
Schoolgirls who defied the Stasi - NeedMoreTea
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/may/11/schoolgirls-defied-the-stasi-across-the-border
======
mieseratte
If you find this era interesting, I recently read the book "Burning down the
Haus"[0]. Most histories I've read of the region and era focus a lot on the
mechanics or politics of it, but the book was interesting to me in that it
made you aware of the changes, the ebbs and flows of the East German security-
state over time as they fought against even harmless "dissidents" and the
abuses (and to a lesser extent incentives) to address those. Now I'm not
bleeding-heart, but a lot of the tactics really start to look familiar. Modern
America isn't that far removed from the Stasi.

[0] - [https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/how-
east-g...](https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/how-east-german-
punks-helped-destroy-the-berlin-wall-722926/)

~~~
coldtea
> _American journalist and author Tim Mohr admits that when he first arrived
> in Berlin in 1992, he was clueless to the reality of what the post-Wall city
> would look like. “I thought all of Germany was Oktoberfest basically,” he
> told punk writer Legs McNeil at Brooklyn record store Rough Trade last week
> to celebrate the release of his new book Burning Down the Haus. “I was
> shocked when I got off the plane and everyone wasn’t wearing lederhosen and
> holding giant beer steins.”_

And that person, with that knowledge of global culture, was a journalist?

At least in this case, traveling did broadened the mind!

------
DoreenMichele
_The bus had stopped under an archway, sheltered from onlookers. Tina and the
others asked the driver to open the back door for fresh air. One of them
chatted to the driver, while the others let Bernd in through the back. The
teenagers stood in the aisle to block the view. Bernd folded his almost 2m
frame into the hidden space, and the girls piled their coats on top._

This is astonishingly brilliant.

 _Some 20 minutes later, one of their friends picked up the onboard mic and
announced: “Our guest today, live in our show: Bernd Bergmann from the GDR!”_

This is where they went wrong. They should have kept quiet about it after
pulling it off, not announced it like they expected everyone to approve of
what they had done.

They should have tried to sneak him off the bus. At most, they should have
talked to their teacher or another adult to find out what they need to do now.
They may not have known to take him to a police station so he could formally
and officially "enter" the system/country.

 _All their lives they had been told to be brave in the face of injustice. Now
they were being treated like criminals._

Well, duh. That's why it requires _bravery_ to begin with. If everyone was
going to pat you on the head for it, the problem wouldn't exist to begin with.

~~~
soulofmischief
If you don't feel like a criminal in today's society, you are complicit.

~~~
DoreenMichele
My mother actually escaped East Germany in her teens.

I have plenty of criticism of what's wrong with the US. For example:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19888281](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19888281)

But I don't actually agree with your assertion, nor with other comments
suggesting that the US is currently about as bad as East Germany was.

After she escaped, my mother helped multiple relatives get out. Family stories
indicate that part of the process was sending enough cash to help them cover
bribes to get their papers. My dad was an American soldier. The exchange rate
was 4 West German marks to the dollar and 4 East German marks to the West
German marks, or 16 East Marks to the dollar. My father's relative wealth and
pragmatic attitude facilitated a lot of this.

You didn't have any means to wire it or whatever. You sent cash. Sometimes it
got to the intended recipient. Sometimes it didn't.

It took tremendous faith, willingness to trust and callouses to keep sending
help in the face of that and not just accuse desperate people of lying, etc.

My dad was a remarkable man.

~~~
cmurf
I agree it is not as bad as the DDR was, but it is way more decadent and that
may end up being every bit as effective as a police state. No one wants to tip
over this apple cart under some vague notion of ethics or actual equality - my
goodness no, we want to keep on being entertained and to buy crap we don't
need and have stuff. We have more attachment to stuff than we have to any
sense of rights let alone normative behavior for leaders. It's a classist
system of neo-feudalism and any attempt to moderate it is communism/socialism.
Who needs a police state when most people believe the propaganda willingly and
repeat it?

~~~
DoreenMichele
I gave up my car more than a decade ago. I spent nearly six years homeless. I
have lived in an SRO for about 18 months or so.

Since getting divorced, I have mostly not owned a TV. I think I have been to
one movie at a theater in the many years since my ex moved out.

I'm aware it is a classist, sexist, racist system in many ways.

I also seem to be the only woman to have ever spent time on the leaderboard of
Hacker News. I hit the board under my original handle of Mz about a month or
so after finally getting off the street, so a lot of the upvotes that got me
to the leaderboard were gotten during the years I was homeless.

I bitch regularly about the classism and sexism both in the world and on HN.
But I'm not really the right person to aim your remark at. Because if you
imagine you are "talking about me," then you have absolutely no idea
whatsoever who the hell I am.

