On the 20th anniversary of the Berlin Wall's fall I think back to the electrified atmosphere on the streets of Berlin. I was there, watching throngs of East Germans swarm through border crossings. A Fulbright scholar and social anthropologist based in Warsaw in November 1989, I drove with a friend through gas-rationed Poland and East Germany to bear witness. Back then many of the excited East Germans I interviewed -- even some border guards -- looked to the United States as a beacon of democracy.
Flash forward 20 years and many of the hopes of those who were present at the breaching of the Wall have not been realized. In much of the former Soviet bloc the intervening decades have been distinguished not only by young democracies, but also by corruption and shady insider dealing. But for Americans what may be more disheartening is that the roles of East and West have been, to some extent, reversed. Ironically, instead of the ex-Eastern Bloc looking to the U.S. as a model, the U.S. seems to be modeling its behavior on post-communist Eastern Europe. And nothing less than America's public interest is at stake.
The way that government and business now interlock in the U.S., notably in the wake of Wall Street's meltdown, is beginning to resemble the tangle of self-interested government-business "clans" and other such informal networks that emerged during the East's transition to a market economy in the 1990s. I have come to this conclusion after spending the better part of three decades studying communist and post-communist societies -- observing first how people circumvented the communist system, and when it was coming undone, how players positioned themselves to wield power and influence and thereby helped create the emerging order. This century, as I've turned much of my energy homeward, my prior experience has -- to my surprise -- proved ideal preparation for looking into similar issues in the United States.
In Eastern Europe what happened is clear. When the command structure of a centrally planned state that has owned virtually all the property, companies and wealth breaks down and no authoritarian stand-in is put in its place, a network-based mode of governing and business develops to replace it. Throughout the region, long-standing networks, positioning themselves at the state-private nexus, rose to fill leadership vacuums and, at times, reaped the spoils of previously state-owned wealth. Known variously as "clans" in Russia, "institutional nomadic networks" in Poland, and by still other names elsewhere, always their members were energetic and well-placed, sometimes also ethically challenged.
A "clan-state" arose in Russia in the 1990s. During that period, competing political-financial cliques –- or clans -- mobilized to exert control over the economy, energy, internal security and other valuable arenas. They had a strong footing both in segments of the state and in business or finance. Their loyalty was to their group, and to promoting that group's agenda, rather than to the broader public interest. A prime example of the Russian clan at work would be the "Chubais Clan," named after the young “reformer” Anatoly Chubais, which had earlier coalesced through a club of young intellectuals, then teamed up with advisors from Harvard University to carry out economic reform and privatization of state assets and became one of the most powerful clans of the era. Its comparative advantage in the Russian context was its access to hundreds of millions of Western aid dollars. To serve the clan's agendas, members of the clan closely guarded official information, made end runs around the bureaucracy and the democratically elected parliament, and straddled multiple and mutually reinforcing roles across government and foreign aid-supported private organizations.
A similar, but more benign, version of the clan developed in post-communist Poland -- the institutional nomad networks. The phrase was coined by Polish sociologists, but also sometimes crops up in the Polish media. These tight-knit networks are so named because their members migrate freely between institutions -- governmental and nongovernmental, including national branches of international banks and foundations. Nomadic networks were not nearly as likely as clans to cross the line into criminal activity -- there wasn't as much at stake in Poland as in vast and resource-rich Russia. (Besides, there is little evidence of criminal mafia infiltration in the Polish political establishment, as opposed to the institutional and legal frameworks of the Russian clan-state.) As with clans, however, the members’ primary loyalty is to their network, rather than to the institutions, both governmental and non-, for which they are working at any given time.
The nomadic networks were key players in the immediate post-communist years especially, but they still hold sway today. One such network that was very visible in the late 1990s, known as Ordynacka (and whose members first came together during their student days under the umbrella of a communist club), counts among its ranks the popular Aleksander Kwaśniewski, who served as president of Poland from 1995 to 2005. Ordynacka can't be reduced to a political party, NGO, social club, business or lobbying organization, yet its influence can be seen in the politics, the economy and the media.
