Volume 39, Number 9 · May 14, 1992
East Germany: Crime and Punishment
By Amos Elon
I drove to Leipzig one afternoon this winter on Hitler's old Autobahn, which had just been resurfaced with asphalt. The traffic was heavy. Outside Naumburg the Autobahn became jammed up. An enterprising motorcyclist, renting out the use of a cellular telephone, drove past the long line of barely moving cars. The traffic continued to crawl at less than ten miles an hour. East Germans have brought up so many new or used Western cars since reunification that traffic on East Germany's antiquated roads now often comes to a complete standstill. It was almost dark when I finally reached Leipzig. I drove straight to the university where in one of the auditoriums a teach-in was taking place. Its subject matter was Aufarbeitung (the term, derived from psychoanalysis, means coping, coming to terms) with the horrors of the recent past under a regime as tyrannical as that of the Nazis though, as the saying here goes, one 'with reduced criminal energy.' The speakers at the teach-ins spoke bitterly of the readiness of so many East Germans to spy on their fellow citizens as full-time and 'informal' agents of the feared Communist secret police, the Staatssicherheitsdienst (Stasi).
Feature, 5677 words
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