The horrors of the Stasi's East Germany.

• Author: Garvin, Glenn
• Position: Stasiland: True Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall - After the Wall: Confessions from an East German Childhood and the Life That Came Next - Book Review

Stasiland: True Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall, by Anna Funder, London: Granta, 288 pages, $16.95

After the Wall: Confessions from an East German Childhood and the Life That Came Next, by, Fana Hensel, New York: Public Affairs, 180 pages, $24

LIKE ITS COUNTERPART in Moscow, East Germany's Ministry for State Security--better known by its sounds-like-Nazi nickname, Stasi--regarded itself as the sword and shield of the Communist Party. Of course, lots of extras in Ben Hut had swords and shields, too, and that did not make them formidable anywhere off the MGM back lot. As a foreign intelligence service, the Stasi made few penetrations outside West Germany (where the term was disconcertingly literal--the Stasi specialized in so-called Romeo traps, sending handsome young spies to charm government secretaries out of not only their hymens but the documents they typed at work).

A typical example of Stasi impotence: When the Reagan administration furiously--and correctly--accused East Germany of sheltering the Libyan terrorists who bombed a West Berlin disco full of American soldiers in 1986, the nervous regime demanded an assessment of Washington's intentions. Stasi operatives in D.C. replied with rewritten New York Times articles. Jayson Blair was still in high school at the time, or the history of the Cold War might have taken a much more interesting turn.

When the Stasi did have sources made of flesh and blood rather than newsprint, the results were even more ludicrous. In John O. Koehler's 1999 book Stasi: The Untold History of the East German Secret Police, he published a captured Stasi cable predicting a U.S. invasion of Nicaragua in 1984. The source: "leading circles close to J. Jackson." That's J as in Jesse, Ronald Reagan's drinking buddy and national security sidekick.

At home, though, it was a different matter. When it came to spying on its own citizens, the Stasi combined Teutonic precision with Stakhanovite zeal. The Stasi-compiled dossiers on East German citizens found after the regime fell would make a stack 112 miles high. (And God knows how much material had already disappeared; in the final days before the Berlin Wall fell, the Stasi destroyed paper with such manic enthusiasm that every shredder in the country burned out, forcing agents to cross to the West on one last hard-currency shopping spree.) Virtually every living person in East Germany had a file in the Stasi archives, up to and including Communist Party chief Erich Honecker--who, when the files were declassified by the government of the new unified Germany, quickly asked to see his.

The Stasi knew everything about you, including your smell. Its agents routinely broke into apartments to steal soiled underwear, which it would store in sealed jars, to be used later by sniffer dogs prowling the sites of illegal meetings.

Adolf Hitler kept a population of more than 70 million Germans cowed with a Gestapo numbering about 40,000. Perhaps these days, when they share a beer on the ninth circle of Hell, East Germany's Honecker derides Hitler as a pussy disgrace to totalitarianism. Honecker had 102,000 Stasi officers--a bigger staff than the CIA, FBI, and National Security Agency combined--for just 17 million East Germans. It is not hyperbole to suggest that the Stasi was probably present at every dinner party ever thrown in East Germany; when you add in informers, there was one Stasi for every six citizens. The Stasi had so many infiltrators inside the country's ragtag dissident groups that one officer wrote a report warning that they were making the dissidents look far more numerous and powerful than they really were.

All those spies couldn't produce intelligence worth beans--the Stasi failed to predict the massive 1989 protests that toppled first Honecker and then the Wall itself--but they certainly turned East Germany into an Orwellian fishbowl. Spouses and even children--researchers combing the Stasi files after the Wall fell were horrified to discover the payroll included 10,000 informers under the age of 18--were potential eyes and ears of the regime; friends were suspect; and strangers were presumed to be Stasi until proven innocent, and probably well beyond that. "Relations between people were conditioned by the fact that one or the other of you could be one of them," writes Australian journalist Anna Funder in Stasiland: True Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall. "Everyone suspected everyone else, and the mistrust this bred was the foundation of social existence."

The ubiquity of its secret police and the degree of cooperation they received from the civilian population make East Germany an even more...