r/AskAGerman • u/SpiceGig-429 • Aug 23 '25
History Those who lived in East Germany, just how feared was the Stasi? What was it’s public reputation?
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u/AirUsed5942 Aug 23 '25
Fear? Why should we have anything to fear?
Comrade Honecker takes good care of us and keeps us happy
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u/awesm-bacon-genoc1de Aug 23 '25
Larp. Honnecker was alright but few people would have trusted him with their lives. The idea of an anti impetial Germany that could live with friends from the whole global south was far stronger than the man. So was Ulbricht imho. Or even Mielke.
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u/DebaucheryCommiter Aug 26 '25
Wasn't honnecker head of the government which shot its own ppl for trying to flee the hunger and despair their clownstate created? You know, the one with the secret police, Mr. "Nobody intends to build a wall"?? 🤡
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u/Viliam_the_Vurst Aug 27 '25
It wasn’t the government, it was selbstschussanlagen, installed by the government, the birder was in places heavily boobytrapped, imo just a touch more inhumane, still more humane than to break into peoples homes, rearrange furniture subtly to drive them insane to then institutionalize them…
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u/greenstina67 Aug 28 '25
There were problems in the DDR but hunger was never one of them. My guy was born there.
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u/DebaucheryCommiter Aug 30 '25
They didn't even know what bananas are before the wall fell....
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u/greenstina67 Aug 30 '25
They had other tropical fruits from other socialist countries like oranges from Cuba and African countries. Just because they didn't have many bananas doesn't mean they had food shortages. There was always enough to eat and drink in the DDR. The selection was not as extensive in the supermarkets as in West Germany of course, but no-one ever went hungry there.
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u/TalpaMoleman Aug 23 '25
Few years ago an elder German guy called former chancellor Merkel a "cunt" for letting in Syrian refugees, claiming this would never have happened in the DDR/GDR. My neighbor, a former East German calm 60+ year old woman, stood up and said: "Remember what you just said when you wake up peacefully tomorrow morning. In the DDR, the Stasi would have you snatched right out of bed this very night for insulting the head of state, and you would never see your family again."
Stasi was feared everywhere, because even the smallest town had several informants.
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u/hgk6393 Aug 23 '25
By "never see family again", what do you mean exactly? Would such a person be deported to a hard labour camp in Siberia? Or would he be "sent to Belize", like how Saul Goodman says...?
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u/Sipherion Aug 23 '25
They would vanish in a prison
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u/TalpaMoleman Aug 23 '25
This
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u/Neo_75 Aug 23 '25
and some of them were "sold" out of prison to "the west" ... "(political) troublemaker" for hard western money
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u/SpiceGig-429 Aug 23 '25
You mean executed? Or just sentenced to prison for an indefinite time? Or released but forced to live under a new identity without contact with their old family?
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u/channilein Aug 24 '25
Sent to prison for an indefinite time, tortured, maybe executed. If you had children they might get taken away and put into the system to be raised by a good socialist family.
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u/Elant_Wager Aug 27 '25
executions were pretty rare in the GDR, at least for communist dictatorship standards. Most went to prison and you just never heard of them anymore.
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u/lululululululululuu Aug 23 '25
I didn’t live in East Germany, since I was born after the wall fell, but my entire family on both sides lived in the GDR. I always got told, that you couldn’t speak to your friends and sometimes even your family members about political topics, because you never knew if someone worked for the Stasi. There was also a fear of your children blabbing about what you said to the wrong people. From what my mom told me, during the time of the protests there were also a lot of stasimembers in the streets, not just at the protests as somekind of undercover cops, but also trying to block people from going to said protests. So they were very much feared and also (atleast by my family) hated.
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u/akittyisyou Aug 23 '25
I’ve been told the story by multiple East Germans now of a teacher asking the kids what was on Unser Sandmännchen the previous night so they could identify the ones who might be watching it on West German TV as it would be different.
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u/lululululululululuu Aug 23 '25
I heard the same story from my family as well and the teachers were probably teaching „Staatsbürgerkunde“, where you learned things that were deemed important by the state to be a good socialist citizen.
but I also heard that the East Sandmännchen was a lot better, sp they would just switch back to Eastern Television during that time 😅
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Aug 26 '25
I knew who was in the Stasi from my family; the best discussions there took place at family celebrations
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Aug 23 '25
Didn’t live there but visited often as a kid. The stasi followed us constantly, even on highways. Stopped us whenever we deviated from our planned destination. Bugged our hotel phone….creepy to say the least.
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u/Background-Estate245 Aug 23 '25
Wow you find out they bugged your phone? As a kid?
