{"id":7308,"date":"2013-07-17T09:52:06","date_gmt":"2013-07-17T09:52:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/praag.org\/?p=7308"},"modified":"2013-07-17T09:52:06","modified_gmt":"2013-07-17T09:52:06","slug":"why-germans-hate-the-stasi-state","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/praag.org\/?p=7308","title":{"rendered":"Why Germans hate the Stasi state"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"germanmarshallfund\"<\/a>By\u00a0Constanze Stelzenm\u00fcller.<\/p>\n

Ah, German hypocrisy! During the cold war, you marched waving \u201cAmi, Go Home\u201d placards, but still let us protect you against the Soviets. Now you moan self-righteously about the National Security Agency and GCHQ reading your emails and listening to your mobile phone. You don\u2019t acknowledge that \u2013 unlike the US or the UK \u2013 you have had no domestic terror attack in the past 10 years. That\u2019s because we gave you information to prevent them; guess where we got it? Anyway, your Federal Intelligence Service snoops as much as it can. Except it can\u2019t do that much. Whereas we \u2013 oh yes, we scan! Could it be that you\u2019re jealous?<\/p>\n

That about sums up the American and British response to the uproar about alleged US and UK spying activities in Germany revealed by the whistleblower Edward Snowden.<\/p>\n

Sorry, friends: things are not that simple. This topic touches on historical sensitivities here. Our grandparents\u2019 generation feared the early-morning knock of the Gestapo. During the cold war, West and East Germans alike were aware that their divided country was crawling with spooks of all denominations. We recognised that mutually assured espionage helped prop up the bipolar balance of power. (It also made for some superb spy thrillers.) Still, no one misses the sombre paranoia, reinforced in and after the 1970s by the ramping up of West Germany\u2019s domestic intelligence services in response to homegrown terrorism.<\/p>\n

Germans who were born east of the Berlin Wall were careful to give the organs of the Staatssicherheit a wide berth. But it was only after the fall of the Wall in 1989, when the citizens who had brought down their government stormed the secret police\u2019s headquarters and realised the full horror of the web woven by the Stasi: neighbours spying on neighbours; husbands spying on wives. Joachim Gauck, our current president, was the first head of the Stasi Archives, the government agency that, 20 years on, continues to painstakingly piece together a full record of East Germany\u2019s surveillance of its citizens.<\/p>\n

Yes, we Germans have better cause than many of our allies to abhor the secret state. It\u2019s why we don\u2019t like closed-circuit television cameras. It\u2019s also why our constitutional court enshrined a fundamental right of data privacy, and declared it illegal for Germany to implement an EU directive on preventive data storage.<\/p>\n

That said, we understand that our liberal societies have enemies \u2013 and we need some surveillance to protect ourselves and preserve our way of life. We remember that some of the September 11 attackers were based in Hamburg. Like you, we\u2019ve done a lot since then to improve our domestic intelligence capabilities. We haven\u2019t heard many complaints about our ability to co-operate, whether in Europe or in Afghanistan. And, fair enough, this story has become fodder for an opposition desperate to unseat a seemingly unbeatable chancellor.<\/p>\n

Rattled at first, Angela Merkel snapped: \u201cFriends don\u2019t treat each other like this.\u201d Now, with her standing in the polls unharmed, Ms Merkel is calling for an EU-wide data privacy initiative.<\/p>\n

The truth of Mr Snowden\u2019s allegations has yet to be proved; they remain disturbing. Germany a target on the level of Iraq and Afghanistan? 500m intercepts a month? Embassies and EU representations bugged? You could try harder to dispel our misgivings. For all we know, no abuse of power was involved. But it is surely clear the intelligence services wield an excess of power. And, as we know, \u201cpower corrupts; and absolute power corrupts absolutely\u201d.<\/p>\n

It is not always easy to understand where our British friends draw the line between freedom and security. But it was Barack Obama who vowed on May 23 to end the war on terror, quoting James Madison: \u201cNo nation can preserve its freedom in the midst of perpetual warfare.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tell us about it. The phrase \u201cperpetual warfare\u201d reminds Germans that the most influential theorist of war without end \u2013 and of an untrammelled executive \u2013 was Carl Schmitt, Hitler\u2019s lawyer-in-chief. It\u2019s time for all of us to turn back the tide of executive power.<\/p>\n

The writer is a senior transatlantic fellow with the German Marshall Fund. Her article appeared in the Financial Times
\n<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By\u00a0Constanze Stelzenm\u00fcller. Ah, German hypocrisy! During the cold war, you marched waving \u201cAmi, Go Home\u201d placards, but still let us protect you against the Soviets. Now you moan self-righteously about the National Security Agency and GCHQ reading your emails and listening to your mobile phone. You don\u2019t acknowledge that \u2013 unlike the US or the … Continue reading “Why Germans hate the Stasi state”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7309,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[782,1295],"tags":[3988,51,3030,2912,2956],"class_list":["post-7308","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features","category-in-depth-coverage","tag-german-marshall-fund","tag-germany","tag-nsa","tag-prism","tag-spying"],"cc_featured_image_caption":{"caption_text":false,"source_text":false,"source_url":false},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/praag.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/07\/germanmarshallfund.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7308","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7308"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7308\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7311,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7308\/revisions\/7311"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/7309"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7308"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7308"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7308"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}