Mario Röllig is still struggling to get over his time in a Stasi prison while his jailers enjoy a peaceful retirement. Twenty years after the fall of the Wall, East Germany's former political prisoners want more recognition for their suffering -- and an end to "Ostalgie."
Mario Röllig can remember the day he arrived in East Berlin's Hohenschönhausen jail like it was yesterday. And recalling the three months he spent there in 1987 often makes him tremble.
"When we stepped out of the van there were men in riding boots with riding breeches and rubber truncheons screaming at us to remove our belts and shoelaces. I thought I was in a Nazi movie," Röllig, a 41-year-old Berliner, told SPIEGEL ONLINE.
PHOTO GALLERY: STILL PLAGUED BY MEMORIES OF STASI JAIL
Click on a picture to launch the image gallery (6 Photos)
Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Röllig's legs still buckle at the memory of being locked up without knowing where he was, of body cavity searches while naked, of being threatened with indefinite incarceration.
"They said if I didn't talk about my friends they would arrest my parents too or take my sister's child from her. They said 'no one knows where you are, we can do what we want and no one will ever find out. We'll just say you disappeared in the West.' There were moments when I really thought I might not make it out alive."
Plagued by Memories
Röllig still wakes up in a sweat at night wondering if he's broken prison rules by sleeping on his side. The sound of a two-stroke car engine still makes his heart pound because it reminds him of the van that brought him to jail in a five-hour odyssey that was aimed at disorientating him.
REPRINTS Find out how you can reprint this SPIEGEL ONLINE article in your publication. Like many of the 250,000 political prisoners held in East German jails during the 41-year communist regime, Röllig is suffering from a post-traumatic stress disorder. A noise or a smell can trigger a memory and cause panic.
Röllig can't work and has been in and out of psychiatric therapy and hospitals for the last decade. He had initially managed to suppress the trauma and was enjoying life in unified Germany until one day in 1999 when his world collapsed. A chance encounter with one of his interrogators in a Berlin department store brought all the memories flooding back and overwhelmed him. Röllig tried to commit suicide with sleeping pills that night.
He lost his job and has been fighting to overcome his past ever since. But Röllig keeps on returning to Hohenschönhausen, every month to give tours of the drab, concrete complex of 103 cells and 230 interrogation rooms that now serves as a memorial to the victims of the Stasi.
Why does he come back? For one, it gives him a sense of triumph. "A lot of the old Stasi guys still live in this neighborhood and this place is like a thorn in their side. I like the thought of that."
Warped View of East Germany
But Röllig, one of 72,000 East Germans jailed for trying to escape to the West, has another reason for confronting his past each month: He feels that many Germans have started to look back at East Germany -- also known as the German Democratic Republic, or GDR -- with an utterly unwarranted nostalgia that has become so widespread that there's a name for it -- "Ostalgie."
Röllig says the fundamental injustice of a system that locked its citizens behind a wall, spied on them and incarcerated anyone who criticized it or tried to escape is being masked by a growing perception that East Germany had a great welfare system, good schools and virtually zero unemployment -- appealing attributes at this time of economic crisis.
"I really can't stand this sentence you often hear these days: 'Not everything was bad about the GDR.' I'm speechless when I hear people going on about the great child care and the great education system in East Germany. It's a lie. People were indoctrinated there like they were under the Nazis."
Röllig said the Left Party, which emerged from the communist party that ruled East Germany to become a major electoral force in both eastern and western Germany, even sharing power in the city-state government of Berlin, has been propagating a warped view of the past. Left Party officials including Bodo Ramelow, the regional party leader in the eastern state of Thuringia, are on record denying that East Germany was an "unjust state."
Röllig said: "I'm not surprised many young people think East Germany was like the West, just without the freedom to travel and the hard currency. We ex-prisoners have to keep hammering home to people that it was a dictatorship. Only when every school book contains that statement will I stop coming here to give tours."
NEWSLETTER Sign up for Spiegel Online's daily newsletter and get the best of Der Spiegel's and Spiegel Online's international coverage in your In- Box everyday. Former Stasi Officers Regaining Confidence
Röllig and other ex-prisoners are becoming increasingly vocal because Germany is getting ready to mark the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Wall on November 9. But they're also motivated by frustration at the mounting self-confidence of former Stasi officers and prison guards.
In recent years Stasi members have been writing books about the good old days and taking legal action against newspapers or former prisoners who name them publicly. They have been emboldened by the passage of a statute of limitations deadline in 2000 since when Stasi officers can no longer be prosecuted for any crimes they committed apart from murder or manslaughter.
"They've all been coming out their holes and trivializing what they did," said Röllig. "Sometimes they take part in tours at the prison. They're easy to recognize because they usually have little handbags round their wrists, probably containing tape recorders," said Röllig.
"We've had people who suddenly shout out 'You're lying!' It used to make me angry but these days I ask them to come to the front and talk about their human rights abuses. They usually respond by walking off or just shutting up."
Read Full Article »
