BERLIN — For most Americans, a personal look back at life is a varied but benign journey, a mixture of satisfaction and regret, tears and laughter.
Not so for the Germans.
In a nation whose confrontations with history this century have already generated immeasurable personal suffering and endless public debate, people have started another painful trek through the past. This time they are searching the most disturbing chapter of East Germany's 40-year-long communist era--the dehumanizing and pervasive work of the infamous Ministry for State Security, known as the Stasi.
As victims gained access to their Stasi dossiers for the first time under a new law that took effect early this month, many feared that exposing the hidden horrors could cause an uncontrollable quest for revenge in the region.
"Something is about to overwhelm us with unbelievable force--a mountain of files, anAuschwitz of (our) souls," predicted east German writer Juergen Fuchs shortly before the new law took effect.
So far, more than 300,000 Germans have applied to see their files and the initial revelations have only confirmed Fuchs's worst fears.
What is happening in eastern Germany is part of a broader regional issue that continues to haunt the former Soviet-controlled nations of Eastern Europe. Some countries have shied away from a direct confrontation with the past.
Hungary's democratic government, for example, considered publishing a list of secret police agents and informants, but pulled back after learning that most secret police files had been destroyed. The rest have been placed under a 30-year quarantine.
In Bulgaria, a parliamentary committee has been established to decide between those who want secret police files destroyed and those who want them turned over to the media. And in Poland, occasional voices demand action but there seems little political will to seek out secret police collaborators.
So far, only Czechoslovakia has moved as forcefully as Germany, launching what has become known as "lustrace" --literally a purifying sacrifice--that includes a sweeping five-year public employment ban or demotion for anyone found on a massive list of former Communist officials and secret police collaborators. For a modest fee a citizen can find out whether he or someone he knows is on the list.
While the sweeping nature of the regulation and questions about the list's accuracy have unsettled many in the country, events in Czechoslovakia pale in comparison to what is under way in Germany.
Here, the sheer size of the Stasi network and the depth of the shadow it cast over individual citizens give the east German experience a dimension all its own.
Of all the internal security systems that operated in Communist eastern Europe, none managed to penetrate more deeply into the heart of people's lives, gather more extensive information and sow deeper mistrust than the Stasi.
Former East German dissident pastor Joachim Gauck, who heads the specially created German government authority responsible for maintaining the Stasi dossiers, says conditions are still too chaotic for any serious estimate on the number of files kept by the Stasi. Instead, hemeasures the information in miles--125 to be exact.
A master file containing a single cardfor each Stasi employee, collaborator and surveillance target covered more than a mile. Cards with the name "Mueller" alone stretched over 100 yards.
After the army, the Stasi was East Germany's largest single employer, with 90,000 full-time workers. It looted private mail, tapped up to half a million telephones simultaneously and generally gathered more information on more of the country's citizens than any internal security operation anywhere.
"In numbers alone, what existed here was larger than what was at work during the Nazi era," said Gauck, referring to the Nazi secret police, known as the Gestapo. "The level of cruelty was not worse, but the penetration through to the basic elements of society was better organized. There were more people and more money thrown into the surveillance apparatus."
What made the Stasi so pervasive--and so unique--was its success in recruiting an army of part-time informants, an army estimated variously at between 100,000 and 1 million otherwise ordinary citizens--lawyers, doctors, writers, schoolchildren, friends, neighbors, even spouses--who fed the organization's insatiable thirst for information. They provided details ranging from the location of the ironing board in a victim's apartment, to what a dissident wore when she took out the garbage, to a person's deepest medical or bedroom secrets.
"The efficiency of this penetration was very German--perfect, exact," said Gauck in an interview with The Times.
The results, as Germans are now finding out, were often chilling. Some examples:
