TRUDY RUBIN
Government unrestrained, then and now

April 4, 2007

BY TRUDY RUBIN

BERLIN -- On a glorious, sunny day in Germany's reunited capital, I found myself in the dimness of the Stasi museum -- a two-story concrete building that exhibits the tools East Germany's secret police used to spy on most of its citizens.

I came to this museum not out of perversity, but because I was impelled by the German movie "The Lives of Others," which offers a chilling and emotionally powerful portrait of Stasi surveillance of a fictional writer and artist couple. Directed by a young West German named Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, the movie is drawing huge crowds here, even though it has been 17 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall.


I believe the film also has significance for Americans post-Sept. 11, at a time of heightened concern over security surveillance in the United States. No, I don't think we are headed toward a Stasi regime in our country. But East German history reminds us of what happens when there are no checks on government power.

Germans tell me this is the first film that provides a realistic view of the suffocating surveillance methods of the Stasi. By 1989, about 92,000 secret police and 170,000 informers were taking compulsive notes on their victims in a country of only 16 million.

Most of these files were salvaged by East German opposition groups before the Stasi could destroy them. I witnessed one of these citizen takeovers in Leipzig in November 1989. Twenty-four local men and women, drawing courage from a huge anti-communist demonstration in the city center, demanded that the Leipzig Stasi let them into its headquarters. They took me in with them. I will never forget the faces on the secret police officials who clearly wanted to arrest us but understood that their world was collapsing.

When I left the headquarters, a mob of the demonstrators nearly lynched me before I could explain I wasn't a Stasi.

Standing in the Stasi museum, it is easy to understand that pent-up anger. The secret police invaded every aspect of people's lives.

You can see exhibits of the special tools they used to enter people's homes and the tiny bugging devices they installed behind light switches. You can observe a row of yellow cloths, in glass jars, that were used to collect body odor samples by swabbing chairs in kitchens or studies. You can look at rows of old-fashioned tape reels that collected data from bugged phones, and photos of refrigeration trucks that parked in residential areas with surveillance cameras.

You can read copies of some of the many thousands (or millions?) of letters to ordinary people that were opened and copied by Stasi envelope steamers. Keep in mind that all this bugging and transcribing was done with primitive equipment, before the computer or satellite age.

Today, a federal authority maintains the files, and people can request to see the information the government collected on them.

Andreas Shultze, the spokesman for the federal authority, told me he thought the requests were increasing -- this year topping 8,000 each month -- because enough time had passed that people felt freer to confront their history. That may also explain the popularity of "The Lives of Others."

Shultze himself was punished and spied upon as a conscientious objector in East Germany. I asked him whether he worried about a new era of government intrusion. "Since 9/11, I've asked myself over and over whether we could go back," he replied. "In special situations it might be legitimate to leave the way of freedom, but we have to keep the opportunity for a way back. If a special situation becomes a normal situation, then begins the problems."

This is another way of saying that democracy needs checks and balances to limit executive power. A glimpse into the unchecked world of the Stasi reminds me that those limits define the difference between their world and ours.

TRUDY RUBIN is a columnist and editorial board member for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Write to her at trubin@phillynews.com or at Philadelphia Inquirer, P.O. Box 8262, Philadelphia, PA 19101.
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DonCline

David Amagi said: "If you value liberty, peace, and abundance, realize that government--whether it calls itself a "democracy," a "republic," or a "workers' paradise," will only stand in the way."

That's true, and that is why liberty requires eternal vigilance. However, the inference that anarchy may be superior is certainly not true. The problem with anarchy is that there will always be laws. The question is not whether we want laws or not; laws are a given. The question is do we want laws to be made by our properly chosen representatives, whom we can turn out of office if we don't like their legislation? Or do we want laws made by the biggest thug on the block who enforces his personal edicts with a collection of lesser thugs who make sure they have all the weapons they need to enforce his rule, and you don't?

Anarchy quickly results in the latter kind of law, and no one in their right mind would call that "liberty".

Posted: Sat Apr 07, 2007 11:37 am

DavidAmagi

...did NOT grow more intrusive, grasping, and violent over time, despite any so-called "checks and balances?"

If you expect politicians to obey laws that restrict their own efforts to acquire and exercise ever more power, I'm afraid you are fated to be disappointed at best, and at worst impoverished and enslaved.

If you value liberty, peace, and abundance, realize that government--whether it calls itself a "democracy," a "republic," or a "workers' paradise," will only stand in the way.

Posted: Fri Apr 06, 2007 8:17 am

gosbuxgo

Writer Trudy Rubin: "This is another way of saying that democracy needs checks and balances to limit executive power."

Trudy -- check it out: the U.S. is NOT a democracy. It is a constitutional republic.

Check out the following article by Dr. Walter Williams, "Are We a Republic or a Democracy?"

http://www.gmu.edu/departments/economic ... ublic.html

Trudy, if you want to teach how the U.S. government is supposed to work, then it would help if you had the slightest clue as to what form that government takes.

Freedom!

Mike A. Smith

Posted: Wed Apr 04, 2007 4:33 pm

JonM.

Trudy writes, "This is another way of saying that democracy needs checks and balances to limit executive power."

Hmmm, I thought that our American concept of checks and balances applied to all three branches of the government, not just the Executive Branch.

This seems to be yet another despicable Bush = Hitler trope.

Posted: Wed Apr 04, 2007 4:22 pm

http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/arti ... /704040335