Operating at the pinnacle, members of both clans and institutional nomadic groups secure the resources and power necessary to further their group's goals, whatever they might be, often at the expense of the institutions they supposedly serve. It may seem absurd to suggest that American democracy today has anything in common with Russia or Poland in the early 1990s, or far-fetched to compare American businessmen and government officials with Russian clans and Polish nomads. But in the aftermath of the financial crisis in the United States, some things are starting to look familiar.
The post-communist players bear a striking resemblance to the interlocking handful of Wall Street–government policy deciders who "coincide" at the highest echelons of power and have come to be symbolized by "Government Sachs." From those who ruined Enron to those who wrought more recent Wall Street wreckage, a lack of loyalty to institutions, including the dearth of regard for shareholders and boards of directors, has characterized the modus operandi of the Wall Street players who brought on the financial crisis in America -- and the world.
In both the East European and U.S. cases, operators at the top challenge governments' rules of accountability and businesses' codes of competition, ultimately answering only to each other. In both cases, it's hard to get more "efficient," because inside information and power is confined to very few actors who trust each other. And, because only the players have the information, they can brand it for everyone else’s consumption without anyone being able to challenge them. Their maneuverings are largely beyond the reach of traditional monitors. Gone are the messy disagreements and competing interests of the democratic process. You can hardly get more efficient, for example, than having two former Goldman Sachs executives like Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and assistant Neel Kashkari hand $700 billion in taxpayer money to errant financial firms, including a hefty chunk to Goldman Sachs.
Moreover, the intertwined coterie of financial and policy deciders in the United States is creating not only the financial architecture of the future, backed by the power and billions of the state, but, more generally, new relationships between the bureaucracy and the market. A perfect example of these relationships in Russia is Gazprom, the natural gas conglomerate created from the Soviet gas ministry in 1989 and staffed by nomenklatura turned capitalists. While it was nominally privatized in the 1990s, the Russian government holds a controlling stake and Gazprom is run by Putin cronies. Just as the Russian government holds a controlling stake in this major industry, bailouts have made the U.S. government a huge shareholder in two financial firms, AIG and Citi, as well as two carmakers, General Motors and Chrysler. Through their maneuverings, these networks help create new institutional forms of governance in which state and private power are not only interdependent but often blurred. With minimal public input or even notice, this new architecture provides more and more opportunities for the players to reinforce their power and wield influence -- largely beyond public scrutiny.
Though practically invisible to the public, the current challenge to democracy actually characterizes much of federal governance in the United States today. This state of affairs grew out of a reconfiguring of the balance between state and private interests, combined with a hollowing out of the regulatory and monitoring functions of the state. A major contributor to it lies in regulatory and policy changes associated with the contracting out of government work to private companies over the past 15 years. One result is that, today, most of the work of the federal government is actually performed by contractors. In fact, three-quarters of the people working for the U.S. government actually receive their paychecks from private companies, according to government scholar Paul Light. The outsourcing of many government functions is now routine. Contractors choose and oversee other contractors, control crucial databases, draft official documents, and run intelligence operations -- constituting one-fourth of the country's intelligence workforce. Government bailouts and stimulus packages are managed and overseen by contractor firms that can hardly be said to be disinterested.
While the public is familiar with the excesses of the now infamous Blackwater (renamed Xe), it is generally unaware that companies stand in daily for government. Many public priorities and decisions are driven by private companies instead of government officials and agencies that must answer to citizens, with officials only signing on the dotted line. In report after report, government investigators (such as the Government Accountability Office and inspectors general) have raised questions about who really sets policy -- government or contractors? -- and whether government has the information, expertise, institutional memory and personnel to manage contractors -- or is it the other way around? Other contributors to the new forms of blurred governing include the rising number and influence of quasi-government advisory boards, according to the Congressional Research Service, the upsurge in personal envoys forging public policy, and the drift of governmental legitimacy and expertise to private partners.
The upshot of all this is that new institutional forms of governing that join the state and the private permeate virtually all arenas of government, most visibly intelligence, military and "homeland security" enterprises, where so much action has taken place since 9/11. It is questionable whether the world's model democracy can be counted on to act in the national and public interest. And it is hard to see how all this can be unraveled. The challenge the current state of affairs presents to democracy and the free market may well prove more daunting than the dismantling of the Berlin Wall.
