Defending the private sphere

Photo by Matthias Wehnert

When I started my research on private life in East Germany about 15 years ago, I ran into a prominent colleague in my field. I told him a little about my ongoing project and he responded by saying, ‘Private life in East Germany – sounds like a very short book.’ The implication was that there was no such thing; in a world dominated by the Stasi and very strong State apparatus, the private sphere had supposedly been done away with After all, communism stood for the enlargement of the State and the domination of society and private life.

What I discovered was, in fact, the very opposite: under authoritarian regimes, the private sphere matters even more to people. Because the private sphere was not a given and really had no constitutional or political traction as an enforceable place, it had to be invented and defended by everyday citizens. They did this in a variety of different ways, and in so doing generated conflict with the State over the place and meaning of the private sphere under socialism.

A social contract

Evidence could be found among East German Christians, in terms of how the State monitored their activity both in church and at home; in court cases, citizens demanded the right to free conscience and religious practice. Claims to private life could be noted in citizen’s letters to local town councils about the right to a quiet and peaceful life. Here, they’d complain that there was too much noise being produced in their neighbourhood and that the regime owed them a certain amount of peace and quiet. For them, it was part of a tacit social contract between state and citizen – they worked hard and were loyal to the regime, for which the State in turn owed them a quiet and orderly private life.

One could detect similar claims in court cases about divorce, in which estranged partners would talk openly about their domestic problems and then demand that their private concerns should be respected. Likewise, housing authority files revealed a range of different ways in which people petitioned officials for the preservation of their private life free from any overbearing state interference.

East Germany was a particular case. Because of the Nazi background, the State always wanted to appear as one in which they were unlike their hated predecessor, the Third Reich. As a result, a relatively private sphere was something that they offered their citizens in return for hard work and good loyal service.

Associative private life

In the West, our ideas of private life are synonymous with the isolated individual; we often think of stories of solitude, of people removed from public life living in their own flat or house. In socialist cultures, they often speak in terms of an associational private life that encompassed a network of family and friends.

From the very beginning, private life in a country like East Germany was understood as linked to society. It did not imply a total withdrawal into the self or into a particular place. Rather, it signified small social gatherings or leisurely pursuits, such as gardening or weekends in dachas. Often this meant the spatial removes from the city, family holidays or personal travel. The automobile was not just an object of mobility as in the West, but instead became a cherished space of private life. In it, as noted in memoirs and recollection, you could be yourself and speak more openly.

Private life in public spaces

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Under state socialism, the spaces of public and private life were often inverted. For example, in the film The Lives of Others, the characters are fully aware that their flat is being wiretapped and bugged – they don’t speak openly there because they feel that there are probably hidden microphones. Instead, they have to go to a large public park nearby to have private conversations.

So at times, private life took place in open public spaces, while one’s private residence offered comparatively little privacy if the State was monitoring you as a dangerous citizen for whatever reason. The role of private spaces and practices shifted over time, and East Germans grew more savvy in terms of how they could successfully resist the encroachments of the State.

Citizens and the Stasi

We have inherited this image of East Germany as a kind of Stasi monolith lording over its citizens. In fact, the Stasi was a relatively small organisation in the 1950s and was still quite small through the 1960s. It was at its most expansive in the 1970s. At first this may appear counterintuitive since the 1970s saw a growing gap in Eastern European countries between the State and the citizen. In that decade citizens were given more latitude, as evidenced in a more relaxed youth culture, associational leisure pursuits and more open religious practices.

The moment at which the State and the citizens seemed to be drifting apart was also when the State security services stepped up their activity to monitor the effects of these social changes. So the golden age of the Stasi was really in the 1970s and 1980s, not the 1950s and 1960s, exactly when people were enjoying more personal freedoms than they had in the past.

Surveillance in East Germany

I conducted a number of interviews with East German citizens about their private lives, and not surprisingly they ranged widely in opinion. Some said that they had very little private life because they had been directly affected by the ways in which the State – the Stasi in particular – bore down on them. The State often exerted its power, influence and surveillance through residential officials living in housing blocks and towers that would report on citizens. So the freedom of one’s private life frequently depended on the zealousness of the local official.

