Stassi Chatter

Among the top stories in Germany from last night, there was this story left over from the Cold War period.....what to do with the Stassi files.

During the glory days of the DDR (former East Germany), the Secret Police (the Stassi) were your typical German bureaucratic intelligence collectors, and they built tons of files on just about everyone (to include regular people from both East and West Germany).

The Bundestag held a vote yesterday and basically opened the door for the 'relocation' of all Stassi folders/files. 

They are to be handled by the German Federal Archives after the summer of 2021.

Critics happy?  No.

Right now....through a process, if you had interest in yourself or your folder, you could apply and learn what's being held 'secret'.

What the critics suggest is that secrecy has to be maintained and they didn't get that good feeling about the national archives doing the job.

How many Germans have dug into the files to find out what was collected on them?  It's not a open statistic.  We are about thirty years from the Wall coming down, and former DDR residents nearing forty are pretty sure that there isn't any folder for them.  If you were over fifty?  There's pretty good odds that something was collected on you.....maybe by your professor, or your wife, or some neighbor. 

I asked my wife (a 'westy' German), and she admitted there might be a folder mentioning her trip over across the West Berlin area from the early 1980s.  Beyond that, she's confident that nothing nasty exists on her. 

The problem with this private folder business, and people turning in reports....some of this might have been legit and truthful information (you had four beers and insulted the local mayor).  Some of this might be fraudulent information and false (you had some super-secret affair with a CIA agent).  You might open up a pretty thick file on yourself and find just about every third-page to be gossip material from your sister-in-law at the time. 

So the critics do have a valid point.  Personally, I'd be more in favor of just burning the entire collection.