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Janine R. Wedel, a professor in the School of Public Policy at George Mason University and a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation, is the author of "Shadow Elite: How the World's New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government, and the Free Market" (Basic Books, Dec. 1).
Three calendar dates. Three anniversaries. Three eras in the history of the United States and the world.
Monday marks the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. On Nov. 9, 1989, the Communist dictatorship in East Germany, following weeks of protests, allowed the citizens of East Berlin to enter West Berlin. Ever since its construction began in 1961, the wall had symbolized the division not only of Germany but of Europe as a whole between the dreary, tyrannical Soviet bloc and the imperfectly democratic and vibrant West. Over the decades several hundred East Germans had been slaughtered by their own government as they tried to escape to freedom in the West. Now, on the night of Nov. 9, jubilant crowds streamed through the wall, and East Germans and West Germans collaborated to begin to tear the monstrous edifice down. The liberation of Eastern Europe from the Red Army and the reunification of Germany, the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the final collapse of belief in the secular religion of Marxism-Leninism, even in nominally communist countries like China, Cuba, North Korea and Vietnam, quickly followed.
On Sept. 11, 2001, radical Islamists hijacked jets as part of a conspiracy orchestrated by Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaida network. To the horror of a world watching on television, two jets crashed into the iconic twin towers of the World Trade Center, capsizing them and killing around 3,000 victims. Another jet crashed into the Pentagon, while a fourth, headed for Washington, plunged to destruction in a field in Pennsylvania, after passengers overpowered the terrorists. The U.S. invasions of Afghanistan, whose Taliban regime had hosted al-Qaida, and Iraq, which had nothing to do with the attacks on the U.S., quickly followed.
On Sept. 15, 2008, Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy. As news spread of the collapse of America's fifth-largest investment bank, credit markets froze and the Dow Jones industrial average plunged more than 500 points. In the next few weeks, the stock market quickly erased a decade's worth of gains. Waves of bank failures and business failures and mass unemployment, from North America to Europe to Asia, marked the greatest global financial crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
11/9. 9/11. 9/15. These three dates divide three eras in recent history: the Age of Euphoria, the Age of Paranoia, and the Age of Disillusionment.
The Age of Euphoria lasted from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the fall of the twin towers. In Washington, the fall of the Soviet Union was misinterpreted as the rise of the United States. The Gulf War of 1991 seemed to ratify American hubris. Using advanced technology designed to defeat the Soviet Union, the U.S. military quickly demolished the armed forces of Saddam Hussein's feeble regime. It was said that the world had gone from being bipolar to unipolar, that no force since Rome had been as powerful as America and its legions.
This was absurd hyperbole, of course. It was true that the U.S. was the only great power with power projection capabilities that permitted it to defeat weak states on the Eurasian periphery like Iraq, Serbia and Afghanistan. But America's unmatched abilities in the new colonial warfare hardly gave it hegemony over Europe or Asia. The U.S. military budget was strained nearly to bankruptcy merely by the cost of fighting low-level wars against primitive opponents in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some solitary superpower.
The other great powers chose not to compete with the "New Rome" because they had better things to do with their wealth. The Europeans slashed their military spending after the Cold War to pay for welfare and amenities for their people. The Chinese, having discarded communism in practice, threw their energies into building up a world-class industrial base. If Americans insisted on sacrificing American blood and American treasure to protect oil destined mostly for Europe and East Asia rather than the U.S., well, the Europeans and East Asians were not going to object.
Following the second pivotal date, 9/11, America's euphoria gave way to paranoia. Before the al-Qaida terrorists hijacked the planes, America was widely thought to be the greatest superpower the world had ever seen. Following the attacks, suddenly Americans saw themselves as weak, pathetic and about to be destroyed by a handful of stateless criminals. The response to the 9/11 attacks should have been a tough refusal to be panicked by acts of mass murder. Instead, bin Laden and his allies succeeded in provoking the panic and overreaction that they sought.
