Germany and the Ghosts of the Past

Note: for more on the Stasi, East Germany's secret police, I recommend the film The Lives of Others (link to the right, under "Film and TV").

From: The New York Times

December 10, 2009
Letter from Europe
Ghosts of Past Haunt Politics in Germany
By JUDY DEMPSEY

Last week, the past caught up with the German state of Brandenburg. Several legislators belonging to the Left Party, the successor to the Communist Party, admitted to collaborating with the East German secret police. Astonishingly, their past had never been an issue in the 20 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

That began to change when Matthias Platzeck, the popular Social Democrat premier of this poor state, decided three months ago to drop the conservative Christian Democrats as his coalition partners in favor of the Left Party. He said the Left could no longer be stigmatized, especially since it had won 27 percent of the votes during elections last September.

As soon as the coalition was sworn into office, the facts began to creep out. Seven of the 26 Left Party legislators had worked for the Stasi. Some have since resigned. Others are sitting it out. Not Mr. Platzeck. He called for a reckoning with the past. “Since 1990, there has been no systematic Stasi check of any deputies in the Brandenburg Parliament,” he told Parliament last Friday. “We must admit, and I, too, must personally admit, that this was a mistake.”

It was the Social Democrats who since 1990 have governed this state, mostly in coalition with the conservative Christian Democrats. During much of that time, the premier was Manfred Stolpe. He had been a leading member of East Germany’s Lutheran Church and as such had regularly met Stasi agents. Despite repeated allegations, Mr. Stolpe denied he was an informer. But as premier, he never asked questions about the credentials of the legislators or civil servants.

Nor, for that matter, did Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union. Jörg Schönbohm, until recently Brandenburg’s conservative interior minister, did not even check the background of the police. Documents released earlier this year showed that hundreds of them had been full-time Stasi officials or informers during the Communist era.

“It was a cartel of silence in Brandenburg,” said Ulrich Mählert, historian at the government-funded Foundation for the Reappraisal of the Communist Dictatorship in East Germany. “It was about realpolitik.”

The revelations in Brandenburg have repercussions for Germany’s Social Democrats, in opposition since a catastrophic defeat in federal elections last September. The party now will have to decide what alliance, if any, it wants with the Left Party in order to challenge Mrs. Merkel’s coalition of conservatives and Free Democrats in 2013. One thing is certain: if the Social Democrats choose an alliance on the federal level with the Left, the past of each Left legislator will be scrutinized. As in Brandenburg, that could leave a very poisoned political atmosphere.

The existence of the secret police files continues to fuel a debate not only in Germany but across Eastern Europe. Even some who opposed the Communists say that keeping the files open will taint the political class because they can be abused for political purposes. Others say politics will never recover from the poison if the files are kept shut away.

“If you do not open the files fully and place them under independent control, the system will remain poisoned,” said Monica Macovei, a former justice minister in Romania who fought against corruption and the continuing influence of the Securitate, or secret police. “Former collaborators are not the people to build a democracy.”

Romania’s files were only opened in 2005 — 15 years after Germany’s and the Czech Republic’s. Only a handful of the two million files have reached the courts. The political parties decide which cases to pursue. Even then, judges are not always independent. “There are so many networks where people protect or blackmail each other,” Ms. Macovei said. “That is why I cannot agree to say ‘enough is enough’ when it comes to the issue of closing the files.” Ms. Macovei, despite — or perhaps because of — her commitment to openness, was fired weeks after Romania joined the European Union in 2007. She is now a conservative member of the European Parliament.

The situation is not much better in neighboring Bulgaria, where successive governments since 1989 have done little to keep former collaborators or secret police agents from holding top government jobs. When it was disclosed a few years ago that President Georgi Parvanov was an informer, there were some calls for his resignation. He is still in power. There are no sanctions barring former collaborators from holding public office. Prime Minister Boyko Borisov, who was elected last July, has vowed to adopt tougher measures in order to end corruption and strengthen democracy. Progress has been slow.

“The political elites are not trusted,” said Daniel Smilov, program director of the Center for Liberal Strategies in Sofia. “But there is a growing consensus that former secret service agents should be kept from public office. There is also a need for a thorough analysis of the past.”

Yet there is always the fear that the files will be used for partisan goals.

Alexander Smolar, president of the independent Stefan Batory Foundation in Warsaw, said that when Poland’s Communists and Solidarity agreed to share power in 1989, members of the Solidarity leadership opted for reconciliation instead of a witch hunt against their former persecutors.

A law was passed in 1997 requiring officials holding public office to declare whether they had worked for the secret police. It involved about 22,000 people. Four years ago, the conservative-nationalist government led by Jaroslaw Kaczynski (and a former Solidarity activist) sought to widen the net to include up to one million people.

“The whole issue has become highly politicized and poisonous,” Mr. Smolar said. “There are names of innocent people in those files because the secret police and informers wrote down how much they wanted to recruit them. The past is so complex.”

It is also very ambiguous. Despite that, back in Brandenburg, Mr. Platzeck has opted to confront the past — for the victims. “We need a Brandenburg in which nobody has the impression that he may be permanently pushed aside, excluded or forgotten,” he said last week. “This concerns, explicitly and foremost, the victims of East Germany’s Communist Party dictatorship.”

E-MAIL jdempsey@iht.com