History sometimes happens on beaches and campsites. Twenty years ago, many thousand East German tourists were waiting for the right moment to get from Hungary to Austria, and from there to the Federal Republic of Germany. The anniversary inspired Germany: they're playing the two-part film, entitled Wir sind das Volk (We are the people), and it's a great success. The story starts in the summer of 1989, by the Hungarian Sea. The new novel by contemporary prose writer Ingo Schulze, entitled Adam and Evelyn, was favourably received by reviewers. The story is set twenty years ago by Lake Balaton. What is common in these stories is that the characters are East Germans who wish for freedom and a better life, and they are trying to reach Western Europe through Hungary.

Directly proportional to the hope of its citizens, however, grew the anxiety of the East German state security services. The Stasi tried to prevent people from swarming to the West from Hungary; the detachment stationed by Lake Balaton sent home reports to the very last minute - similarly to the Hungarian ministry of interior's III/III department, which even prepared an operative plan for the reburial of Imre Nagy on June 16th 1989, and continued to recruit people up until the last minute. The state security work carried out on the shores of the Hungarian Sea had a long history: as early as the early 1970's, a Stasi detachment watched its compatriots bathing in Lake Balaton. The group of three-five officers, usually based in Siófok, built a whole network of informers in the larger campsites frequented by Germans from East and West Germany. They were especially interested in the campsite named Napsugár in Fonyód, the one in Balatonlelle called Vadvirág, in the automobile camp in Zamárdi, as well as in Hévíz, the health spa near the lake.

For a long time, they could count on the informants of the Hungarian ministry of the interior, for the organisation passed on all the information referring to tourists from the GDR. However, this changed with time. "From the documents we can trace how the Hungarian national security loses interest in the German issue, which is important from the point of view of »the national economy« (since it produces foreign currency), and reacts slowly to the queries of the partner organisation. It is more and more preoccupied with the Hungarian opposition and trying to deal with it," Krisztina Slachta - who is currently in Berlin, researching Stasi documents concerning the operations at Lake Balaton - explains to us. The East Germans - who had combined Prussian bureaucracy with Bolshevik brutality - must have had a really bad opinion of their lazy Hungarian colleagues. "These people are Chekists (Soviet secret police)," says lieutenant Bönicke angrily, one of the characters of György Dalos' novel, The Balaton brigade, after he and his superior, Captain Klempner, have left their Hungarian liaison officer, who drinks pálinka (fruit brandy) during working hours and will collapse along with the system. (The Soviet political police of the early 1920's was called Cheka.)

Anti-Fascist dam

Just like the heroes of the above-mentioned literary work, the real Stasi-officers worked really hard in the summer and early autumn of 1989 in order to keep a check on their compatriots. This was not at all easy for two reasons: as Andrea Dunai wrote in a study published in the literary weekly Élet és Irodalom, by the end of August 1989, more than 730 thousand citizens of the GDR had entered the territory of Hungary. Many of them had no intention of ever returning to "the workers' and peasants' paradise". But the others were suspicious, too. The East German comrades considered anyone who spent their summer holiday in a "fraternal" country bordering a non-Socialist country as a potential defector (that is why there were Stasi-units in Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria,too.).

Apart from revealing their compatriots' intention to defect, the task of the East German state security officers was to find the agents of Western intelligence services. The people they considered most dangerous were those East Germans who met relatives and friends from West Germany during their holidays - this was, according to Stasi logic and experience, the first step towards defection. Even if the defection didn't actually happen, information about these meetings was considered valuable. A state official could be blackmailed and recruited, for example, if he failed to report back home that while he had been drinking beer and eating fish by the lake, he had also conversed with people from the other side of the "anti-Fascist dam" (i.e. the Berlin Wall). Only the Hungarian authorities had the right to make arrests, all Stasi could do was to ask for help in carrying out the operative work. The East German Chekists turned to their Hungarian colleagues in order to find out whether a given citizen of the German Federal Republic had entered the territory of Hungary or not. If they had, and an East German whom they thought had ties with the former was also staying in the country at the same time, then the East German immediately became a target person.

Don't the Hungarians shoot?

While at first they tried to separate the East Germans from the West Germans, by the 1980's there was nothing to prevent relatives living on both sides of the border (between the GDR and the FRG) from renting accommodation together. The East German state security services knew very well that it was generally the West Germans who informed their relatives of the border stretches that were not guarded so heavily, they were the ones who transported the luggage to Austria, (so that those wanting to defect could move more easily), or hid the fugitive in their caravans or microbuses. The number of illegal border crossers rose not only because of intensive reconnaissance, but also because more and more people tried it: between January 1st and September 30th 1987, there were 188 illegal border crossers in Hungary, in 1988, during the same time-span, 303 illegal border crossers were arrested and handed over to Stasi - which then transported its citizens home in police vans, or, less frequently, by plane (naturally, the successful attempts were not included in the statistics).