The Bush administration and Republican conservatives, having lost the national security wedge issue following the Cold War, realized that they could get it back. The American right, which had been boasting of how powerful America was, now warned of how weak and vulnerable the nation had become. Color-coded "terrorist threat" alerts from the new Department of Homeland Security stoked a pervasive feeling of anxiety. The possibility that Saddam Hussein might develop nuclear weapons and give them to al-Qaida to be used to destroy American cities -- a possibility that was remote to the point of absurdity -- was employed by the Bush administration to justify an invasion and occupation of Iraq, the actual strategic purpose of which remains debated to this day.
The threat of al-Qaida, though exaggerated, was and is genuine; witness the later, small-scale terrorist attacks in Madrid, London and Glasgow, as well as a series of plots to destroy airliners that vigilant authorities in the U.S. and other countries managed to thwart. And the recent atrocity at Fort Hood in Texas may have been motivated in part by jihadist ideology. But despite the best efforts of conservative politicians and ideologues to frighten the American people, it has proved to be impossible to sustain a high level of public anxiety for a prolonged period. The public mood changed in a national burst of laughter in February 2003, when Department of Homeland Security director Tom Ridge urged citizens to amass duct tape in order to seal their windows as a precaution against anthrax or gas attacks. The spell was broken. America relaxed. George W. Bush was narrowly reelected as a wartime president in 2004, but by 2006 the electorate no longer saw the connection between the costly war in Iraq and their own security and threw the Republican Party out of both houses of Congress.
The Age of Paranoia came to a final end with the global economic collapse that began on Sept. 15, 2008. The subject changed from the threat of terrorists with atomic bombs to the threat of bankers with financial bombs, in the form of unexploded "toxic assets" with strange names like credit default swaps and over-the-counter derivatives. There was a brief upsurge in optimism, when a young, vigorous, mixed-race senator named Barack Obama was elected president of the United States. With Democrats in control of the White House as well as Congress, many assumed that an era of sweeping change was about to begin.
But Obama soon proved to be a cautious incrementalist, not a bold reformer. He froze out innovative thinkers and assembled an economic team dominated by center-right Democrats, including some like Larry Summers who had helped to make the crisis possible by supporting the deregulation of American and global finance in the 1990s. Obama's Treasury secretary, Tim Geithner, said no to all proposals for serious restructuring of the financial industry that might upset investment banks and hedge funds. Every major idea for financial reform -- from forcing investment banks into insolvency and nationalizing them temporarily to restoring the Glass-Steagall separation of retail banking from casino finance and cracking down on offshore tax havens to imposing a "Tobin tax" on financial transactions -- was rejected as too radical by the best friends in the White House that Wall Street has ever had. By the fall of 2009, according to press reports Paul Volcker was considered too radical to be taken seriously by the Obama administration. Paul Volcker.
In other areas, Obama was just as timid and deferential toward the organized business lobbies who had helped cause the problems he claimed to be trying to solve. He appeased pharmaceutical companies as part of an effort to push a health reform plan that was too feeble to be truly "historic." In the name of combating climate change, Obama and the Democrats pushed a complicated cap-and-trade system that invited manipulation by industry lobbyists and Wall Street investors. In every area, the Democrats rejected bold, deep reforms in favor of incremental changes that would not upset Wall Street and other industries that showered Obama and Democrats in Congress with contributions.
It has gradually dawned on Americans that the dynamic leadership that the times require is not to be found -- not on the right, caught up in a cultish Ghost Dance movement that conflates center-right Democrats with Nazis and Communists and King George, as enemies of the people, and not in the incrementalist, lobby-dominated Democratic Party of Obama, Pelosi and Reid. Popular rage is surprisingly limited. The mood overall is one of disillusionment and demoralization, like that of the American people during the Hoover years rather than after Franklin Roosevelt's inauguration.
But the present Age of Disillusionment that has followed the fall of Lehman Brothers may yet prove to be as much an overreaction to dramatic events as were the Age of Euphoria that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Age of Paranoia that followed the fall of the twin towers. The U.S. was never as strong as it seemed after 11/9; it was never as weak as it seemed after 9/11; and it is not as bankrupt as it has seemed after 9/15. Let us hope that we can work our way out of the present Age of Disillusionment, without the need for a new catastrophe to mark this epoch's conclusion.