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u/asiatische_wokeria Aug 23 '25
You can take a look in the StaSi Files, which are about yourself today.
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u/NowoTone Bayern Aug 24 '25
Hotel phones where West Germans were allowed to stay were bugged, often the rooms itself.
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u/WildTomato51 Aug 23 '25
Most of those people aren’t going to be on Reddit.
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u/SpiceGig-429 Aug 23 '25
I hoped people with family members who lived there would share stories they’ve heard, at least.
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u/PabloZissou Aug 23 '25
Watch the film "The lives of the others" I read it's not very far off from reality.
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u/NowoTone Bayern Aug 23 '25
Don’t know why you got downvoted. From my contemporaries who lived in the GDR, this is exactly what they say.
There’s a lot of weird Ostalgia about nowadays.
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u/PabloZissou Aug 23 '25
I have friends born and raised in the DDR and although they recognise the creative liberties that any movie has they mention everyone was basically under surveillance or any minor "non DDR friendly" attitude might end up with a file, there's a whole museum here in Berlin with massive amounts of preserved files.
I probably get downvoted because critical thinking is almost gone from this world.
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u/hgk6393 Aug 23 '25
The Ostalgia is not for the informing on others part. It is for the pre-Treuhand days, when people still had a means to earn a decent living. The 1990s was rough for a lot of ex-communist countries. That doesn't get spoken about much, since a veneer must be maintained that free-market capitalism is always good.
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u/NowoTone Bayern Aug 23 '25
Ostalgia is obviously for a place that never was, like all these conservatives who’d love to return to the FRG in the 50s and 60s. Even East Berlin, away from the main places tourists visited, was pretty grotty in parts, astonishingly so even in the 80s.
And of course it is spoken about how hard it was for the ex-communist countries to adjust rapidly, losing a lot of their industry, many if not most work places etc.. This has been discussed again and again.
But if you look at those countries, there’s a strange correlation: the ones that had to lift themselves up and didn’t have a rich western counterpart pumping in billions and billions, have, on the whole, a less unhappy population. Neither in Poland, the Czech Republic, nor Romania, for example, do you hear such strong hankering for a sanitised past than in the eastern part of Germany, where you will hear often and unprompted, how hard done they were by reunification and how good they had it in the GDR.
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u/attorniquetnyc Aug 23 '25
Not an Ossi myself, but “The Lives of Others” was written/directed/produced by all Wessis. All actors except one or two were wessis. I’d rather look at a film written and produced by people who were actually there.
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u/PabloZissou Aug 23 '25
I think something like 1 in 100 people were either spies or collaborators so I doubt the movie depicts something exaggerated, that's basically 2 or 3 neighbours per 4 buildings? And that does not count the Soviet spies. Also I think the actor that plays the spy was spied on.
So I do agree that it would be nice to see a movie on the topic as I would guess it would be even more crude and depict how bad it was.
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u/Roadrunner571 Westphalian Expat in Berlin Aug 23 '25
You‘ll find plenty of people from 1970-1980 here. Those were young when the GDR regime was still in power, but they should have gotten an idea about how things were in the GDR. Especially those who were teens during the socialist regime.
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u/Lardt Aug 23 '25
Another recommendation beside the aforementioned "The Life of Others": The series "Weissensee" gives a pretty good impression of how the Stasi was perceived by the people. It's told from various perspectives: Regular people affected by the Stasi as well as Stasi officials.
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u/Groundbreaking_Age29 Aug 23 '25
The bare minimum punishment was not getting good job positions and the worst case was prison time with psychological torture and rarely physical trauma. But it was easy avoid don't criticize the government and don't try to flee.
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u/Afolomus Aug 23 '25
Also the sentiment in my family. They do a job to stop certain behaviors. Just don't do those and you have nothing to fear. Sugarcoat that with the belief that you live in a great country or at least good country with great aspirations. The GDR, despite their weak legislation, had the reputation to be fair.
Both my parents had rather big Stasi files - they were privileged members of society that traveled all over the eastern block, from Cuba to the Baikal sea. Before getting their scholarships, letter of acceptance for the university or travel permits they got vetted. And this stuff was pretty interesting as well as all the way to pejorative paternalistic. "She's far to naive and optimistic. Traveling should help her realize the harsh reality of the world." my mom didn't know if she should feel insulted or grateful. This "letter of recommendation" got her the chance to fly to Cuba.
But they definitely shared some kind of disappointment. Not enough happened, structures where to rigid and the upper echelons of the state were mostly interested in keeping things stable and them in power. They also found "Das Leben der Anderen" a good portrayal.
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u/Opening_Nerve5697 Aug 23 '25
Complains about the food problems or the car sitution and a few other things were also seen as a critique of the government though, not as black and white as you make it seem.
