Word: stasis
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...address, his last name. As far as Dieter is concerned, the only fact that has any meaning these days is that until a few months ago, he was a member of the Staatssicherheitsdienst, the now defunct secret-police force known and reviled by East Germans as the Stasi. Once employment by the elite Stasi was a way of life. Now it is the curse of Dieter's existence. "Everybody has forgotten that we worked to make this country safe," he says. "We were the true believers, and now we are left with no jobs, no security, no safety...
Though the Stasis propped up an unpopular Communist regime for more than four decades and were notorious for their disregard of privacy and occasional beatings of prisoners, Dieter cannot understand why so much loathing is aimed his way. He insists he was only a maintenance man in a Stasi center, a mere speck in an elaborate organization that not only offered full-time employment to 85,000 people but also provided pocket money to a network of 109,000 citizens who snooped on their neighbors and co-workers...
...further rocked last week by the old apparat. Three days after the election, CDU leader Lothar de Maiziere was accused of cooperating with the Stasi, the despised state security police under the old regime. The information came from the same sources who had supplied the documents that destroyed the brief political career of Wolfgang Schnur, leader of the small Democratic Awakening, a partner in the CDU alliance. Schnur resigned when the reports charging that he had provided information to the Stasi about his dissident clients proved true...
...Maiziere, a lawyer, says that in his own legal work he was forced to have some contact with the Stasi while defending dissidents. The Stasi stain could spread to other parties, including the SPD. There are charges that as many as 40 of the 400 new deputies may have been in the service of the secret police. If any of these men are forced to resign as a result of their past activities, warns Manfred Stolpe, a top East German churchman, "this would be a terrible blow for our young democracy...
...standards of most young revolutions prior to the annus mirabilis of 1989, the event was rather tame. There was even some speculation that the Communist government had fomented the trouble to spread fear of disorder. Nonetheless, the sacking of Stasi headquarters epitomized a rising impatience with the pace of change in several East European countries. Increasingly aware of the strength they can wield in open demonstrations, many East Germans, Rumanians and Bulgarians seem to be growing more restive, more insistent in their demands. Their sights are often set, as they were in East Berlin, on the efforts of Communist officeholders...