The newest and most controversial piece of architecture in the Middle East will stretch a total of 300 miles through Israel and the West Bank, a $1 billion combination of trenches, electronic fences, concrete walls and razor coil rising in some places to 25 feet high. When completed, it will cut off Jerusalem from Palestinian areas to the north and south -- a requirement, Israeli officials say, to stop Palestinian suicide bombers from entering their country.
After months of construction and simmering conflict, the project has emerged this week as a high-profile flash point in the ongoing, White House-led Middle East peace talks.
For journalists though, the barrier poses another problem: What does one call it? A wall? A fence? The choice may seem trivial, but as with everything else connected to the Israeli/Palestinian struggle, the topic stirs deep passions and fierce debate.
"It's a reflection of the whole Middle East quandary," says Mark Jacob, foreign/national news editor at the Chicago Tribune. "They can't even agree on a word."
Palestinians refer to the structure as a wall -- Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat labeled it the new "Berlin Wall," and many others call it an "apartheid wall" -- and insist construction will sabotage any peace plans that call for creating a Palestinian state. They fear it will permanently divide West Bank communities down the middle, making it difficult for citizens to get from one side to the other, and in some cases separating farmers from their fields.
Israelis maintain it's a much-needed measure of security, and one justified by an epidemic of Palestinian suicide bombings and terrorist attacks. "The construction is intended to keep out terrorists and extremists seeking to blow up the peace process," Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom told Israel Radio. To them, the barrier is a fence.
The two phrases carry clear public-relations connotations. "Fence" summons a homey image, a logical attempt at self-defense; "wall" conjures a prison, or the Soviet Union, or a failed security policy that's unable to protect its people.
That's one reason Israelis so adamantly reject the "wall" label. Appearing on NBC's "Today Show" this week, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon insisted: "First of all, it's not a wall there. It's a very small part where you have a wall. It's a fence."
In the middle are news organizations struggling to find a description that is both accurate and that doesn't raise charges of bias.
"Of all the groups that make their concerns known to us, none are more vocal than the Palestinians and the Israelis," says Eason Jordan, chief news executive at CNN. "And we've heard from them on this topic." He says the all-news channel refers to the West Bank structure as a "security barrier" because that is the best generic term to describe a structure that in some places resembles a high-tech chain-link fence and in others is a concrete wall.
A review of recent news dispatches shows outlets using a shifting assortment of terms when dealing with the volatile topic.
In a July 30 dispatch, the London-based Guardian detailed Sharon's visit to the White House, where the barrier was discussed. The Guardian opted for "fence," but not "wall." The Associated Press made the same choice that day, as did the Dallas Morning News, Newsday, the New York Post, and the Sacramento Bee, among others.
New York Times clips show the paper often uses "security fence" to describe the West Bank barrier. But a newspaper spokeswoman says the Times will now opt for "barrier" to avoid the politicized terms of "wall" or "fence." It will also drop "security" from the description, "because that is an Israeli term expressing the Israeli view" of what the structure provides, says the spokesperson.
Meanwhile, in its August 4 issue, Newsweek asked Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas about Israel's security "wall." Addressing the wall/fence question on Fox News this week, anchor Brit Hume told viewers the barrier "looks like a wall."
Some news outlets simply use both terms. Consider a July 30 story from the London-based Financial Times: "Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister, said yesterday that Israel would continue constructing a security fence." The next paragraph read: "Mr. Sharon said following a White House meeting with President George W. Bush that the wall would be built."
The Boston Globe on July 30 also juggled the two descriptions, but leaned more often towards wall.
In its July 28 feature on the topic filed from the West Bank, the Los Angeles Times ran a the headline "Palestinians Losing Land to the Fence" followed by a sub-headline "Israel's anti-terrorism security wall makes its way through people's property in West Bank." Inside the story, too, the terms were used interchangeably. "Palestinians, Israelis and international peace mediators all fear the fence will harden into a border. The wall's final route is a mystery ... "
Just two days later, covering Sharon's visit to the White House, the Los Angeles Times' Washington bureau story dropped any reference to a wall, and used fence. It did note, though, that Palestinians refer to it as the "Berlin Wall."