In many cases, local Stasi agents and residential monitors were keen report writers. Most people in the building knew who they were and would avoid them as best they could. Others were comparatively laissez-faire and allowed people to get on with their lives. The degree to which people felt they were under scrutiny and surveillance depended not just on whether they lived in a dense urban environment or not , but often on which tower block they lived in. As a result, we need to exercise caution against blanket generalisations about an East German common experience.

Persecuted by the State

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Christians, political dissidents and homosexuals were among the social groups that attracted special attention from the State, and were often persecuted, blocked from universities and sometimes imprisoned. Personal choices and public behaviour coloured one’s relationship with the State, yet the severity of the conflicts with the authorities typically depended on local factors, social norms and individual caprice.

What I found striking in these interviews was what East Germans counted as private. As a Westerner, I presumed that privacy began at their front door, but that’s often not the way they saw it. Again, the concept of associational privacy was more important to them than the liberal idea of individualism. It was above all a matter of how they experienced and recalled their relationship to others.

Shared experiences across the Eastern Bloc

The East German Stasi was, of course, a particularly elaborate outfit, as was the Securitate in Romania. There was nothing of the equivalent in Hungary or Poland. But for the most part, what I have described for East Germany is not something that would have been unrecognisable across Eastern Europe.

Of course, things were very different further afield, in places like People’s Republic of China. I’ve had a number of discussions with Chinese historians, and they say that the conception of private life is very incongruous there. For one thing, three generations often live together in the same household, so it’s not necessarily the State bearing down as much as it is the crowded housing situation and family dynamics that render private life so untenable. When I discuss the role of private spaces in East Germany, they say there’s no real equivalent in China, due to social customs, the housing arrangements and the Party’s close monitoring of the internet.

Different cultural traditions and historical circumstances determine the extent to which societies define and value private life, and the same goes for socialist cultures. In eastern Europe, private life was never a given and had to be claimed and defended. But it remained dangerous – I interviewed a number of East Germans who had burned their diaries in anticipation of possible Stasi house searches. The State’s influence was in no way checked once you closed your front door, and this has been a common pattern in all authoritarian socialist societies.

Reclaiming the Stasi files

One of the things that marked out Germany from other Eastern European countries after 1989 is that, in the name of post-communist democratic transition, the German government granted all East German citizens the right to retrieve their secret police files. In 1989 and 1990, many Stasi files were thrown out or destroyed by citizens as a symbol of a hated and deposed regime. But many files were untouched.

A law was passed in 1992 giving all East German citizens the right to reclaim their Stasi dossiers, and many did. Some, however, chose not to read what these files contained; for them, it was better to live with the comforting myth that your family and friends were trustworthy and loyal to you all along, as opposed to learning otherwise and confronting the possible truth of betrayal.

The end of the regime

Enough stories were circulating early in the 1990s to discourage people from applying for their files, but nearly two million did. When I conducted interviews with a few of them, people discovered many things in them. There were of course numerous stories of betrayal, but in other cases, they learned that their brother, cousin or partner did their best to protect them, so it cut both ways.

In the early 1990s, there was a great deal of media fascination with lurid stories of corruption and betrayal in connection with file revelations, but what I found most interesting was how many of them described the moment of reclaiming their police files, often years after the collapse of the regime. The retrieval of their Stasi file was the symbolic repossession of their private life, and for them that was the day – and not 1989 – when the state socialist regime finally ended.

Discover more about

Private life behind the Wall

Betts, P. (2010). Within Walls: Private Life in the German Democratic Republic. Oxford University Press.

Pence, K., & Betts, P. (Eds.). (2008). Socialist Modern: East German Everyday Culture and Politics. University of Michigan Press.

Betts, P (2008). Property, Peace and Honor: Neighborhood Justice in Communist Berlin. Past & Present, 201(1), 215–254.

Private life behind the Berlin Wall in East Germany