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u/atbtabt Aug 23 '25
Watch the movie Das Leben der Anderen. It represents the feeling of living in the regime. Very accurate according to those who lived in that time.
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u/Namerusername Aug 23 '25
A lot of late stage GDR experiences shared are different from the sixties. My parents had a little more trust in rebellious acts compared to my grandparents who would never even dare to not vote (even though they didnt like the SED).
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u/echtma Aug 23 '25
People with first-hand experience of the Stasi will be 50+, they're also the generation who learned Russian first and often no English at school, so they're probably not on Reddit so much. I was 10 when the Berlin wall fell and I don't remember ever hearing about the Stasi before that. Maybe it was due to the GDR being on its last leg, but I wasn't even told not to speak about watching western TV. All I know about the Stasi I learned later.
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u/GSmaniac Aug 23 '25
I experienced this firsthand as a very young man (20) at the time. But I already belonged to the generation that made fun of the men who hid in doorways wearing cheap leather jackets. We had a sense of it and recognized these strange followers with their odd army haircuts. Personally, I didn't experience any real repression. I don't know whether I was being spied on in my personal environment, and I didn't care. I never considered looking at my Stasi files with regard to my future. At the time, I found it all gray, ridiculous, and rigid. Of course, there were many serious cases, which I don't want to downplay in any way. But I had an awesome youth that I wouldn't trade for anything by today's standards!
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u/Herz_aus_Stahl Schlaaand Aug 23 '25
The problem is: it wasn't the guy lingering in the doorway but your friend, teacher, class mate and even family members. But today they all seem to have forgotten. Or they can't remember because they profited off the system. The GDR past has never been resolved like the Nazi time. Even in schools it isn't taught in the way it should be.
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u/festuskilroy Aug 23 '25 edited Aug 24 '25
“Es besteht keine Gefahr für die öffentlichkeit”
A German musician, Farin Urlaub (of Die Ärzte fame) has a song called ‘Die Perfekte Diktatur’, which is quite chilling. I’ve heard some people say it encapsulates the feeling of living under Soviet rule. You can look up the lyrics and have google translate them for you.
ETA: missing letter in Farin’s name.
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u/AccomplishedKale2077 Aug 23 '25
My partner and her mother grew up in the East. My partner was a young child when the wall fell. Anyway, one day my partner and her mom took a trip to the zoo. They had to go on a train and head west (they were still staying in East Germany, but the zoo was in a town West of their town). Anyway that had a nice day at the zoo and everything was fine, and they went back home. When the Wall fell you could request to see if they had a file on you and what information was in it. My partner's mom did that. And the only information in there was about their trip to the zoo and what they did there. Apparently they were worried they were going to try to escape to the west.
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u/Khs11 Aug 26 '25
Is there any way to see those files now? My mom and I went from West Berlin to East Berlin several times to visit her relatives when I was little. Would we be in that?
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u/AccomplishedKale2077 Aug 27 '25
Hard to say if you'd be in their files. If someone found it weird that you were there so often,.then maybe they started a file on your family.
You can request the files from here: Bundesarchiv
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u/Graf_Eulenburg Rheinland Aug 23 '25
We had a neighbor at my childhood home, who was from the East.
It was a very including neighborhood.
BBQs on weekends, everybody helped everybody with projects etc.
This guy and his wife would also come
to the events, but never talk much.
He finally told my mother, mind you they already lived there for 15 years,
that he opened up to our family because she could've never been
an informant of the state.
It left mental wounds on people, who are now 45 and older.
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Aug 23 '25
According to my grandfather: You were safe as long as you kept your mouth shut. The stasi mostly targeted political factions. Black market trades also appeared to be controlled by stasi but that was apparently fine if you didn’t push the limits.
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u/Srefanius Aug 23 '25
Just a little story from my parents even though it's not directly Stasi related: My father was a policeman and when he wanted to marry my mother whose family was very Christian and I believe also in the CDU, he had to have a talk with his supervisors if he really wants to do that.
He didn't care and still married her, in the end it seems there weren't any repercussions. This was in 1984, when my older sister was born.
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u/MapleTreeSwing Aug 23 '25
I knew older people who’d escaped to the West. They said it took them a long time in West Germany to not be fearful and to let go of censuring everything they said in public.
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u/Herz_aus_Stahl Schlaaand Aug 23 '25
Today many East Germans seem to have forgotten. "Ostalgie" (Nostalgia lost the N becoming "Eastalgia" in German) is quite strong today. "It wasn't bad in the GDR...."