Something similar occurred at the Chicago Tribune. On July 26, the paper ran a dispatch from Jerusalem about the security barrier and referred to it nearly 20 times as a "wall." Four days later, detailing Sharon's meeting with Bush, the Tribune reported about the controversy surrounding the "fence."
"If everyone is talking fence, fence, fence, then the reporter may be more likely to use 'fence' than 'wall'," says Jacob at the Tribune. "But it was not conscious, and it does not reflect a change of policy at the newspaper." He says fence, wall, and barrier are all fair descriptions.
Some of the confusion may stem from the fact that President Bush has flip-flopped on the controversial terms. Last week when welcoming Abbas to the White House, Bush was quite clear when addressing reporters in a joint media appearance. "First of all, on the wall. Let me talk about the wall. I think the wall is a problem," said Bush. "And I discussed this with Ariel Sharon. It is very difficult to develop confidence between the Palestinians and the Israel -- Israel -- with a wall snaking through the West Bank."
The same day Bush's spokesman echoed his boss: "And on the issue of the wall, the president did express his concern about the wall."
But when Sharon appeared at the White House this week, where in private he told Bush "fences make good neighbors," the president changed course, and discussed the barrier as a fence. "Look, the fence is a sensitive issue," he told reporters.
The Washington Post noted how Bush "adjusted his terminology as well, calling the $1 billion project a 'fence' -- Israel's preferred term -- rather than the 'wall' used by Palestinians."
The Post itself did not have to make any adjustments; it most often refers to the structure as a fence.
The change in phrase was seen as a victory for Sharon and his trip to the U.S. As an Israeli security expert told the Christian Science Monitor: "Basically, Sharon came back safe. They [the White House] called the wall a fence."
Yet even last week, when Bush was using "wall," the New York Daily News and other news operations rejected the president's phrase and insisted on using "fence" even when reporting on the president's comments. The same with the New York Post: "'I think the wall is a problem,' Bush said of the 200-mile long fence." [Emphasis added.]
Perhaps the smartest approach is to simply inform news consumers about the semantics debate, and let them decide, the way CNN's Chris Burns did on July 29: "The Palestinians call it a wall of separation. The Israelis call it a security fence that prevents militants from crossing into Israel proper."
Says CNN's Jordan: "We lay it all out there and viewers can reach their own conclusions."
Some writers have to inflate their subject to make it worthy of them. Others take what I call the wrong-end-of-the-binoculars approach: They shrink what they're talking about so they can seem superior to it. The prime exponent of that school is Louis Menand. A few months back, the Incredible Shrinking Critic brought his method to bear on George Orwell in a New Yorker essay. In a sustained misreading of nearly every major Orwell work from "Down and Out in Paris and London" to the great essay "Politics and the English Language," it was inevitable that Menand would find fault with "1984." Treating it mistakenly as a prophetic (that is to say, clairvoyant) fable, Menand basically dismissed the book because its warnings hadn't come true. It's embarrassing to have to point out that by the time Orwell published the book, in 1948, his portrait of a totalitarian future, where thought as well as action is controlled, where the leaders have bought into the essentially religious notion that thought is the same thing as action, had already come close to being completely true in Stalin's USSR.
The Australian writer Anna Funder began living in West Germany in the '80s, eventually working for the state television station answering inquiries from viewers. After the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, she took it upon herself to interview both former members of the Stasi, the East German security apparatus, and the people they spied on. The result, "Stasiland: True Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall," is a mixture of personal and investigative journalism and a reminder that Orwell's vision kept coming true. As the stories Funder hears bear out, the totalitarian logic of illogic was perhaps pursued more rigorously and completely in East Germany than in any other Communist dictatorship.
Funder relates the statistics: "At the end, the Stasi had 97,000 employees -- more than enough to oversee a country of seventeen million people. But it also had over 173,000 informers among the population. In Hitler's Third Reich it is estimated that there was one Gestapo agent for every 2000 citizens, and in Stalin's USSR there was one KGB agent for every 5830 people. In the GDR [German Democratic Republic] there was one Stasi officer or informant for every sixty-three people. If part-time informers are included, some estimates have the ratio as high as one informer for every 6.5 citizens."
