C - Organized Mobbing

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516 CHAPTER NINE
long, and intensive contact with a set of people who were SUpposed O be
anti-authorities. Yet they ate with them, drank with them, laughed with th %-I
played with their children, listened to music together, and seemingly shared
their opinions and their feelings. On the other hand, they met one Single
officer, often several times a week, who for the most part was not a friend ,a
buddy, but in crucial ways knew more about them than anybody else. -rhat
officer had to remain a bureaucrat, even if he also once in a while cooked for
them, received them with coffee and sweets at their meetings, but who had
after all, a job to do, a report to write that had to follow a particular script
satisfy his superiors. The dormants were thus sandwiched between people
who thought and acted like friends even though they were supposedly en-
emies, and an officer who was a comrade, who, qua rules and regulatlo,,,
was not supposed to become a friend or even an intellectual partner because
his eyes had to remain fixed to the particular goals of the casework.
n e secret informants' most peculiar social situation helps US to under.
stand a curious phenomenon. After the dissolution of the GDR, when the
former informants were asked by the former dissidents why they had betrayed
them, the informants often said somethng to the effect that they had
only partially betrayed the activists, that they had in fact done both, work for
the groups in which they participated and work for the secret police. They
described their situation as "thoroughly schizophrenic," or as "full of contradictions."
When the Wall fell and the Stasi was dissolved, most of them were
relieved that their double life came to an end (not quite anticipating yet the
ostracization that was soon to follow).
In living and breathing with the movement members, these had, perhaps
imperceptibly at first, often become authorities for the informants. The activists'
recognitions began to count, and they began to transform the informants'
understandings. The Stasi was aware that what anthropologists call
"going nativs" \\-as a constant danger of their informant's work. Therefore,
guidance officers ivere asked to impregnate their informants with a firml'foe
image." They were asked to convince them that the activists were dangerous
carriers of PUT, threatening the socialist project. For example, Hager was
told by her guidance officer that Gerd Poppe had once said that "if matters
were ever to change again, they [presumably the Stasi officers and their informants
and leading party members] would all be hung." Yet, such explanations
did not satisfy all informants, and if they did for a while they lost some
of their credibility in the course of time. Winkler, Miiller, and Kaminski say
in unison that they tried to raise doubts with their guidance officers with
regard to the Stasi's assessment of the groups' dangerousness for the GDR.
They all read the movement members as desiring a reform of socialism as
it was-and that a reform was necessary, they themselves had no doubts.
Most of their guidance officers rigorously blocked such conversations, and