All-powerful Stasi?

The scene of the crime: the Goethe School in the sleepy village of Gnoien in northeastern Germany. The date: September 1962. There, in a provincial backwater, the agents of the East German Ministry for State Security, commonly known as the Stasi, found a portrait of East German head of state Walter Ulbricht attached to a skeleton (pictured above). The image bore graffiti slogans - dissident, hostile. How the agents reacted when confronted with the scene is not known. But the two brave young students responsible for the comical protest weren't laughing in the end. They paid a heavy price: 16 months in prison.

The anti-Ulbricht scene dramatically demonstrated that dissent was still alive 13 years after the founding of the German Democratic Republic and a year after the Berlin Wall had begun construction. And not just in the major urban centers, either.

In his book, "Freiheit heisst, die Angst verlieren" ("Freedom means losing fear"), Christian Halbrock details the resistance movement outside of the main centers of Berlin and Leipzig. Halbrock, a researcher at the Stasi Records Agency (BStU) spent four years digging through files that hadn't seen the light of day for decades. The result is a meticulously detailed look at the everyday acts of resistance and opposition in and around Rostock, the city of 200,000 on the Baltic coast of former East Germany.

Underrated provincial protests

Throughout the 40 years of dictatorship, many East Germans hoped for more personal and political freedoms, and often took large risks to achieve them. These longings culminated in the 1989 protests and the eventual collapse of the system.

Today, Berlin and Leipzig are remembered as particularly strong "beacons" of resistance. But through his research, Halbrock found that, to his surprise, a lot had happened far away from the big cities as well.

Halbrock himself was not completely unaware of the provincial resistance. The 51-year-old historian became acquainted with the Stasi early on. As a young man, he was involved with the church in his home state Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. Later, in Berlin, he was an environmental activist - activities that automatically aroused the Stasi's suspicions.

Halbrock uncovered wide-ranging resistance which spanned four decades - all meticulously documented by the Stasi.

Resistance to forced collectivization

One of those events was the farmers' resistance in the 1950s, for example.

When helpless SED party members near Greifswald complained that "comrades in the village of Levenhagen have had great difficulty in convincing individual farmers of the need to join the cooperative," the Stasi was called in to help. This was common procedure when the East German Socialist Unity Party (SED) was at its wit's end.

As unruly as the farmers were, so too were many fishermen - even as late as the 1980s. On the island of Rügen, in particular, Stasi records show they were "skeptical" about final collectivization. By giving up their carefully tended private property, the fishermen would be losing their "personal freedoms," noted the spy agency. In addition, according to the fishermen, people would lose their sense of responsibility in a cooperative - to the detriment, ultimately, of their equipment.

The Stasi were therefore always aware of the general mood in the region, but also, of course, of the country as a whole. Despite knowing what they were up against, they still thought they could keep everything under strict control, a fallacy, according to Halbrock.

With the help of their nearly 200,000 unofficial informers, the Stasi thought they could deal with any criticism and challenge in any form, and steer the reaction "in certain directions" or, if necessary, stamp it out altogether.

This approach only worked as long as conditions remained the same. But as things began to change, at first slowly but then more obviously in the second half of the 1980s, many of their informers began to quickly renounce their loyalty to East German system.

Fearing another June 17, 1953

Every spray-painted anti-Communist slogan, each pamphlet distributed in secret was another tiny threat to the East German regime. The reminders of formative events, like the popular uprising of June 17, 1953 or the construction of the Berlin Wall on August 13, 1961 also had their effect.

"With every anniversary, the SED feared a resurgence in new graffiti or pamphlets," said Halbrock. Added to this was the state and party leadership's lack of legitimacy, which was met with civil disobedience that often expressed itself through scorn and derision toward political leaders.

Walter Ulbricht's involuntary attachment to a skeleton certainly ranks among the most original examples of this defiance.