Big Bruder Watching

The Stasi’s stink not only lingers where it once did (and sometimes very strongly) but has also been allowed to waft into the former West Germany. The Left party, a grouping formed by the merger of western leftists with the “reformed” heirs to East Germany’s old governing party, took some 12 percent of the vote in the united Germany’s 2009 elections. Reformed? Well, when Joachim Gauck, a former dissident and for 10 years the first federal commissioner for the Stasi archives, addressed the parliament in Saxony, a territory that was once part of East Germany, the event was boycotted by all Left party parliamentarians.

Andrew Stuttaford, who writes frequently about cultural and political issues, works in the international financial markets.