One of the worst aspects of culture shock for the East Germans who, overnight, found that their country no longer existed, was dealing with the revelation that the state's spies were their neighbors, family, friends, lovers, co-workers. That's what East Germans have learned from Stasi documents -- and what they are still learning in a steady, painful trickle. When the Berlin Wall fell, one of the Stasi's immediate concerns was to shred their voluminous files. Since then, a group called the "puzzle women" have been working to piece together the shredded files. Their story provides Funder with one more daunting statistic: With 40 workers reconstructing 400 pages a day between them, it will take 375 years to reconstruct all the files.
Like all the stories and statistics "Stasiland" relates, those numbers bespeak a paranoia that's both comic and horrible. One former Stasi official tells Funder that by the end of East Germany, 65 percent of the clergy were working as informers. And 65 percent of the members of one particular East German resistance group were informers. The delicious irony was that these informers swelled the public support for these groups, making it look like there were more East Germans openly against the government than there were.
So we have here the ultimate absurdist spectacle, a state spying apparatus so far-reaching that it nearly ran out of things to spy on. Which isn't a problem in terms of a totalitarian mind-set that can see enemies anywhere. The function of the Stasi was, as Funder relates, to arrest, imprison and interrogate anyone it chose, to open all mail, intercept phone calls, bug hotels, spy on diplomats, run its own hospitals and universities, and to train Libyan terrorists and West German members of the Red Army Faction.
Funder interviews people who suffered the worst of that -- like Miriam, who put up anti-GDR placards as a schoolgirl prank (she was 16 at the time) and was then given a year and a half in prison for trying to escape. There is Frau Paul, whose son was born with severe stomach problems that threatened his life. After the Wall was laid out in barbed wire in 1961, she and her husband were denied permission to go to the West to obtain the medicine that was keeping him alive. "If your son is as sick as all that, it would be better if he [died]," the official she saw told her. The East German doctors who treated the baby were smart enough to recognize the seriousness of his condition and smuggled him into the West. Frau Paul and her husband attempted escape, were caught and given four years' hard labor. She turned down the Stasi's offer allowing her to stay with her son if she helped them kidnap the West German who was aiding refugees.
There are also the Stasi officials themselves: the man who insists all the revelations of the state spying apparatus are smears, the one who regrets what he did, the man who for years hosted a program broadcasting excerpts from West German television to show the decadence of the West. This last man, known to the entire population, seems to have earned a special place of hatred in the collective hearts of East Germans. But his words to Funder about how the Wall was necessary to keep imperialism from infecting the East finds a weird echo in the former Easterners who talk about how much better things were under Communism -- how there were no drunks on the street, how their needs were taken care of.
The stories these people tell, particularly those of the victims of the Stasi, are the heart and drama of "Stasiland." But what pervades and unites all of the separate narratives in this book, whether told by victims or victimizers, is that they form an overriding tale of pettiness writ large. The arrests and interrogations and tortures and kidnappings and murders are the horrors here. Those experiences -- Frau Paul's imprisonment for wanting to be with her sick baby, how impossible it was for those deemed enemies of the state to live their lives or find work even after serving time -- are so deforming to these people's sense of who they are (Funder writes that Frau Paul treats herself as if she were a criminal, instead of the victim of a criminal state) that to describe them as indignities sounds pitifully inadequate.
Funder does full justice to these stories without milking them. She's a good listener and fine at channeling the voices of her interviewees. It's their own words that ennoble or exonerate or damn them. But it is in the minor incidents that you feel what it means to live under a system of rigidly implemented derangement. It's a picture of a land where Orwell's newspeak was the common parlance. And when the people who survived the GDR, or those who still mourn it, talk of that time, it's as if the dead officials and bureaucrats, and the ones still living, have risen to their former prominence to speak once more through them. For the residents of the former East Germany who appear in "Stasiland," the disappeared Wall is a phantom limb. The memory of Communist "logic" is the voice they still lapse into, a type of dadaist fascism that feels less real than imagined. When they relate their stories to Funder, the subjects here speak as if, perhaps this time, it will finally yield some sense. One of Funder's interviewees reports standing in line at the state employment office and asking the man behind her how long he had been out of work. All at once a state official swooped down on her insisting that there was no such thing as unemployment in the GDR. You are here, she was told, because you are seeking employment. The woman pointed out she was seeking employment because she was unemployed; it didn't matter. And nowhere was that doublespeak more apparent than in the name this mingy sliver of the Evil Empire gave itself: the German Democratic Republic.
