2: Knowing Who to Trust and Trusting What to Know
The “rules of thumb” discussed in the previous chapter were applied by GDR citizens to decide what knowledge could be entrusted to whom, or to make judgements (whether conscious or unconscious) as to what kinds of knowledge might be trusted and thus absorbed into one’s own epistemological tool kit as the basis of individual behaviour and collective action. Whereas Chapter 1 explored different types and degrees of knowledge acquired and shared about the Stasi, this chapter focuses in more detail on gestures, relationships, and networks of trust underpinning the construction and circulation of knowledge. This is particularly important in the context of the GDR where the role of trust is often overlooked or underestimated.
Trust, according to the historian of trust Geoffrey Hosking, is “one of the most pervasive—and perhaps for that reason least noticed—aspects of social life. We need to display trust in order to live at all.”
1Hosking, “Trust and Distrust,” 95. Hosking underscores the historical contingency of trust, which “is not an invariant entity, present in different societies at the same level and in the same forms.”
2Hosking, “Trust and Distrust,” 106. Rather, “both its incidence and its social forms vary greatly.”
3Hosking, “Trust and Distrust,” 106. Whereas “[s]ome societies seem peaceful and stable, and their members relate to each other without acute or chronic distrust for generations,” others “are riven by apparently unceasing distrust, so that conflict between individuals or groups is always either present or latent, ready to break out at the slightest provocation.” Nonetheless, a society without trust is simply unsustainable: “no society can survive … on a diet of total distrust.”
4Hosking, “Trust and Distrust,” 106. In light of post-Wende revelations about the extent of Stasi surveillance and infiltration tactics, the GDR seems to fit clearly into Hosking’s second category of a society characterised by “unceasing distrust,” and we might be tempted to understand its ultimate demise at least partially as the result of the kind of “diet of total distrust” that Hoskings refers to.
Indeed, since the collapse of the East German state and the opening of the Stasi files, it has become a commonly accepted trope that the GDR was a society permeated by mistrust, suspicion, and betrayal. As Betts notes, “[t]he effects of Stasi complicity and the world of mutual surveillance were widely commented on after 1989. Most tended to see its destructive legacy in the breakdown of solidarity. Even the most resistant alternative subcultures—the Church, artists, dissidents, and punks—were riddled with Stasi informers.”
5Betts, Within Walls, 48. Writing in the mid-1990s, David Childs and Richard Popplewell commented that “the most appalling aspect of the system of IM was the breakdown of trust between officers and men, lawyers and clients, doctors and patients, teachers and students, pastors and their communities, friends and neighbours, family members and even lovers.”
6Childs and Popplewell, cited in Betts, Within Walls, 48. More recently, Lewis has written that “confidence and trust was sorely lacking in East German society,” noting that further research on the Stasi has “led to a heightened awareness of breaches of trust in the GDR.”
7Lewis, A State of Secrecy, xxvi. According to Lewis, the Stasi files, in particular, “paint a grim picture of GDR society as founded on chronic mistrust and born from a misplaced desire for total control.”
8Lewis, A State of Secrecy, xxxii. Revelations about the extent of the Stasi’s network of informants, as well as the existence and sheer volume of documentation held in the files do suggest that the GDR was a “low trust society,”
9Hawley, Trust, 18. something which is also borne out in many of the examples discussed in this chapter. Yet the fact that there was “widespread shock”
10Betts, Within Walls, 48. at those post-1989 revelations also points to a tension in retrospective accounts which emphasise rampant mistrust and betrayal: the shocked reactions implies that (some) trust had existed and that people were especially aggrieved when they discovered the identities of those they had mistakenly trusted. As we demonstrate in this chapter, “low trust” by no means equated to “no trust.”
Drawing on Georg Simmel, Lewis highlights the close connection between knowledge, secrecy, and trust in the modern era when “we have become more comfortable with not knowing everything about the people we deal with on a daily basis” which means that we tend to “trust others despite their secrets.”
11Lewis, State of Secrecy, xxxii. On trust and secrecy, see also Gallinat, “Power and Vulnerability.” “In dictatorships such as the GDR,” Lewis writes, “this trust in others was severely undermined … The regime did not value trust, and it filled this gap with modes of control. Because total control was in practice impossible to achieve, the regime was obliged to content itself with knowing everything about those citizens it could not trust.”
12Lewis, State of Secrecy, xxxii–xxxiii. Like other socialist states during the Cold War, the GDR leadership sought to cultivate and mobilise what Alexey Tikhomirov terms “regimes of trust and distrust” that would regulate citizens’ interactions with leaders, institutions, and each other.
13Tikhomirov, “The Grammar of Trust and Distrust,” 319–22. If the East German regime did not value genuine trust itself, as Lewis suggests, it clearly understood the potential power of trust amongst its people, which therefore needed to be regulated as far as possible and, in some situations, actively manipulated and undermined. As this chapter will illustrate, this meant performing and cultivating relationships of trust with potential IMs and encouraging informants to build trust or exploit existing interpersonal trust with their targets. This went hand-in-hand with another key mechanism of control, and an explicitly stated aim in the Stasi’s notorious 1976 directive on “Zersetzung”: the deliberate “instigation of mistrust and mutual suspicion within groups of personal circles and organizations.”
14Cited in Betts, Within Walls, 40. “Zersetzung” rested on a complex balance between trust and mistrust. Trust had to exist for it to be undermined, but there also had to be knowledge about the possibility of betrayal (and that knowledge manifested itself in mistrust).
The regime’s attempt to monopolise knowledge and trust, then, were mechanisms of power, which sought to curtail its citizens’ ability and willingness to grant each other trust and share knowledge. Yet this precluded neither individual expressions of defiant trust nor the formation of “communities of trust and distrust” at a societal level, which could serve as forums for exchanging formal and informal knowledge, including rumours and gossip.
15Tikhomirov, “The Grammar of Trust and Distrust,” 322–26. Whereas state attempts to construct regimes of trust and distrust were expressions of vertical power relations and mechanisms of control, the notion of communities of trust and distrust points to “horizontal bonds”
16Tikhomirov, “The Grammar of Trust and Distrust,” 324. and networks which were harder to regulate and control. These kinds of communities are particularly important because trust, like knowledge, is relational and habitual. Drawing on the work of the sociologist Barbara Misztal, Hosking advocates treating trust as “‘habitus’ in Bourdieu’s sense, that is, as a constituent of a socially learned environment.” In this understanding:
[e]veryday routines and habits are a crucial aspect of trust. They reduce social complexity, enabling us to function on “auto-pilot” for much of our life, and so they save our effort and attention for the unfamiliar and challenging. Families, friends and work colleagues develop familiar practices which simplify mutual interaction and construct a community identity, consisting of those people with whom we feel most at ease and with whom we communicate most readily. By the same token those practices delineate boundaries separating the “in-group” from the “out-group.” Trust and distrust exist in mutual symbiosis.
17Hosking, “Trust and Distrust,” 108.While the Stasi’s efforts to disrupt such routines and networks made it harder for people to judge the boundaries between those in- and out-groups, the examples in this chapter show that people did trust those in their inner circle and that there was significant distrust of those outside it, that is, of those they did not know. Our research demonstrates the circumstances under which trust was possible and reveals examples of communities where knowledge about the Stasi was shared on the basis of trust and where the issue of mistrust was openly confronted. In these contexts, trust was not devalued—nor automatically a sign of naivety—but a precious, if precarious, commodity. As we shall see, building and sustaining relationships of trust, even or perhaps especially with the knowledge that they might be infiltrated and undermined, was a potential means of resisting the state’s repressive strategies.