Constanze Stelzenmüller: The Gestapo and the Stasi taught Germans a hard lesson

Ah, German hypocrisy! During the cold war, you marched waving “Ami, Go Home” placards, but still let us protect you against the Soviets. Now you moan self-righteously about the National Security Agency and GCHQ reading your emails and listening to your mobile phone. You don’t acknowledge that – unlike the US or the UK – you have had no domestic terror attack in the past 10 years. That’s because we gave you information to prevent them; guess where we got it? Anyway, your Federal Intelligence Service snoops as much as it can. Except it can’t do that much. Whereas we – oh yes, we scan! Could it be that you’re jealous?
That about sums up the American and British response to the uproar about alleged US and UK spying activities in Germany revealed by the whistleblower Edward Snowden.
Sorry, friends: things are not that simple. This topic touches on historical sensitivities here. Our grandparents’ generation feared the early-morning knock of the Gestapo. During the cold war, West and East Germans alike were aware that their divided country was crawling with spooks of all denominations. We recognised that mutually assured espionage helped prop up the bipolar balance of power. (It also made for some superb spy thrillers.) Still, no one misses the sombre paranoia, reinforced in and after the 1970s by the ramping up of West Germany’s domestic intelligence services in response to homegrown terrorism.
Germans who were born east of the Berlin Wall were careful to give the organs of the Staatssicherheit a wide berth. But it was only after the fall of the Wall in 1989, when the citizens who had brought down their government stormed the secret police’s headquarters and realised the full horror of the web woven by the Stasi: neighbours spying on neighbours; husbands spying on wives. Joachim Gauck, our current president, was the first head of the Stasi Archives, the government agency that, 20 years on, continues to painstakingly piece together a full record of East Germany’s surveillance of its citizens.
Yes, we Germans have better cause than many of our allies to abhor the secret state. It’s why we don’t like closed-circuit television cameras. It’s also why our constitutional court enshrined a fundamental right of data privacy, and declared it illegal for Germany to implement an EU directive on preventive data storage.
That said, we understand that our liberal societies have enemies – and we need some surveillance to protect ourselves and preserve our way of life. We remember that some of the September 11 attackers were based in Hamburg. Like you, we’ve done a lot since then to improve our domestic intelligence capabilities. We haven’t heard many complaints about our ability to co-operate, whether in Europe or in Afghanistan. And, fair enough, this story has become fodder for an opposition desperate to unseat a seemingly unbeatable chancellor. Rattled at first, Angela Merkel snapped: “Friends don’t treat each other like this.” Now, with her standing in the polls unharmed, Ms Merkel is calling for an EU-wide data privacy initiative.
The truth of Mr Snowden’s allegations has yet to be proved; they remain disturbing. Germany a target on the level of Iraq and Afghanistan? 500m intercepts a month? Embassies and EU representations bugged? You could try harder to dispel our misgivings. For all we know, no abuse of power was involved. But it is surely clear the intelligence services wield an excess of power. And, as we know, “power corrupts; and absolute power corrupts absolutely”.
It is not always easy to understand where our British friends draw the line between freedom and security. But it was Barack Obama who vowed on May 23 to end the war on terror, quoting James Madison: “No nation can preserve its freedom in the midst of perpetual warfare.”
Tell us about it. The phrase “perpetual warfare” reminds Germans that the most influential theorist of war without end – and of an untrammelled executive – was Carl Schmitt, Hitler’s lawyer-in-chief. It’s time for all of us to turn back the tide of executive power.

Constanze Stelzenmüller is a senior transatlantic fellow with the German Marshall Fund