temporary character, in order to facilitate academic research.
Stasis stands for Ministry of State Security (“Ministry for State Security”). It was the state apparatus essentially charged with internal espionage, and was famous for the effectiveness and pervasiveness with which it carried out its function. In the forty years it was active, the Stasi gathered information on about 6 million Germans, a third of the population of East Germany. After the fall of the Berlin Wall it was dismantled, but in January 1990 the dissident “citizens’ committees” of the regime organized an assault on the Berlin office preventing the officials from continuing with the destruction of the documents they had started with the paper shredders or by tearing them by hand.
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The agency closed two weeks ago, commonly called Stasi records authority (“Stasi Documents Authority”), went into operation on October 3, 1990, the day when Germany was reunited and the communist-led German Democratic Republic (East Germany) officially ceased to exist. The Authority immediately made available all the documents in the archive – which lined up would form a strip 111 kilometers long – to the citizens, which is rather unusual when it comes to such sensitive information and concerning such a recent past (usually documents archives are made public after 30 or 50 years).
From 1991 to 2021 the agency managed nearly seven and a half million requests access to the archive, almost half of which came from people wishing to know what information the Stasi had about their private life. At first it was supposed to be a temporary solution, which is also why the documents will be transferred, but then it was also taken as a model by other countries in South America and the former Soviet Union, where similar approaches were adopted to make the accounts with the dictatorships of the past.
Shelves in the headquarters of the Magdeburg Stasi Document Authority. The sacks contain Stasi documents torn apart before the arrival of the “citizens’ committees”: in the Magdeburg headquarters there are 9,000 sacks of this type (AP Photo / Jens Meyer)
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Last March, the head of the Stasi Documents Authority Roland Jahn presented the latest report on his activity: in 2020 there were 23,686 requests for access, more than 10,000 fewer than in 2019. According to the German broadcaster DW the high numbers that year were mainly due to the thirtieth anniversary of the fall of the wall, during which there had been extensive discussions and re-elaborations of the historical events of the communist period and the suffering it had caused in the inhabitants of East Germany. people who in recent years have wanted to consult the archive were also people looking for information on their relatives, to reconstruct the life they had in divided Germany and compare it with theirs.
Historian Katja Hoer on The Spectator he recounted, for example, the case of pastor Gernot Friedrich, who by consulting the archive discovered several things that disturbed him: the Stasi had a very detailed plan of his apartment and other information about his private life. The reason for all this attention, says Friedrich, is that in those years he often traveled in secret to the Soviet Union, moving between the countries of the Communist bloc and distributing clandestine copies of the Bible: “The Soviets feared copies of the Bible as if they were bombs ».
Although the decision to close the agency came only last November with a parliamentary vote, the discussion about its existence and the management of the documents it deals with has been ongoing in Germany for years and has not yet ended. The main ones have recently dealt with it newspapers e weekly national, and political parties have also intervened trying to exploit the issue to their advantage: Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), the far-right formation which is also very popular in the states of former East Germany, has publicly criticized the transfer of documents alluding to in an attempt to protect former regime politicians who are now members of the left-wing Die Linke party.
Two years ago criticism had arrived also by other political representatives, who had feared less transparency in the management of the archive, and by the historian Hubertus Knabe, according to whom closing the agency would send the wrong message to the victims of the Stasi: “It seems that politics wants to put a stone on it” . Another problem cited by many is that the digitization of the archive is very slow (it has only reached 2% of the documents).
But others believe that the transfer of documents is good. Jahn himself, talking to him Spiegel, assured that access to documents will remain guaranteed to all even after the transfer, and that the new arrangement will serve precisely to improve management, to make it more systematic, so as to facilitate the work of historians who are beginning to look for interpretations of the general picture of that period, not just of single events.
Katja Hoer is also in favor of the move: “Historians and historians like me are happy to see the folders move from their temporary accommodation to a more professionally managed one” writes Hoer. “The dissolution of the Stasi Document Authority is part of the painful German struggle to come to terms with its past.”
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