Well before 1989, Hungary was already popular among those wishing to defect - not only because of the "Western" conditions. As historian Ádám Masát told Heti Válasz, according to Stasi's evaluation, our country also became popular because the West German media related the successful escapes as sensations - which the East Germans found extremely attractive. What's more, the press potrayed several cases as if the Hungarian border guards no longer used weapons, when in fact there were deaths even in 1989.

Work plan according to schedule

The Stasi tried very hard to compensate for those developments in international relations which were detrimental to Socialism: their East German compatriots were kept under surveillance by not only the officers on duty, but also by the members of the Ministry of State Security's Young Communists branch - who were, in theory, on vacation here. But even this was not enough. First it was at the Pan-European Picnic, held near Sopron on August 19th, that several hundred East Germans swarmed into Austria. Then, when on September 11th, the Hungarian government announced that citizens of the GDR were free to leave the country and go to any country that received them, tens of thousands set off towards the Austrian border (and further tens of thousands left East Germany and headed for Hungary).

Under such circumstances, it almost seems surreal that - as we can read in Andrea Dunai's study - in September 1989, the competent officer of Stasi sent his superiors the work plan for the summer of 1990, including the list of informants whom they wish to employ. However, the overzealousness of the Stasi officer is more easily understood if we consider it from the aspect of one of the most unlikely military parades in world history. On October 7th 1989, the GDR - which was on the verge of falling apart - celebrated the fortieth anniversary of its birth with such pomp and circumstance that it embarrassed even the Soviets leaders who were used to a show of power. Just a week later, the omnipotent first secretary, Erich Honecker, who saluted the regiments passing by, would be forced to leave all his posts. On November 9th, the working masses were busy not building, but breaking down Socialism, when they started taking the Berlin Wall apart with their bare hands. 

There are several types of defection-stories listed in the documents of the German state security. One of the recurring cases goes as follows: On a warm summer evening, by the Lake Balaton, a West German young man with a good car and fashionable clothes wins the heart of one of the girls from the GDR, known for their "generosity". Following the summer romance, the young man and the girl exchange letters; after 1972 the boy was allowed to enter East Berlin for 24 hours. There was a good chance of the Stasi noticing their ordinary story by then (by opening and reading their letters, for example). The following summer, they once again meet by Lake Balaton, where the boy persuades the girl to defect to the West. If she tries to cross the border towards Austria or Yugoslavia, there's a good chance that the Hungarian authorities will catch the girl, upon the request of the resident Stasi agent, who has received all details of their relationship, and after a short interrogation, they hand her over to the East German state security service. The "criminal" is then transported home and interrogated by the local directorate nearest her home, and at the end of the court procedure, is usually imprisoned.

"The Balaton-file, kept in the Historical Archives of the Hungarian State Security Services, shows us with what meticulousness they observed undesirable relationships," Krisztina Slachta tells us. The following measure had to be taken by the informant of department III/II, whose code name was "Balaton", and who worked as the doorman of the Napsugár Camping site in Fonyód between 1970 and 1979, keeping an eye on the guests (only the initials of the names mentioned are shown, the original spelling of the text has been retained).

"It was the informant's task to check the behaviour of the citizens from the GDR and the FRG vacationing at B's. He was to keep under surveillance West German citizen M. H., and his fiancée, and observe their behaviour. He was to talk to them if they accidentally met. Keeping in mind that the girl is a citizen of the GDR, try to find out where they intend to settle down when she marries M, for the border stands between them at the moment. In this way, the informant will have a chance to determine whether there is any intention of defecting. If possible, the informant should try to get personal data regarding the East German woman."

The East German Ministry of State Security (Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, in other words Stasi) is the synonym for one of history's most effective secret police systems. When the communist regime collapsed, there were, beside the official staff of 90 thousand, another 180 thousand informants, who supplied the organisation - called the "sword and shield of the Party" - with information. If we are to list the estimated half a million occasional informers, what we get is a society that is even more thickly enmeshed than Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. The Stasi, who used brutal methods even in the 1980's and funded left-wing terrorist organisations, controlled every area of citizens' lives. After the organisation was dissolved, those former members of the staff who did not retire pursued legal careers or worked as psychologists (Stasi operated a college of law in Potsdam), but similarly to Hungary, most of them sold their "expertise" in the field of security. There was quite a scandal in Germany recently when it came to light that more than one thousand former employees of Stasi are now employed by the police force in the eastern provinces (formerly belonging to the GDR) - even Chancellor Angela Merkel's summer residence in Brandenburg is guarded by two former state security officers.