ABSTRACT
The brunt of the anger displayed when Stasi premises were stormed and occupied in late 1989 and early 1990 often fell on those at the very bottom of the hierarchy of power, on the Stasi’s secret helpers, the informers. Many of the 174,000 unofficial employees registered active in 1989, and of the many others who had worked in this capacity in the past, were not known as such to even close friends and relatives. The most extreme example of such a case was that concerning Vera Wollenberger (now Lengsfeld), who discovered that her husband Knud had been informing on her under the cover name of ‘Donald’ for many years. There was, at least initially, a period of uncertainty in certain interpersonal relationships when it seemed that the mysterious figure of the informer was ‘everywhere and nowhere, it might have been almost anyone and in the end it was no-one’ (J-102, p. 135). Clarifying who had or had not worked as a Stasi informer and putting an end to mass, often erroneous, speculation was considerably more difficult before the Stasi Document Law came into force at the end of 1991. Very few informers were prepared to come forward and admit to what they had done. Bärbel Bohley bemoaned, for example, the fact that, of over 50 informers reporting on her, not one approached her and confessed (I-1). Bohley had to wait until she was granted access to her Stasi file before she could establish with certainty exactly who had been reporting on her activities.