"Stasiland" is, in its way, a very modest book. It is not a detailed history of the rise and fall of East Germany. Funder does not delve deeply into the reasons why so many East Germans collaborated with the state to spy and inform on their neighbors and families and lovers and friends. Some did it for money, some out of fear, others for the narcissistic thrill of feeling themselves indispensable to those in power. Funder's decision not to go too deeply into the reasons is not reluctance on her part or laziness. It's an acceptance of the worst aspects of human nature, and it shows a deep respect for the horror of the irrational by its refusal to indulge in the sort of psychologizing that only ends up trivializing it. Funder understands that the motives for some horrible behavior do not necessarily go deep. She knows that there are some lands, some corners of the human soul untouched by Rousseauist enlightenment, and that it's a fairy tale to think otherwise.
The crimes of Fascism offend our sense of justice and morality. And while the crimes of Communism do the same, the system Funder writes about here has a weird power to offend our intellect, our respect for logic, rationality, coherence, reason. At its mildest, that's the tinny reductive thinking you find in Communist art (the thing, for instance, that beneath its incredible craft, makes "Potemkin" perhaps the most simple-minded and cartoonish of all great movies). At its worst it is the sense that to have an independent or logical thought, to insist on things as they are rather than as they are said to be, is to indulge in criminal activity. Orwell chose the phrase "thought crime" well -- the crime isn't just in what you think but in thinking at all. And this is the infernal, literally maddening state that Anna Funder depicts in "Stasiland."
After several years of merger mania -- including this week's $129 billion MCI Worldcom-Sprint deal -- we're looking at some pretty huge telcos. But up-and-coming fiber-optic network RCN is trying to buck the trend -- at least with its latest marketing campaign. It's portraying itself as the anti-monopoly alternative, offering you a chance to thwart the telecom giants that control your bills. The trouble is, RCN's new advertising insert goes to such extremes to make its point that it can't help but backfire.
RCN is currently laying fiber-optic cable across the country, putting together the infrastructure for a network offering Internet, cable and phone access. The company has already launched a cable network between Boston and Washington; currently, it's working on the San Francisco and San Diego markets.
It's a daunting task to strip consumers away from the monolithic companies dominating the telecom industry. So, in an ongoing advertising campaign that recently reached the San Francisco Bay Area, RCN is appealing to the rebellious sides of the local post-hippie techies by pitching itself as a new revolution. Witness the insert that came in the local Sunday paper -- a monstrous folded poster, featuring images of revolutionary German mobs tearing down the Berlin Wall in defiance of their communist rulers.
"The greatest moments in history are made when people demand treatment that is fair and just. Sooner or later, all tyrannies crumble," the insert shouts in capital letters, embossed in appropriately revolutionary red and black: "Your telecom giants are next. Introducing RCN phone, cable and Internet."
Never mind that RCN is hardly an upstart revolutionary. It may be smaller than the telecom giants, but with only a few markets it already boasts 600,000 customers, and on Monday the company picked up a $1.65 billion investment from Paul Allen's Vulcan Ventures. To compare a fiber-optic network with a billion-dollar pocketbook to the German revolutionaries is ludicrous, not to mention insulting. It's unlikely that those who helped bash down the wall in 1989 would want their images being used to hawk American telco services.
Not only that, but RCN's insert is offering to send a little chunk of the Berlin Wall -- "a piece of history" -- to those who fill out an attached survey. The Berlin Wall is already an endangered monument, bulldozed and so worked-over by scavengers with rock hammers that hardly anything has been left standing.
RCN would be better off leaving historical monuments where they stand -- taking the money used to ship bits of concrete across the world and using it instead to build the best telecommunications network anywhere, and offering access to it at the lowest possible rates. That, more than false revolution, would do consumers a world of good.
Watching the dominoes fall in Berlin: Reflections on 11/9/09
East Berlin as seen in photos from 1967
Photos from East Berlin, 1971