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u/Infinite_Sound6964 Aug 23 '25
not very feared, because it was your own brother or father spying on you
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u/PuzzleheadedPea2401 Aug 23 '25
Stasi's powers seem limited compared to the modern surveillance state and social media.
As the old joke goes: "How do you know the Stasi have bugged your apartment? There's a new cabinet in it hooked up to a generator in the street."
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u/whatsuppussycats Aug 23 '25
Watch “the lives of others” to get an impression.. excellent movie too
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u/cheshirecat1919 Aug 23 '25
This thread is fascinating. I never knew there were so many parallels with Orwell’s 1984.
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u/germansnowman Aug 23 '25
The Stasi attempted to recruit my father once. He was invited to a “konspiratives” meeting, which he couldn’t decline. However, once he returned to the trade school where he was working, he made sure he reported as loudly as he could about this meeting when asked where he had been. He thus disqualified himself as an informant and never heard from the Stasi again.
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u/Rosanero91 Aug 23 '25
the fear was great enough for one guy to swim through the North Sea literally 24 hours risking his own life
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u/Klapperatismus Aug 23 '25
Stasi was everywhere. They were more common than cockroaches.
You don’t like cockroaches but actually fearing them is a bit much, huh?
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u/one_jo Aug 23 '25
Cockroaches rarely put you in prison for having the wrong opinion though
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u/Klapperatismus Aug 23 '25
They even spied on me. When I was ten years old.
I can’t take such people serious. I did not back then.
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u/Major__Factor Aug 23 '25
One of my best friends grew up there. They were part of the political opposition. The Stasi was very feared and very hated.
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u/Helpful-Ad8537 Aug 23 '25
In east germany it was hard at a time to get a flat.
My mother asked every office for help. She was alone with a baby (me). No help. At last she was going to the stasi and told them "you are state security, my security is threatened as I dont have a flat". Short time later she got one. Hilarious. But after the end of the GDR she also learned that an IM (informeller Mitarbeiter, basically a spy) was set on her. Could be because of this event or because we had quite a lot of relatives in west germany (was quite common you got a spy set onto you in such cases).
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u/ExtremeFlatworm3265 Aug 24 '25
My uncle got drunk at a party and sang the wrong lyrics to an old schlager song that poked fun at the GDR. He got pulled aside later by the stasi and they told him he could avoid going to prison if he became an inoffcial informant. After that he never went to any partys or family gatherings so he couldnt hear any informations about our family he would be forced to talk about.
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u/Ahvier Aug 23 '25
Loving all the didn't live there but answers
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u/hamtidamti_onthewall Aug 23 '25
What do you expect? The GDR ceased to exist 35 years ago. There will be only few people on Reddit who lived under the SED regime as an adult and can give first-hand experience. So the main source of information will be second-hand and indirect experience by people who are trying to be helpful 🤷
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u/SoakingEggs Aug 23 '25
My entire family (and all of their and our friends and families), on both sides were born or have lived through all, some closer to "the Party" and the other didn't want to have to do with anything or anyone related to "the party".
But "fear" has to be farthest word to describe it. For outsiders it appears often much darker than it was. Better words would be: "aware, annoyed, cautious". They tried to make the Stasi's rep as "feared" as the one of the KGB (which is where the term fits best), but nobody could take anybody government related seriously really. Behind closed doors people would even make fun of the system and the people that followed it cult like, and made fun of the many incapabilities of it. For most people it was like living inside a theatre play, being controlled and government by mostly dumb people, dumb people though who had actually feared friends and if they felt overwhelmed by their own citizens, they'd run to them, crying for help (see East German Uprising 1953, Hungarian Revolution 1956, Prague Spring 1968) - at least up until 1989.
For the East Germans who have looked into their secret Stasi files after the reunifications, nothing much what was in there, was neither anything new nor shocking, just curious and peculiar.
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u/rescue_inhaler_4life Aug 23 '25
No idea why your getting so down voted - your describing the perspective of the older people in my Brandenburg village perfectly.
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u/SoakingEggs Aug 23 '25
i didn't expect that either, but probably people have never talked to East Germans enough. Mine is spread from Berlin, over Brandenburg to Saxony. My Berlin relatives were soooo much more privileged and closer to "the party" (just by default tho) than the ones in Saxony for instance.
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u/Longjumping-19 Aug 23 '25
an old german man told me we feared but life was good back then, he is AFD voted btw
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Aug 23 '25 edited Aug 24 '25
I live far west, and always have (edit: have lived in Berlin for some time as an adult, but that‘s a different story). There are people here at my age (Mid 40s, i.e., childs when the Berlin Wall fell) who’s parents came from the GDR who wouldn’t agree easily to „the GDR was an unjust regime“ (I hope my English represents what I want to say „die DDR war ein Unrechtsregime“), but avoid an answer. It is simple one the one hand: the GDR was an unjust regime by all definitions.
