Deep in the belly of the former headquarters of the former German Democratic Republic Ministry for State Security are thousands of orange-pink files neatly arranged in grey steel shelves. It’s an old-style bureaucrat’s dream, but these documents lost their original purpose 30 years ago when the Berlin Wall fell. They are now kept there, still under the strictest of security, as a painful reminder of that time.

Inside the files are the handwritten oaths of allegiance to a country that no longer exists. These were a prerequisite for becoming a Stasi informant. “The writing was always by the person himself,” said Dagmar Hövestädt, spokesperson for the Stasi museum and archive. “If you sign it in your own words, psychologically it does a lot.”

There was nothing normal about being an informant because it meant betraying the trust of fellow citizens to serve the state. They had to be made to feel strongly about their cause even as the Stasi committed a great number of human rights abuses in order to keep the GDR going.

Many have since found it difficult to change and admit to the abuses. “Basically, to rewrite your life’s narrative, especially when you are in your 80s or 90s, that is too much to ask, because that means [your work] was basically all for naught,” Hövestädt said. “It takes time, it takes a reworking of your history, it takes understanding what was wrong.”

Acknowledging an extraordinary past is not only difficult for former perpetrators. A complex psychology is also at play for ordinary – and innocent – citizens, who also found their lives’ work wiped out. Many are still unable to express their feelings, and this is made more difficult by the fact that they feel their stories aren’t readily and widely acknowledged in the whole of Germany.

“You did not move [homes], but you had a migration experience,” said Judith Enders, a political analyst who was a child in the GDR when the Berlin Wall came down. “Maybe our parents lived in the rural areas of east Germany. They are still in the same place, but now they live in a completely different economic system and a different social system, and in a different country with different rules and different ideas of how to develop.”

Enders and filmmaker and author Dörte Grimm recorded the stories of east Germans for a recent project. Incidentally, in Germany people still talk of those from the former east and west as if the divisions are still alive.

“There are some sad stories,” Enders said. “Some people didn’t talk [before] about anything that happened after 1989. Some people didn’t want to talk, because they are still traumatised.” Most people lost their jobs and “maybe they were in a depressed social situation after reunification,” she said.

Grimm said many parents felt “shame and guilt” about everything that happened. “Their entire life work was devalued. For example, my mother had to accommodate the down-going of a huge company and she had to fire, oh, I don’t know, 500 people, and the same for my father.”

The changes were largely dictated by west Germany at breakneck speed after people voted for reunification.

“Sometimes if we look back, the Western society kind of dictated this transformation,” she said, adding it was inevitable. “You have to have a look at the economy at the time. The GDR was not able to pay any bills anymore. There was a group of people who had a third way on how to reunify those countries, but the economic situation was so intense that it [wasn’t possible]. It happened in such a small time gap. A lot of people now feel overwhelmed. They voted for a new system, but didn’t know what they would get.”

A far smaller population in the east – 16 million in 1990 – than in the west (63 million people), meant some experienced it not as reunification, but a swallowing up of east Germany.

Enders said it had to do with identity and the loss of memories – good and bad. Many feel disconnected and angry about what happened after reunification.

“It’s sad to say, but I think for this we are not unified, because there is not so much communication across the border about these things,” she said. In west Germany there’s also not much interest in asking how people feel about being unable to find their childhood memories in buildings, industries, school books, or even in the pictures that have been painted on the remnants of the Berlin Wall, she said. Many people in the east genuinely believed in socialism, and still vote that way too.

On the other side of the spectrum, the far-right and openly xenophobic Alternative for Germany (AfD) has found fertile ground for its ideas in east Germany in the past six years. In recent elections in Thuringia, in former east Germany, the centre-right Christian Democrats (CDU) lost out to both the socialist Left Party, for the first time the strongest party in a German election with 31% of the vote, and the AfD, which doubled its vote there to 23%. The CDU got 22%.

Local dynamics aside, it’s the third time this trend has been observed in recent German elections. On the upside, Grimm said the growth of the AfD in east Germany meant people were now sitting up and listening to east Germans.

Berliner Zeitung journalist Sabine Rennefanz, who grew up in the east, explained in a recent article in The Guardian why it was easy for the far right to take advantage of feelings of trauma and sadness. She said east Germans had for a long time “lacked the inner freedom, the time and simply the words to explain how the transformation of their world after 1989/90 affected them”, but they have since become more capable of doing so.

“People needed to find stability in their personal life in order to be able to express their anger and frustrations.” Now they’re also more sensitive to possibly losing this stability again, and want to guard against external threats.

The reunification brought along inequalities, too. Wages and salaries are 15% lower in the east, while GDP per capita is 20% lower, she wrote. “Not a single corporation has its headquarters in the east.”

If you want a traditional, well-paid career in a large corporation, you have to go west. Criticism of the west is also not so readily tolerated in public debate, and east Germans are often depicted as “Stasi officers, neo-Nazis or unemployed”. Those who criticised the hardships of the transformation were dubbed Jammerossi (the “whining east German”). All this give rise to dissatisfaction.

Outside Germany, the celebration of 9 November 1989 has turned to disillusion for those who were part of the east German project, too. Former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev’s spokesperson and adviser, Andrey Grachev, during a talk at the think-tank Dialogue of Cultures’ offices in Berlin in October 2019, said there would be no celebrations in Moscow because the divisions in the world and in Europe were deepening instead of disappearing.

“The great paradox with this history of the post-Fall of the Berlin Wall is that with every anniversary we discover that there are less and less of hopes and more and more of concerns,” he said. “We are living in a world that is very far away from the euphoric world of that time.” DM

Carien du Plessis was a guest of the German Federal Foreign office on an information tour to Germany in October 2019.