A new documentary that relies on the spoken word of former Stasi prisoners invokes utter horror, and counters the trend of downplaying the horrors of the East German dictatorship
MARIO RÖLLIG wept bitterly the evening the Berlin Wall fell. But it was nearly a decade before he was confronted with the East German past he had risked his life to leave behind.
In January 1999 he was working in Berlin’s KaDeWe department store when a man in his early 40s asked him to recommend some cigars. “He was familiar to me – I wondered if he was famous. Then something struck me as unusual about the way he put his sentences together,” says Röllig, even now his friendly face freezing into a mask of fear at the memory.
Shaking, Röllig said to the man: “You interrogated me for months on end in 1987 when I was 19, just because I wanted to leave the country. I don’t expect you to give me a hug but I think an apology would be appropriate.” There was no apology. Instead, the man began cursing him.
“Have you still not realised that we were right to put you behind bars? What have I to apologise for? Regret is something for babies,” the man shouted and stormed off.
In that moment Röllig’s life collapsed, and his Stasi ordeal rose to the surface after a decade buried in his subconscious.
Röllig is one of more than 72,000 people arrested, interrogated and imprisoned by the East German Stasi, the secret police, for trying to leave the country by “illegal” means.
He is one of five former prisoners who told their stories to German director Stefan Weinert in his harrowing new documentary Gesicht zur Wand (Face the Wall). This is the real Lives of Others.
Most of those who tried to flee East Germany were not political campaigners, dissidents or troublemakers. They were teachers, parents and students with little in common except the burning desire to escape the daily diet of lies and manipulation in a state where 4 per cent of the population was, officially or unofficially, a Stasi spy.
Röllig was arrested trying to escape across the Hungarian border to Yugoslavia and ended up in a Stasi prison in East Berlin not shown on any map.
No one knew where he was, he was told. The insinuation: he was totally at their mercy.
He was interrogated for 300 hours over three months, eight hours a day, with everything recorded in the tiniest detail in his thick collection of files.
Today he gives tours of his former prison, showing how authorities kept prisoners isolated with a traffic-light system at corridor intersections.
If a second prisoner was approaching, the first was ordered to lower his gaze, turn and press his forehead to the wall.
After interrogations, trial dates were set where, beneath the appearance of justice being done, the Stasi set the sentence and locked them up with regular criminals.
FOR MOST 'POLITICAL'prisoners, the hope of release came in the form of a Freikauf, a lucrative East German business of selling prisoners to West Germany. In total, about 33,000 prisoners were sold to the west for the equivalent of €1.25 billion.
“It was like modern-day slave trade; they were soul sellers,” said Catharina Mäge, another former Stasi “political” prisoner from Dresden, whose polite manner is tempered by a fragile personality that flares into glowing rage.
Some 20 years on, with statute of limitation on their crimes passed, former Stasi officers have reorganised to spread disinformation and even attack former prisoners in public. Yesterday evening, they met at a high-profile conference in Vienna.
Like all former East German civil servants, Stasi officials receive regular state pensions. Last year the wage bill for retired army, customs and Stasi officers totalled €1.6 billion.
Meanwhile many of their former victims, with only limited social welfare entitlements, live in often shocking poverty.
After nearly two decades of discussion, the Bundestag agreed last year to pay Stasi victims a pension of €250 a month. The criteria for the means-tested pensions are so strict, however, that just 16,000 people have a claim, out of the estimated 200,000 former Stasi prisoners.
For film-maker Stefan Weinert, Gesicht zur Wandwas his contribution to counter the trend of downplaying the horrors of the East German dictatorship.
With no distractions, no archive footage and no mood music, it relies on the spoken word of witness testimony to invoke utter horror.
The film has been shown to huge acclaim at film festivals around Europe, but in Germany no one wants to know.
Public broadcaster ARD has rejected it for contradictory reasons: one executive said the film was not interesting enough, while another said it was too harrowing for their viewers.
“These are stations run by the 1968 generation who have either no interest in this topic or who feel they cannot fit it into one of the pre-packaged formats,” says Weinert.
AS THE MEMORYof East Germany fades, there is pessimism among former Stasi victims that their ordeal will be remembered in the history books: their inability to trust, to work, to feel, to love.
“You don’t see the damage,” says Anne, a school teacher from Chemnitz who recalls in the film her failed escape attempt.
“They destroyed the person I was. There’s a stone lying on my soul that will never go away.” Amid this week’s celebrations at the fall of the wall, hundreds of thousands of Germans had little to celebrate in a country they feel pays only lip service to their painful past. Instead, after risking everything to get to West Germany, former Stasi victims live with the knowledge that, sooner or later, they are likely to bump into their their former tormentors.
Most Stasi victims have given up hope of an apology and, as a result, say they are unable to forgive. “How can I forgive someone who sees no need to apologise?” says Catharina Mäge. “If someone earned their daily bread tormenting people and then went home and played with his children, then that’s something he has to live with.” www.facethewall.eu