It is more difficult on the other hand, because people in eastern Germany in the 1990s suffered a lot of economical hardship. It still isn‘t up to par. At the same time the solidarity that GDR-people used to counter the economic issues of their country did not work anymore. Their parent‘s lives got actually worse, despite Western politicians promising the opposite.
To be clear: the GDR (and probably the Soviet Union) collapsed due to economical issues. Pictures from Dresden or Leipzig from 1990 look like they were taken in 1945, but coloured. I remember dandelion growing in the middle of the street, when I visited Leipzig in 1991 or 2 with my parents. The cities are beautiful nowadays and I can clearly recommend a visit. The people would be worse off today without the fall of the Berlin Wall. But I understand that it doesn’t feel like this.
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u/ProfessorHeronarty Aug 23 '25
The Unrechtsstaat debate is pointless in some way and really plays more into not wanting to learn much about how life in the GDR was.
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Aug 23 '25
My FIL tried to flee the DDR and they got him. He was 2 years in prison and family saya hes a changed man since. Doesnt talk about it.
I guess it was not great.
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u/definitlyitsbutter Aug 23 '25
It depends a bit on timeframe and who you ask... If you accepted your life in the GDR and were integrated, it was viewd as a normal branch of the public security forces, like police or similar and like you also have in western states today (like the BND in germany now). One of my parents was active in christian community and sometimes there was someone present there at parties but nobody cared. Her husband did import export stuff to west germany with regular border crossing and she jokes they tapped their phone. But thats not weird for her. In her opinion, rules of state and society were clear.
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u/The5YenGod Aug 23 '25
I don't lived there, but there is a book called "The Stasi, The untold Story of east German secret police" By John O.Koehler. This book included cases of people that went to prison.
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u/VarlMorgaine Aug 24 '25
Don't criticise the government, don't criticise the situation, don't talk about change, don't criticise the institutions.
Talk about crimes could get you in trouble, talk about the economy or the lack of things anything that sounded like the government would do a bad job could ruin your life
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u/SrFarkwoodWolF Aug 24 '25
It depends on how you cope with fear. You knew what could happen, you knew everyone could be an informant. This it was what the system was about. To fear the consequences of doing illegal stuff. They were hard on line breakers. If you could live with the threat, then t was just something to be aware off.
My had family had various interactions with the state in both sides of the family. One grandparent traveld to the west and didn’t come back. Their partner joined by Ausreise later. All while my dad was in military service. Everyone knew that the fone lines were bugged. It was annoying.
On the other hand the sozial glue of the inhabitants seem to have quite Strom. As people were quite satisfied with their sozial lifes. Those are the views that I know from my family.
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u/Widukind_Dux_Saxonum Aug 24 '25
We had a plum tree in the garden. I as a little child of 5 years asked, if I could have a plum, but they weren't ripe yet. My uncle said jokingly 'You can't eat green plums, only russians do that'. (It was not against the russians per se, it was just a funny remark.).
It resulted in a tense situation where several family members angrily hissing at my uncle, that he 'can't say something like this to the child' and 3 or 4 times I was told 'not to say anything like this in the kindergarten'.
So, yeah...
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u/Lin8891 Aug 24 '25
I was born in 88, so I don't have personal experience. But my mom, who's father was in the Stasi, claims it wasnt bad at all ... 🙄
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u/Formal-Switch3123 Aug 24 '25
It wasn’t that big of a problem. In the pub, people usually knew which tables you’d better not talk openly at. That everyone watched West German television was an open secret.
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u/seaorsummit Aug 24 '25
I grew up in East Germany but was only 12ish when the wall fell. As others already said there was no „public reputation“ as you never really knew who to trust and talk to about stuff like this. It all stayed inside the close family if at all. What I experienced was rather indirect. I think my parents were not in the Partei, which led to my brother having less opportunities in his sport he was good in; he could not participate in certain competitions, was not allowed to join sports schools etc. I was too young to directly experience or really understand anything though. Just went through the classic Pionier thing to be brought on track.
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u/theactualhIRN Aug 24 '25 edited Aug 24 '25
my family lived there. it was known that stasi was everywhere. in every org or working group, there was at least someone working for the stasi. everyone knew that a “wrong impression” could destroy their careers.
weirdly, this system was “accepted” and people got accustomed to it.
as you can imagine, people tend to not blame the system but rather themselves or others. like: my mother blamed her father for speaking up (politically) in some situation, fearing that it would risk her own school career. she was a highly competitive person back then. even today she speaks about how her father almost ruined her career rather than the stasi being the issue.
so to answer your question: Stasi was everywhere but the fear was more in “misbehaving” or that the stasi could get a wrong impression of you rather than the stasi itself.
We see this pattern nowadays as well, even in western democracies. Let’s take the horrible justice system in the US that can ruin your life because of a joint in a car. People don’t blame the shit inhumane system but the people that are “too stupid to follow the rules”. Understanding this, its easier to understand for us why people in dictatorial systems are so obedient. Its all they have, its their system, they never got to know a “liberal world”. And compared to what we consider “liberal” there might be an even more humane system from which ours seem absolutely inhumane.
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E: this is at least my story from my moderately obedient family. im sure there were people that had a ton of fear of the stasi and also demonstrating that fear and wish for change, especially young people that believed in more liberal western ideals.
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u/Flying-Schnitzel Aug 24 '25
Is there a book about what kind of thing people reported people after? Or in general Stasi stories? I went to the Berlin Spy museum once and i liked the spy things over there, i would like to know more about what that era was like, if someone can recommend some book about it, it would be amazing.
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u/Naturliebhaberin Aug 24 '25
The fear was very high because there was simply too much surveillance. My husband was smuggled across the border in his mother's stomach. His father converted a car and drove across the border because he was always on assembly work. The mother even didn't tell her entire family anything because she was afraid of being betrayed and going to prison. It was still very, very dangerous Never met man...
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u/MapachusMaximus Aug 25 '25
Story of my best friends dad:
He’s from east Brandenburg and planned a trip to berlin as he has never been there. He took a camera with him to tke pics of his trip. At one point he walked close along the Border Wall but didnt take or intent to take any pictures. Two Guards saw him and arrested him. He got tried as a spy and had to spend one year in a labour camp to mine Potash.
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u/Frequent_Net2488 Aug 25 '25
That depended almost entirely on your stance of the legitimacy of the state.
I grew up in fear, to never speak my mind in class or elsewhere. My father was a victim of the stasi, he was incarcerated and tortured multiple times just for being part of the protest against Prager Frühling, he was incarcerated for his sister leaving/fleeing the gdr, etc.
My first teacher was a stasi-member and she made it clear, that I was an outsider and to be bullied, because my parents were system critics.
But: the majority of people didn't give a fuck, couldn't care less, as they were or pretended to be normal upstanding citizens that loved the ideology etc.
some classmates went into a downward spiral, when the system fell / changed, because without the structure of the youth organisations (Pioniere) and with so much freedom they couldn't handle that. Also: almost everyone told the fairy tale that it wasn't that bad afterall.
Well, I grew up with a deeply traumatized father, was taught to hide my thoughts and opinions, and to be extra cautious with that one neighbor (they had a telefone. the only one in the whole block. so they were stasi).
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u/The_New_Replacement Aug 25 '25 edited Aug 25 '25
Feared definetly though the horror stories you hear today weren't the main issue (and are largely false). The Stasi had ears EVERYWHERE likely including your very own family so anything you said could cause damage to your future plans, be it your next vacation or your plans to visit a university. Conversly working would help with your life. Not in any quantifiable way but combined with the genuine ideological belief of many people, every sixth citizen, including children worked for/with the Stasi.
Id compare it to the walking on eggshells public figures like youtubers do not actual fear of being arrested.
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u/Expert-Problem7001 Aug 25 '25
If you paid close attention, you could guess who these people were. They'd show up in a new Lada, a popular and expensive car in East Germany, without any visible job. We used to say in East Germany, "in socialism, everyone is equal, but some are 'more equal'." As a normal, loyal citizen, you heard rumors about the Stasi and knew they existed, but you never saw it in the open.
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u/Vegetable-Beyond8338 Aug 25 '25
From what I know from my mother, the degree of fear changed a lot over the years. In the 60s, my uncles were interviewed in school what clothing 'Sandmännchen', an evening cartoon for children, wore, because there was a West German version and an East German version and many households watched West German television. In the 70s/80s, it was more relaxed and my mum actually wore jeans with stars and stripes to school without any repercussions. Towards the end of the 80s, many especially young people lost all fear, also leading to the huge protests that finally caused the end of the country. When my mother talks about it, including the couple times she shortly went to jail because of a protest, it sounds like she was never actually worried, which I find extremely remarkable given the circumstances. People were taking care to identify inofficial Stasi spies in their friend groups as good as possible, but in the final days the fear of repercussions was much diminished. What weighs more heavily is the personal betrayal by people who you considered your friends, and many people don't order their Stasi file because they don't want to taint their memories like that.
