The Stasi: An Inverse Narcissus Myth

"I said, you are not unemployed!  You are seeking work!" and then, almost hysterically, "There is no unemployment in the German Democratic Republic."

          Stasiland:  Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall , Anna Funder

The Ministerium für Staatssichherheit, or Stasi, were the state security agency for the former German Democratic Republic (aka East Germany).  They're widely held as one of the most invasive internal security agencies ever.  At their height, the Stasi had some 90,000 agents--far more, on a per capita basis, than the KGB or the Gestapo.  Including inofizielle Mitarbeiter (unofficial collaborators) they reckon that up to one in seven East Germans worked for the Stasi.

When the Stasi invited you in for a visit they would sit you on an uncomfortable stool chair with a little drop-cloth on it. Following the interrogation --which would, I imagine, be quite stressful--they would take the cloth and put it in a sealed   glass jar with your name on it.

Sealed-in Freshness: The smell of sweaty buttocks.

In case they ever needed to find you, they had a scent to give the dogs.  In my mind, I envisioned--deep in a subterranean chamber of the Stasi HQ in a suburb of East Berlin--these endless rows of shelves stacked floor to ceiling with plain glass jars, arranged in alphabetical order.

As Funder points out in her excellent book, despite the Orwellian invasiveness of the Stasi and the  staggering cost to the state to maintain them, they completely and utterly failed to predict the fall of the regime in 1989.  In the final analysis, they were useless.  Actually, it's even worse than that. Protestors early on in the revolution were few, but their numbers were greatly bolstered by the huge number of Stasi agents and informers among them pretending to be protestors.  This made the protests look a lot bigger than they actually were, which emboldened others to come out. 

The Stasi produced nothing themselves and exploited the proletariat of the socialist state far more than the Kapitalismus they detested.  What's the opposite of wrinkly?  Riiiight.  Irony.

Narcissus is the tragic figure of Greek myth who was so beautiful that he fell in love with his reflection in a pool, could not look away, and died.  The GDR were like a negative Narcissus. They looked at themselves, through the Stasi, and were as mesmerized by their repugnance, as Narcissus was by his beauty.  They could not look away.  The Stasi only found decay and rot; threats skulking in corners, plans hatching in windowless cellars.  They became so fascinated studying their own ugliness that when the end came, marching to the deafening blast of an oom-pah band, they didn't even hear it.

I thought this was rather a profound insight a first, but realized that this is an old metaphor.  See for example, a young Peter Falk as the General of  an anonymous Latin American coup in a Twilight Zone episode called The Mirror, broadcast 50 years ago yesterday, in fact.  Or underrated visionary director Terry Gilliam's scientists in his 1995 film 12 Monkeys. 

Peter Falk in "The Mirror"

12 Monkeys

Bono was wrong.  Every time you look in the mirror, you will find exactly what you're looking for.

Anyway, I'm going to write a story about the Stasi.  But since I only like writing horror and science fiction stories, I'll have to work Cthulhu or time machines in there somehow.  

In the meantime, I highly recommend Funder's excellent book, Stasiland.