Innocents Abroad, or What I Didn’t Do on My Summer Vacation

Abstract

I The following tale is both unique and ordinary: singular in its mind-boggling outlandishness and typical in its petty arbitrariness. It is the story of an apolitical East German woman’s victimization by the Stasi (secret police) spy network in the 1980s. What distinguishes this account from other cases of human rights violations in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) is the senseless, farcical pseudojustification advanced by official authorities for this woman’s persecution. Most examples of Stasi harassment targeted individuals who had abrogated some law or policy; however inhumane it was, however reprehensible it was, retaliatory government action in response to such cases was quite explicable. By contrast, the case of Marina involves no criminal act or seditious conduct. As she told me repeatedly, Marina was an apolitical person during her GDR youth, and she remains so today. Why did the GDR government pursue her? Was it for the sole purpose of obtaining a “ransom” from her wealthy West German uncle? The prospect is both squalid and chilling. As we shall see, Marina was arrested, prosecuted, and sentenced to 18 months in jail, apparently for the primary purpose of extorting money from her uncle. Of course, Marina was just one of tens of thousands of GDR citizens victimized by the East German government’s surveillance of its citizenry. She herself strives to relate her experience within a broader context of East German violations of human rights standards. Although I believe she downplays the injustice of her own victimization and the degree of her own personal sufferings, her modesty does furnish us with both a valuable reminder of the pervasive terror regime over which the Stasi presided and a renewed appreciation of her bizarre and tawdry ordeal. Both East Germans and foreign visitors to the GDR have devoted extensive attention in recent years to the Stasi terror regime’s domestic surveillance program. For example, Timothy Garten Ash’s The File (1998) recounts his Hum Rights Rev (2009) 10:605–614 DOI 10.1007/s12142-008-0088-9