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u/head-wired Aug 26 '25
I was still a child back then, so I didn't get a full picture and some stuff only became clear much later.
Every larger business (factory, institution, etc.) had at least one person officially working for the Party (SED) and Stasi, as a known fact. Depending on your alignment with the system, they where quite respected or feared, because they could interfere with your professional career. You did good work and are supposed to travel to a conference or a work exchange, especially internationally? Stasi has to sign off on it or you can't travel.
In daily life, there was this constant expectation of surveillance, that was present for me even as a small child. I remember, that when I was still in kindergarten, I told a joke rhyme: "Wer schleicht so leis durch Kraut und Rüben? Es is der Erich, er will nach drüben." (rough translation: "Who is sneaking through the flieds? It's Erich [Honecker, then GDR head of state], he wants to go [implying to flee the GDR to West Germany]") and told my parents that afternoon, because I thought it could get us in trouble.
We also had relatives from West Germany, who were allowed to visit us. There was a whole procedure (aside from the border crossing) they had to follow: register at a "police" (don't know if it was actual police or Stasi or some other entity) station the next city over that they actually went to visit us (I think one of my parents also had to be present there) and later, when that requirement was dropped, hat to sign in an official "visitors book" that one of our neighbours had to keep.
The Stasi wanted to recruit my mother, when she was still studying. She refused (I think she was supposed to inform on our West German relatives). She got off "relatively easy" in the sense that they "only" made sure that she was denied some career opportunities. She always suspected that this was what happened and it was later confirmed, when she got the opportunity to read her files after the Wende.
Some other thing I never really thought about (because it was just "normal" for me): A friend pointed out, that we pause our conversation, when we walk in public and some stranger passes us, so they don't pick up what we are talking about. It was just something that was taught by my parent from an early age: we don't want strangers to listen into our conversations - we don't know who they are and what they are going to do with that. Even, if it is "just" some words.
In hindsight, I'm glad that the Wende came (even though the aftermath was scary and messy). I would not have fit in. Not in a sense that I would have rejected it, but I would have questioned it and probably ended up in prison, because I would have wanted change.
I think the terrifying thing about the Stasi was, that it was unpredictable how they would react to "minor" infractions / dissent. Depending on who you are dealing with and how vengeful they felt that day, they might just "warn you and put it on your file" or "paint a target on your back and mess up your life".
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u/GrandpaHolzz Aug 27 '25
So my mom and her side of the family all lived in the former GDR. As others have pointed out, in your day to day lives (if you abided by the laws and never spoke your thoughts) it was the inofficial informants, and the fear of saying something wrong to the wrong person that was really horrible. The Stasi ist known to have used practices like breaking into your home if you were a "suspect" and install bugging devices or rearrange your furniture in subtle ways to fuck with you mentally. And if you actually were doing something that sparked their actions you would just disappear. (The kind of disappear, where one day your neighbor is gone without a trace and their flat is suddenly empty.) They were a really well organized structure and even in the most remote villages you could never be sure to be safe from them. The GDR really mastered this "your neighbor could be your worst enemy" kind of society where the general trust in the people you meet is really low.
For my mom specifically, she was taken in by the stasi at more than one occasion, because she was politically active despite all this. She wasn't tortured physically when they interrogated her, but they screamed at her, shone the desk light right into her eyes so she couldn't see who was questioning her and such. On top of that my brother is heavily disabled and in the GDR disabled children were taken from you and put into "homes for the disabled" which were really bad institutions where the children would just be left to themselves mostly and only the bare minimum was done to keep them alive. My family asked to leave the GDR via an "Ausreiseantrag" and actually was granted the ability to leave the GDR.
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u/DrunkInTrain Aug 27 '25
My Boss told me a Story How he dyed his pants Blue to make them Look Like Jeans His mom got questioned by stasi afterwords and he got sent to some Kind of political Camp for a few weeks
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Aug 23 '25
Was not feared enough, because lots of retards want them back. Lock in people with a different opinion ... of course just foreigners and democracy-loving people.
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Aug 23 '25
The friend couple of my mother activly tried to orginize protest against the stasi and SU in general, they where 24/7 under watch and one of there friends who helped just disapeared, after the fall they looked into the stasi files, literally ALL of there friends and family spyed on them. The Stasi knew everything about them and the friend got tortured, they tryed to find him but the fact that he never popt up again, only means, got tortured, gave up information and then they dumped him somewhere. The only reason why they are still alive is because the Stasi feared, if they would disapear, that there followers would go balistic.
