The members of the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (MfS) were among the real losers of the reunification process, along with senior officers of the NVA and those civil servants with strong connections to the SED. MfS officers suffered both a commiserate loss of status post-Wende and those still of working age had severe problems finding work.

There were two interrelated factors at play that led to this sorry state of affairs for MfS veterans. One salient element was the fact that the price of reunification was quite high for Bonn to shoulder. GDR industrial plant was obsolescent and the GDR's constitutional guarantees for full employment meant there was a large surplus of unproductive labor. Additionally, the exchange ratios for GDR Marks and pensions was a major hit to Bonn's coffers; while it was a political necessity, it was a major fiscal drain. In this context, maintaining either the large security and military forces of the GDR, and to a lesser extent, its civil service, was a non-starter. They were too large and too expensive to maintain and there was no purpose to keeping them intact going into the 1990s.

Yet it was not just costs that led to the complete disestablishment of the MfS and NVA senior officer corps. The central idea of unification was that the FRG's main bureaucracies would assume control over the GDR ones, and both the FRG's intelligence services and the Bundeswehr were among the staunchest bastions of anticommunism within the FRG. In many respects, this anticommunism was a holdover from the conservative Adenauer period, but such sentiments had been institutionalized in these organizations. Bundeswehr officers found upon inspection of NVA barracks and troops that their appearance and manner were decidedly "un-German" and pushed for a wholesale cashiering of a majority of the NVA. The MfS was at an even greater disadvantage as the post-Wende years revealed the extent of its domestic surveillance empire. Within the reunified civil service and military, being an inoffizieller Mitarbeiter (informal collaborator/IM) could be grounds denial of applications for being a member of the new unified entities or grounds for dismissal once revealed. The new German state also dictated that MfS and NVA pensions were to be much lower than their equivalent rank in the West, and although litigation led to the German courts raising the levels, the Courts also justified this discrepancy.

For MfS men still of working age, the 1990s were a period of hard readjustment. A few managed to find work in the Interior Ministry which was more flexible about the background of its applicants. There were around 1000 MfS and IMs working in the Bundesgrenzschutz (Federal Border Patrol) in the new federal Länder. Other MfS veterans ended up in low level civil service positions in the unemployment offices. But the civil service employment of MfS veterans was much lower than in the rest of Eastern Europe, with many going into the private sector. On the extreme end of successes, there were figures like Matthias Warnig who used his connections with Russia to become a player in German-Russian business. But Warnig was much more of an outlier to this process and many MfS veterans had to take jobs in lower tier private sector positions such as night watchmen or the service industries.

Historians like Gary Bruce who have conducted interviews with MfS veterans make note of a consistent disappointment and bitterness over reunification that verges on self-pity. Some MfS veterans liken their position in the Berlin Republic to that of Jews in the 1920s and 30s where they get scapegoated for the ills of the GDR. Beneath this somewhat facile analogy (unlike interwar German Jews, the MfS were a privileged state elite and were actively involved in running the state) is an interesting commentary on the process of Ostalgie inside the former GDR. While some aspects of the Communist state are celebrated by Ossis, its less than savory aspects like the massive surveillance apparatus are not subject to this nostalgic gloss. Even die Linke party treats the MfS legacy quite gingerly and the MfS often has to organize its own support networks and pressure groups. Attempts by MfS veterans to portray themselves as masters of a cat and mouse game of Cold War espionage have generally fallen flat despite widespread interest in the MfS. That they have been socially locked out of a larger process of nostalgia for a departed regime speaks volumes about the deep unpopularity of the organization among the wider GDR population that added a further difficulty to adjust to the new realities of 1989.

Sources

Bruce, Gary. The Firm: The Inside Story of the Stasi. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Caldwell, Peter C., and Robert R. Shandley. German Unification: Expectations and Outcomes. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

Derlien, Hans-Ulrich. "German unification and bureaucratic transformation." International Political Science Review 14, no. 4 (1993): 319-334.

Gieseke, Jens. The History of the Stasi: East Germany's Secret Police, 1945-1990. New York: Berghahn Books, 2014.

Salheiser, Axel. "Socialist and Post-Socialist Functional Elites in East Germany." Historical Social Research/Historische Sozialforschung (2012): 123-138.