Valuable Freedom

I have been thinking about starting a Blog, and finally decided to take the plunge. There are things I want to say, and here people may be hearing them. “Freedom” is something that is very dear to me, to a level that sometimes even surprises me. Looking back at my life, I have realized that some of the formative events in that respect were a series of visits I made to the then-communist East-Germany.

Checkpoint Charlie, Berlin, 1985

Back in the late 1980s, visiting East Germany was not something one would do on the spur of the moment. It started off with the visa application. This application process would take six weeks—if you were lucky. To be safe, better plan two months of more ahead. As part of your visa application, you would have to specify where you would expect to be staying. In my case, I would be visiting a pen friend who lived in a small village not far from Dresden, and would be staying with her. She had told me that this information would go into her “file.” Nobody know exactly what information the Stasi (the East-German secret police) was collecting about the country’s citizens, but it was fully expected that contact with foreigners would be noted. Of course, the fact that she was regularly receiving letters from people in a capitalist country would already have been noted. Being a kindergarten teacher, which would have been considered a kind of public trust position, she would not have undertaken a regular correspondence with foreigners lightly. Choices like these could impact her career opportunities, could cause her to loose her job even. As someone born and raised in the West, I had always taken our basic freedoms for granted. Sure, western countries have their own “secret service” agencies, and we expect them to protect us against potential evil people. But I never expected that my government would want to know or care who I would exchange letters with, who would be visiting me, where I would travel. The East German government was known to keep that kind of information about its own citizens. In fact, with my visa application, they were bound to have opened a file on me. Sure, I could understand that there would be some kind of a background check if I would apply for a position that involves dealing with state secrets, and at such a point there might be questions about what I had done and who I would have known as a student. But for my East German friend, this was expected as part of every government job—and in a communist country, just about every job is directly or indirectly a government job. ... to be continued