~~~
coldtea
> _Because if you imagine you are "talking about me," then you have absolutely
> no idea whatsoever who the hell I am._

Making a point in a discussion is not about the personal circumstances of the
one we're talking to. Doubly so if they're an outlier, and triply so if we
don't know their circumstances to begin with, because the discussion happens
in an online forum.

~~~
DoreenMichele
A. I made that inference based on the framing of the remark, not based on
straight up stupidity.

B. Plenty of people here know plenty about my circumstances. I know because
they routinely use that against me.

So it is not unreasonable on my part to assume some people here do have some
idea who I am and what I'm about. I was, in fact, very recently told I'm full
of shit if I assume they don't:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19776469](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19776469)

~~~
coldtea
Well, I for one, never even knew the backstory. I wouldn't assume most do.

Could be a few that have grievances against you or something.

I've noticed that some people, on online forums, get an obsession with another
they had a dispute with (and felt wronged or whatever), and follow them from
post to post, gather intelligence, and act like stalkers. Then again, some
people are cuckoo with no personal lives and compensate in all kinds of
bizarro ways online. Best to ignore those kind of people...

~~~
DoreenMichele
I'm not assuming _most_ do.

I would thank you to stop trying to police my participation here. You have
something of a history of treating me like an idiot.

If you want to engage some point I've made in a good faith manner: awesome.

If you want to continue your pattern of talking at me like I have no fucking
clue how public discourse on HN works, please stop doing that. I view it as a
form of harassment.

If you are not consciously aware of doing that, well, consider yourself
notified that I have noticed a pattern of behavior here and it's something I
don't like and don't want done to me.

And if you are suggesting I simply "ignore" jacquesm, I assure you I've tried.
He's impossible to ignore. He's extremely influential here.

~~~
soulofmischief
Hi,

No, I don't know you well at all. No, I don't have any wish to control you or
silence you. With that out of the way, I've read a large amount of your
comments on HN and you seem to have a habit of turning basically any
discussion into a discussion about _you_. Not only a discussion, but one
framed as "attacking" you.

It's why I initially didn't respond to your comment. I was a bit confused at
how to relate your anecdote with my own post and eventually gave up.

It only related with a single sentence where you disagreed, and the rest was
autobiographical stuff with which you put me in a position where I would have
to disregard in order to move the conversation forward. I smelled a potential
argument and moved on.

Just because someone has their own opinions doesn't mean they're trying to
silence your own. And when you shift the conversation away from the topic at
hand and act like a victim towards every single person that replies, it really
just doesn't get anywhere at all. It just leads to cyclic, inflammatory posts.

I would suggest maybe reflecting upon this for a while, before replying to me
with the standard, "you have no idea who I am". It's often said we can learn
quite a lot about ourselves just by spending a few minutes with a stranger and
asking them their thoughts.

To quote an esteemed member of HN:

 _If you are not consciously aware of doing that, well, consider yourself
notified that I have noticed a pattern of behavior here_

