C - Organized Mobbing

event by providing the majority of the audience. The political night prayers
I discussed in the last chapter were, from the second one onward, strongly
frequented by the Stasi's social forces attempting to corroborate the group's
frustrations about not being able to conduct events as planned and to reach
a wider audience in the GDR. Finally, the Stasi even broke into apartments,
not just for searches, but to show that they could, with impunity, do as they
pleased in this regard. All activists I spoke with found this measure particularly
insidious because it confounded basic kinesthetic background understandings
about the boundaries between inside and outside, control and
contingency, safety and risk.
The manipulation of corroboration requires a high degree of environmental
control. What helped the Stasi enormously in this respect were the means
available to it in a centrally organized state oriented toward a common goal
by the membership of most significant actors in the same Leninist vanguard
party. Even though the Stasi had no formal authority to issue directives directly
to other branches of the administration or the economy, it produced
a formidable track record of organizing workplace pressures on dissidents.
These were often facilitated by employees who were co-opted as secret informants
and on whom the Stasi could rely as their own influence agents.
The Stasi's success is also owed to the willingness of employees in their role
as party members to cooperate with their comrades from the fabled secret
i police. After all, the Stasi could take for granted a basic agreement among
comrades about the dangers of political diversion that were prominently
discussed in general propaganda. A further reason for workplaces to comply
with the Stasi's requests was that they did not want risky troublemakers
among their ranks who could potentially endanger the productivity of their
work collectives or attract unwanted party attention by creating a stir around
some ideological issue. In either case this would have entailed blame ofleaders
for lax discipline or unsuccessful ideological work.
The control ofresources available to dissidents offered another set of means
for the Stasi to try their hand at decomposing dissidents and groups. A necessary
resource for action is time, and so the Stasi tried to deprive activists of
the time to engage in oppositional activities. Prison terms mark the extreme
end of such measures. Keeping dissidents employed was at times also choi
sen as a means to keep them busy. The Stasi learned in the course of time
that activists' underemployment in nondemanding jobs was detrimental to
their intentions. It gave activists time to think and to prepare actions; and
Perhaps even worse: it left the activists with dissidence as their main career.
I