ABSTRACT
In the immediate aftermath of the events surrounding German unification, the Stasi debate was at the forefront of any discussion of the GDR’s problematic legacy, leading journalist Peter Jochen Winters to remark: ‘At the moment the confrontation with the SED dictatorship consists almost exclusively of tracking down employees of the former GDR’s Ministry of State Security’ (I-15). Joachim Gauck described the sensational emphasising of this aspect of GDR history as ‘Stasi-hysteria’, arguing that this tendency was indicative of obvious deficiencies in the approach to the confrontation with the past (I-2). Yet the hysteria and hyperbole which characterised the Stasi debate in its initial stages were arguably inevitable. If East Germans were not already obsessed with the Stasi after having lived their lives imagining that its spies might be just around every corner, then the post-Wall discovery that this system could have nurtured such absurdities as a husband reporting on his own wife only served to increase the macabre fascination of the issue.
