Compromised by a Gigantic Lie

By John Elson

After the communist regime headed by Erich Honecker collapsed late last year, East Germans were appalled by what they discovered about the lavishly bourgeois life-style that the ousted party boss and his cronies had enjoyed at their well-guarded compound in the Berlin suburb of Wandlitz. Nonetheless, the new leaders in East Berlin have been slow to take legal steps against their predecessors, mainly because they have yet to resolve two difficult but related ethical issues: Who should be judged? Who should do the judging?

Both questions arise from the fact that virtually everyone in East Germany cooperated with, or was compromised by, the enforcing agencies of a totalitarian state. Some 2.3 million people -- effectively, the elite -- were members of the Socialist Unity Party, the communists. Then there were the 85,000 full-time employees of the Ministry for State Security (Stasi), as well as its 109,000 still mostly anonymous informers. Finally, thousands of journalists, judges, mayors and policemen gave at least lip service to what they knew to be a gigantic lie.

"We cannot decommunize a whole society overnight," says Friedrich Magirius, superintendent of Leipzig's Protestant churches, who notes that East Germany was "a typical dictatorship in which anybody who wanted to achieve something, to climb professionally, had to adapt." Hans Meyer, a law professor at the University of Frankfurt, argues that in East Germany the line between victim and criminal was perilously thin. "Very often," he says, "a person will have resisted in one respect but helped the regime in another."

Some commentators argue that just as West Germany had to live with the shame of the Nazi years, it is now the East's turn to expiate collective guilt. Margarete Mitscherlich, a Frankfurt psychoanalyst, rejects that equation. "The Stasi is not the Gestapo, and Honecker is not Hitler," she says. "Whatever one can say about the Stasi, we are not now confronted with Auschwitz as we were after Hitler." Another Frankfurt law professor, Erhard Denninger, agrees that comparisons with the Nazi era are inexact. "The Nuremberg trials dealt with crimes against humanity and genocide," he argues. "You can't charge the communist regime in East Germany with anything like that."

Treason charges against Honecker were dropped last March. Nonetheless, the ousted leader, who is receiving treatment for kidney cancer at a Soviet hospital in East Germany, is still under investigation for corruption and abuse of power. Late last month new potential charges surfaced: East German Interior Minister Peter-Michael Diestel announced that Honecker had given safe haven to Red Army Faction terrorists. Honecker and a few senior officials may eventually stand trial, but the vast majority of party members seem unlikely to suffer much. For example, Diestel has hired back, as an act of "Christian charity," 12,000 former State Security employees who had been fired by a citizens' committee set up to dismantle the agency.

A further irony is that some 700 of those clerks have been placed in charge of the agency's voluminous dossiers. "Only they know how to find things," explains Werner Fischer, chairman of the citizens' committee. Some Germans want to preserve the files as a valuable historical archive. Fischer wants to see them destroyed on the ground that they could serve as a source of leaks and blackmail. "I am in charge of it," Fischer says, "but I don't want to see it. What if you find out about friends who informed on you? What if you find out that your wife was having an affair? Some things are better not known."

With reporting by Andreas Gutzeit/Frankfurt and James O. Jackson/Leipzig