You have a defensive streak that gets in the way of constructive conversation,
and that doesn't make you a crappy person. I myself have a problem with
getting aggressive at times when I engage in discourse. But we owe it to
ourselves to consider advice from others before disregarding it.

~~~
DoreenMichele
I engaged you in good faith elsewhere:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19891676](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19891676)

You have chosen to not respond to that and then you come here to describe me
as basically playing the victim card every time I open my mouth. You further
go out of your way to make sure that if I defend myself or disagree with your
accusation, that's just further proof of how I'm the problem and I'm in the
wrong and so forth.

Your comment is a personal attack and it's rather nastily framed to ensure
that whether I reply or not, anything I do is agreeing with your ugly framing.
Suffice it to say that I don't think it consitutes any kind of good faith
attempt to be helpful to me and I have no plans to try to take your claimed
"help" seriously.

------
pmoriarty
The most inspiring story along these lines that I know of is that of Sophie
Scholl[1], who (along with other members of the White Rose[2]) was beheaded by
the Nazis for distributing anti-war leaflets.

[1] -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_Scholl](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_Scholl)

[2] -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Rose](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Rose)

------
Zenst
This makes me wonder what the legacy effects of the Stasi today and one gauge
of that would be a measure of age demographic uptake of social media for
people who grew up under the Stasi and compare that to west german's of the
same age demographic.

A quick dig into this and:
[https://www.internetworldstats.com/europa.htm](https://www.internetworldstats.com/europa.htm)
proved a bit insightful, whilst this only has the data for Germany (as a whole
as it is again with no East/West) it does show in contrast to other EU members
a lower uptake of social media when you factor in internet access. Whilst
Poland does show lower, if you scale in internet access you see that Germany
per population is a lower uptake. You could also see some impact in previous
communist countries, though for many, internet penitration is lower and that
plays a factor. Bulgaria shows low usage but in relation to those with
internet access - it is pretty high. So hard to see any true correlation. A
better set of statistics would enable some true analysis. But on a quick
glance, it would seem to of had a legacy impact upon people who grew up in
that time who may well have a predisposition towards - not sharing personal
information.

~~~
NeedMoreTea
One of the clearest indicators that correlates with a difference in mindset is
to look at Google Streetview. Most places it's fairly uncommon to see a
property opted out. In Germany, it's really common to see properties blurred.

When it was first rolling out there were articles with pictures of streets
where more was blurred than not. Not sure if acceptance has increased much in
the years since then, but I'd assume the current young generation may be less
bothered.

~~~
Zenst
That's very interesting as it shows an active pursuit of privacy above and
beyond policing themselves, but also others in regard to themselves. I also
found
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Street_View_privacy_con...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Street_View_privacy_concerns#Germany)
interesting, and thought the perspective from this quote "At a forum on
privacy held in Berlin by the Green Party, a member of the audience asked
whether future historians would blame the current generation for leaving
German cities in digital ruins as bombs did the real landscape in World War
II", to be one aspect many would overlook and equally a most elegant way of
putting across a point that cuts thru the generation divides.

I suspect you are right about younger generations, but reading about an
historical event and experiencing it are two different experiences. Whilst it
is possible to learn from both, only one is a reinforced lesson.

~~~
NeedMoreTea
As interesting is that English language Wikipedia chooses to pick out that
minority, but more US-typical, view - I suspect German language Wiki may
emphasise it differently, whilst being equally neutral. :)

The Abwehr and SiPo, later Stasi and NKVD/KGB habit of adding people to lists
- of elites, of jews, of defectives that are to be corrected, reformed or
exterminated may be thought far more responsible than the current generation.
As someone who was thought privacy conscious even prior to Snowden, I'm
astonished the Dutch, Poles, British etc haven't turned out as strident on
privacy as the Germans. There was a SiPo list, and Gestapo list of British
elites and trouble makers to be eliminated on invasion, the Poles and Dutch
had their lists actioned etc. All the former Eastern bloc had their own
oppressive security apparatus just as long as the GDR.

> Whilst it is possible to learn from both, only one is a reinforced lesson.

As an aside that is why I am vehemently against the modern trend for
professional politicians - that gave us mainly wealthy elites playing at it.
Even if still young I want politicians with experience of a stint of war or at
least in the military, of extreme poverty, of manufacturing, or healthcare
etc. Those types of things used to be _the reason_ one went into politics.

------
wangchungtonite
The stasi exists now. When east Germany fell all citizens could walk into
their equivalent of the pentagon and look up their file. They had files on
almost everyone. This was 1989. Imagine what you could look up on yourself
today if the governments fell.

~~~
lumberjack
Although I'm sure that the NSA do their best, I would bet that Facebook and
Google have a much more accurate profile. Not sure if there is a point in
making this distinction, though.

~~~
Zenst
Precisely, when it comes to public companies and government entities, lines
can blur and governments do have a track record of introducing laws and
regulations to enable access.

Another way of thinking about it is - if the NSA wanted coca-cola's or KFC's
secret recipe; They would already have it.

But social media as a whole, is for governmental security services, the
greatest invention they never made.

------
TheLuddite
It's a sad story that the East German Stasi and Communist party thugs avoided
any type of punishment for their actions.

They should've been arrested, tortured, crippled, blinded and thrown on the
streets to beg so the people that suffered their action can spit on them at
will.

