Dealing with the past

On January 15, 1990, thousands of demonstrators stormed the headquarters of East Germany's infamous secret police - more commonly known as the Stasi. The protestors peacefully seized the myriad files that had been kept on their lives, helping end the decades of surveillance and informing upon suspect citizens that were the central tasks of the agency. Deutsche Welle spoke with Marianne Birthler, who is the commissioner for the Stasi archives. Birthler leads government efforts to protect the Stasi files and investigate the past crimes of the East German secret police.

Deutsche Welle: There was a surprising level of resistance by politicians, including then chancellor Helmut Kohl, against the opening of the Stasi files. As a result, even in September 1990, still a few weeks prior to the official ending of the reunification process, there were demonstrations and vigils being held at the Stasi headquarters here in Berlin. Was this a surprising political development within the context of German reunification?

Marianne Birthler: Well, everything that was new and that did not correspond to the normal procedures of the federal government, had been troublesome during the reunification process. And therefore it was assumed that following reunification when it came to the Stasi files the federal government would do what it does with all state files: that they would be put into government archives and would be inaccessible for a few decades. This was not what we wanted. So there was resistance.

Perhaps the authorities were afraid because there would be information that would be released which ordinarily would not have come to be published. And so there had to be some pressure applied so that the files would be opened along with German reunification.

The ministry for state security in East Germany was an important intelligence service insofar as the intelligence system in the Eastern Bloc was concerned. Here in Berlin, 20 years ago, the Stasi headquarters were stormed by demonstrators in a manner that did not occur in other countries at the time. How do you explain this?

Well, actually there were other developments in other countries, though overall the whole issue of the secret police developed elsewhere much later as a public matter. It concerned political parties and those in power. But it wasn't due to the fact that opposition in other countries was any weaker than in Germany, quite the opposite. In Poland for example, there was very strong opposition, but the situation that existed there developed very differently.

Even in the initial years after 1990, there was a desire to close the curtain and not worry about all this, but this changed when it was realized that keeping secret files closed could be more dangerous than opening them. In the meantime, there are similar institutions (to the German Stasi Commission) in Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Romania. We are always working in close contact.

More than a year ago, you helped initiate a network between Germany and six former Eastern Bloc countries to help improve access to Communist secret police files. Could this model be applied in other regions of the world, for example in some Latin American and Asian countries, where dictators still hold power?

I was invited only last summer to Brazil for a conference on exactly this question. There were also representatives from countries such as Argentina and Chile, which reported on their efforts to come to terms with dictatorships, and this, if I'm correctly informed, was the first time that a trans-South American discourse on the subject had been held.

There has also been an intensified global trend towards a debate over the question, 'how do we deal with toppled dictatorships?' We also have guests coming not only from former Communist countries, but from Iraq, from Latin America, from Spain, from Cambodia, trying to find out what we're doing here. It doesn't only concern the legacy of the secret police, but also other important questions: 'How is it for the victims?,' 'What are the needs of the victims?,' 'What do you do with the perpetrators?,' 'How do you heal a damaged society?' These types of questions are always very similar, even if the dictatorships themselves are very different.

The debate over the future of your commission and over when files should be transferred into the national archives has intensified in recent years. Where is this discussion at the moment, and what would you like to see happen?

There was consensus from the beginning that this commission would be a temporary and limited mechanism. It was estimated when laws on the Stasi documents were passed that the authority would be in existence for 10, maximum 15 years. But all who are involved share the belief that even 20 years after the peaceful revolution our tasks are still not finished and won't be for quite a while. And the special nature of the files means they cannot yet be placed in general archives. Demand for the files from different areas supports this.

A more important question addresses how the files can be best kept and administered in the future, and when would a transition to general archives be justifiable. I estimate this will take time, but I don't want to hypothesize on the outcome of this debate.

Interviewer: Marcel Fuerstenau/dfm

Editor: Sonia Phalnikar