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Literary figures like Wolf were not the only prominent easterners to be profoundly discredited by belated evidence of Stasi collaboration. A number of reformist politicians had their careers in post-Wall Germany derailed by such unwelcome revelations. Ibrahim Bohme, head of the eastern SPD and formerly a fixture in East Berlin’s peace movement, disappeared from public life in 1990 after it was revealed that he had done some snooping for the Stasi. On the eve of his exposure, he was considered by many to be the strongest candidate for leadership of the GDR. The eastern-GDU leader, Lothar de Maizière, who had served as the GDR’s last prime minister, was forced to resign his subsequent position in Kohl’s cabinet because Stasi skeletons suddenly turned up in his closet. Accounts in the German press revealed that he had helped the police gather information on the East German Protestant church and on Bonn’s legation in East Berlin. According to his Stasi contacts, “Czerny” (the code name he had selected) had been a very useful informant, “honest, loyal, and reliable.” Manfred Stolpe (SPD), the post-unification minister-president of Brandenburg, similarly found himself under investigation for alleged Stasi collaboration during his tenure as a high official of the East German Federation of Protestant Churches. His was an exceptionally complicated case. Stasi files that surfaced in 1992 showed that he had attended numerous meetings with state security officers, but he insisted that his purpose on these occasions was solely to assist churchmen who had fallen afoul of the regime. He first denied, but later was forced to admit, that the Stasi had given him the code name “Secretary.” The collaboration charges and his spirited defense ignited a bitter battle in the Brandenburg parliament over his fate. The CDU and Greens (who tended to be high-minded on these matters) demanded his ouster as prime minister; the SPD and PDS came to his defense. Stolpe survived this challenge, but the attacks on him continued, making him in the eyes of many Ossis yet another victim of “victor’s justice.” The PDS leader Gregor Gysi, who was himself under a cloud of suspicion for Stasi contacts, charged that the allegations against Stolpe were part of a plot by Bonn to disqualify former GDR leaders from high positions in united Germany.

Stolpe and his political colleagues were tried in the court of public opinion, not in a court of law, but there were plenty of formal trials involving former GDR leaders and security personnel in the years following the collapse of the East German state. Post-Wall Berlin became the central site of this judicial “reckoning with the past.” As in earlier efforts of this kind, the results were on the whole unsatisfying. Many observers complained that the “big fish” were being allowed to swim free while smaller fry were hauled in and made to take the rap for the truly guilty. Some thought that the legal net was too finely meshed, others that it was not fine enough. In the end, the trials, like the opening of the Stasi files, impeded the healing process and exacerbated tensions between east and west.

According to the Unification Treaty, citizens of the former GDR could be tried for offenses that violated West German law, but punishment could not be imposed if the acts had been legal under East German codes. An exception to this last stricture, however, could be made in cases of such “extreme injustice” that the perpetrators must have known that they were violating international standards of human behavior. This of course was a recipe for legal confusion, not to mention political and social acrimony.