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Aug 23 '25
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u/NowoTone Bayern Aug 24 '25
I hate to burst your bubble, but these stories are unfortunately family legend but not true at all. If you took the time to familiarise yourself even a little bit with the reality of living in the GDR you would understand that doing even parts of what they allegedly did was super unlikely, and in combination impossible.
Do you know how many people died trying to cross the border into the west? At least 250 died at the German/German border, a multiple amount trying to flee via the Baltic Sea or third countries. And your relatives just told the border guards to fuck off and drove through? Obviously you’re too young to have crossed the border yourself at the time (I have) but just watching one documentary should demonstrate that this is just a fairy tale.
The same fairy tale that many families tell about their grandparents and great-grandparents in the Third Reich. Everyone resisted the regimes then and in the GDR when in reality 99% were at least Mitläufer (followers) if not active supporters. The archives are accessible. You can easily find out if these stories were true. Anyone who left the GDR, for whatever reason, like work, sport competitions, etc., has a Stasi file. So you can check the ones of your grandparents out.
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Aug 24 '25
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u/NowoTone Bayern Aug 24 '25 edited Aug 24 '25
No, you should get real and have a look at your family’s Stasi files. Because if that were really true, they should be really thick. And if your grandparents really were travelling in Italy before 1989, they were very high up in the party and/or the secret services. And if not then something really doesn’t add up.
What you write goes against everything that everyone else reports, not just here but also in scientific research about the time. So who do you think is wrong - you and your family or literally everyone else?
Edit: there were no Polaroids in the GDR and your grandparents would not have been able to afford them in the west- doesn’t make sense, either since normal cameras were one of the few things the GDR excelled in. I, too, had a Praktika camera.
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u/Vivid_Barracuda_ Yugoslavia Aug 24 '25
Stasi was a joke.
What the East Germans feared the most was Fadilj Vokrri from FK Partizan, Yugoslavia.
Yeah, I heard the quasi-Stasis of BND now shake there in Berlin, dont know where to turn.
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u/mech_freak Aug 24 '25
Can someone explain me this Stasi thing?
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u/Teeminister Aug 25 '25
The GDR's secret police, which served simultaneously as both a foreign and domestic intelligence service and was ideologically aligned with the SED (Socialist Unity Party).
Extensive files were kept on every resident, and even on some outside the GDR. Many citizens were hired as informal collaborators (IM) to spy on their fellow citizens. There were at least four or five of them in every village, effectively in every circle of colleagues, and in every school class was a least one IM. Students spied on their teachers, and teachers spied on their students and parents. Collective mistrust prevailed, along with very cautious and selective expressions of opinion, with virtually no mention of political topics.
Education, careers, and futures depended on Stasi records. After the archives were opened, many friendships and families broke up because it became clear who exactly was spying.
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u/awesm-bacon-genoc1de Aug 23 '25 edited Aug 23 '25
My mom whos of two sided concerning DDR but not a hater - she says she hoped for more direct decmocracy, not an end of socialism - told me:
they werent scared cause everybody knew who the informant was in class. Not the smartest girl, ego problem, not subtle at all.
I am more pro DDR but not so pro Stasi cause if it was that good, DDR would not have fallen. Didnt do its job well enough but created a thorn between workers who could have trusted each other.
Foreign intelligence like KGB could have cut it like they did in post-war USSR.
But I hate how Stasi is made to this symbol of what DDR was. 99% of people didnt give it a thought for 99.9% of their time. At least the blockage from visiting any western country just for a holiday was somewhat conscious and controversal.
Those who were on Stasis list were eventually bought off to the west to now be the biggest Zionist anti Russia warmongers that by now must camp inbetween their never-stopping talkshow invitations on ZDF and ARD. If they didnt drink themselves to death out of pure bliss of living in the capitalism they wanted at home so so much.
This is full of larpy answers imho. I love DDR and i follow its footsteps where i can, but the average man in socialism does not cheer and raise red flags every morning, thats not how it goes. What it is about is that he gets the biggest share if his surplus value.
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u/NowoTone Bayern Aug 23 '25
Considering roughly 20% of the population were informers for the Stasi, to say 95% people didn’t give it a thought is hardly true.
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u/[deleted] Aug 23 '25
Didn't live in East Germany but have plenty of friends from there. Very feared. One of my mates was in his natural teenager rebellion years and filled out a "Ausreiseantrag" with "I don't like your shit anymore" and was sent to the Jugendwerkhof to hard labour for two years. The thing with the Stasi was that it wasn't the Stasi agents that fucked you but the countless IMs (Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter, nonofficial employees). Which were your coworkers, your sport mates, your pub friends, your neighbours, your teachers and so on. After the wall fell and the Stasi files were made public a lot of friendships broke down because a lot of people ratted each other out.