Kyodo World Service, August 17th, 2007
Selected editorial excerpts from the U.S. press:
SHOOT TO KILL (The Wall Street Journal, New York)
Estimates vary, but up to 780 people were killed by East German
border guards for trying to flee to the West during the Cold War. Yet
Saturday's revelation of an official 1973 order that Stasi
secret-police agents ''stop or liquidate'' anyone trying to escape
the socialist paradise has stunned Germany. The story preoccupies the
media and politicians alike.
Granted, the order is unique in its explicit inhumanity. ''Do
not hesitate to use your firearm, not even when the border is
breached in the company of women and children, which the traitors
have often used to their advantage,'' the document reads. Like other
totalitarian regimes, East Germany's apparatchiks usually referred to
state-sanctioned murder in more ambiguous terms.
The document, published days before the 46th anniversary of the
construction of the Berlin Wall on August 13, 1961, may help silence
former East German officials and their apologists who deny that an
order to shoot ever existed. Technically they are right: A public law
authorizing it never passed. But a plethora of documents, the
testimonies of former soldiers and, not least, the killings along the
former German-German border all prove that such a policy was in
effect.
So why did the current document -- which actually appeared 10
years ago in an obscure publication without gaining much attention --
so shock the country this week? In part it reflects a romanticized
view of the past. It is still popular in Germany -- and some other
Western countries -- to see communism as basically a good idea, just
an imperfectly executed one. In a survey two years ago, a clear
majority of Germans polled agreed with this view.
This benign interpretation of communism has paved the way for
Ostalgie, a German term referring to nostalgia for life in the former
East Germany. It's manifested in a revival of symbols, products and
brands of the now-defunct ''Worker and Farmer State.''
(Aug. 17)
