THE POLITICS OF GERMANY’S STASI ARCHIVES:

While former East Germans will continue to be able to request access to the files, the headquarters of the Federal Archives in Koblenz seem a long way away. The right-wing AfD party, which is particularly popular in the former East, has tried to make political headway by claiming that the files will now be hidden away to shield the former ‘wall shooters’ — an allusion to the fact that some former GDR politicians have found a new home in the far-left party Die Linke. The argument that only 2 percent of the files are so far digitalized, something that the Federal Archives could speed up, is unlikely to cool the heated debate around the legacy of East Germany’s police state.

The head of the now-defunct Stasi Records Agency, Roland Jahn, told Spiegel magazine that the dissolution of his department was not a move to hide away from uncomfortable truths — quite the contrary. Where the focus in the 1990s was naturally on those directly affected, thirty years on Germans are beginning to think about future generations. Access to the files will need to be less personal, less ad hoc and more systematic if historians are to make sense of the bigger picture. There are fewer Gernot Friedrichs browsing through their own postcards. But private individuals will still be able to access their own files or those of close relatives.

Historians like me are happy to see Stasi files moved from their temporary department to a more permanent and professionally managed home in the Federal Archives. It is a rational way to transition painful memories into the annals of history. Germany is unique among Western nations in that it has to juggle the histories and legacies of two states within the framework of one collective narrative. The dissolution of the Stasi Records Agency is part of that painful struggle for Germany to come to terms with itself.

Earlier: Pandemic Paranoia Makes ‘The Lives of Others’ a Remarkably Timely Movie.