The State Security of the GDR, or Stasi for short, monitored millions of people. Only when the Stasi archives were opened 30 years ago did those affected find out what information had been collected about them. Among them was the political scientist Enrico Seewald. As a teenager he was spied on for leaflet campaigns and eventually arrested.
SRF: What was in the files that the Stasi kept on you?
Enrico Seewald: The State Security first examined the surroundings of people who were, so to speak, blank slides.
I was only 18 years old when I was targeted by certain actions. My parents were already in the sights of the State Security before. Although they were simple people from a small village in the Ore Mountains, they had been spied on since 1966.
What the State Security did with people they did not know was to question the neighbors, work colleagues and acquaintances in order to get an idea of the person who was to be investigated.
The Stasi kept a file on you because of leaflet campaigns. And she wasn’t even sure that you were really behind it. What did these leaflets say?
For example, a leaflet was directed against military education. We were the first year in school to have these lessons.
The district administration wrote that we were bad opponents, enemies of the regime.
It read accordingly: «We have been educated to militarism here and that shouldn’t be. Oppose it and express your protest so that you will not be the fallen of the Third World War. ” That’s a bit naive, but that’s how young people did it.
Two 18-year-olds defend themselves against the military studies and that is why the state security has started up their whole apparatus?
When they still hadn’t tracked us down after more than a year, the head of the district administration got very angry and wrote about us in a statement that we were very bad opponents, enemies of the regime and that all the strength of the district administration must be used to liquidate these people as soon as possible.
In the end, you got caught. You were under 20 years old and jailed for two years. Then they were ransomed, were able to emigrate to West Germany and ten years later, after the end of the GDR, she was able to inspect your files for the first time. What new insights did that bring you?
The fight over the files was a huge one. The State Security frantically tried to destroy files at the end because they were not prepared for the overthrow.
Even so, the legacy of files, which are lined up 178 kilometers long, is a huge amount. The GDR secret service wanted to know everything. It was deeply ineffective. In our case there were 36 officers involved, even though we only distributed 400 leaflets. That is a completely absurd dimension.
Today you work as a researcher with these Stasi files. What is your balance, 30 years after the archives were opened?
Above all, one must be grateful to the people who protected these files from destruction. In the beginning, they were civil rights activists who sealed or occupied the Stasi objects in order to save the files. That was a great achievement in this German revolution.
The interview was conducted by Susanne Schmugge.