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One person’s Abwicklung was another person’s opportunity: the process created thousands of vacancies across the former GDR, and many of these spaces were filled with Wessis. The eastern universities were particularly attractive targets for job-hungry western academics. In the first years after unification hundreds of suddenly empty chairs were filled by Western scholars. Like missionaries, some of the newcomers hoped to help reshape the “desertlike” academic landscape in the east. As the premier university of the ex-GDR, Humboldt-Universität in Berlin attracted a host of academic stars from the west. Efforts to effect a rapid westernization of that institution, however, yielded bitter disputes, as representatives of the old guard fought tenaciously to defend their turf. The rector, Heinrich Fink, who had been appointed shortly before unification, declared his intention to “renew” the university as far as possible with existing personnel, rather than through a thorough purge. This did not sit well with the new senator for Science and Research, who supervised the Berlin universities. He ordered Fink’s dismissal, citing as grounds the rector’s collaboration with the Stasi during his tenure as a theology professor. Seeing Fink as the victim of a Wessi witch-hunt, many Humboldt students, professors, and eastern intellectuals rallied to his defense. Meanwhile, other academic personnel who were being abgewickelt appealed their dismissals in court. The august university, which many hoped would be an ideal meeting place between east and west, became instead an ideological battlefield.

So too did Berlin’s literary landscape. The cause in this instance was not a formal purge but a widespread assault on the artistic reputation and personal character of a number of easterners following the opening of the Stasi files. Interestingly, pressure to throw open these files originated in the east, not in the west. Many GDR citizens believed that they had a right to know who had informed on them and what had been said. Officials of the federal government in Bonn, most notably Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble, warned that this could lead to an orgy of revenge-taking. Nevertheless, in 1991 the government passed a law that allowed access to personal files by the individuals upon whom the records were kept, but not to third parties. An independent commission was established to oversee this process. Its head was the former East German theologian Joachim Gauck, who (unlike Schäuble) believed that bringing the full scope of the Stasi crimes to light was necessary for collective healing. Of course, Gauck’s agency did not have possession of everything the Stasi had collected, since some records had been shredded right after the Wall came down and others had been sold to the press by Stasi men looking to finance their retirement. The records under Gauck’s purview, however, were voluminous, and many of them resembled shrapnel-filled letter-bombs, set to blow up in their viewer’s face as soon as they were opened. The East German feminist Vera Wollenberger, for example, discovered that her husband had been spying on her for the Stasi for years. Not a few citizens who gained access to their files later came to regret their curiosity. Some blamed the messenger, accusing Gauck of rubbing the Ossis’ noses in their sins, thereby aiding in the West’s campaign of humiliation. No corner of East German life was left undamaged by the detonations in the Stasi files, but East Berlin’s literary and intellectual community provided the most spectacular pyrotechnics.