Matthew Longo

“M. lived a very private life; whatever discontent he felt, he kept to himself. This was surely infuriating to the Stasi. But it is hugely telling about the kind of place the GDR had become, so effective at driving people inward, away from the public sphere and into that private sanctum in which they cannot be found. That M.__'s intentions went unnoticed was thus not simply a failure of the system, but also, paradoxically, evidence of its success.

This kind of social atomization is a mainstay of authoritarian systems, a point Hannah Arendt makes in Origins. Her study focused on Hitler's Third Reich and Stalin's USSR, but its resonance with the GDR is immediately obvious. These are systems defined by extralegal violence and indoctrination, where state slogans are repeated by rote and citizens follow orders not out of any deep, abiding belief, but for fear of persecution. "The aim of [totalitarianism] has never been to instill convictions," Arendt writes, "but to destroy the capacity to form any."

In such conditions, the entire fabric of society unravels. Since people are isolated from one another — each existing in their own fearful pod they stop sharing their experiences. This produces what Arendt calls loneliness, a special kind of solitude where you feel alone, even when surrounded by others.

For the Stasi, this was very much the point — to infiltrate social units and destroy the trust people had in each other, thereby ensuring no communal bond was strong enough to overwhelm the state. But it's clear that, by 1989, they had become victims of their own effectiveness. With time, people begin to unknow, unlearn, unobserve as an emotional response to state power. In such a system, people's thoughts become so guarded that even when they do report on one another, the information garnered is unreliable. And when people disappear totally inward, there is nothing to report at all.”
― Matthew Longo, Vintage The Picnic.