In chapter 7 of Burned Bridge, Sheffer not only discussed the groups of people leaving East Germany, but also the ways in which East German officials sought to keep people in the territory. As opposed to actually bettering areas of the government so people won’t want to leave, the East German officials use strategies such as glorified stalking and propaganda. The East German government would research into people’s lives to “manipulate” them to stay if they thought they were going to leave. However, this phenomena became so rampant that citizens were able to manipulate the government in order to gain benefits. In many cases these files got so out of hand that local government would give up and let people leave. Moreover, the officials used the people who had already fled as pariahs who represented selfishness. They cast the people who left as outcasts who could not thrive in East Germany due to personal issues not government issues. Sheffer states, “Whether or not people believed or sympathized with such attacks, everyone recognized such shaming as a public consequence that implicated neighbors, associates, and loved ones,” (147). Similar to the show trials, the validity of the claims being made might be clearly questionable; yet, peoples’ names are being ruined and that already does decent damage. Continually, West Germany was using propaganda to show East German refugees as brave people who escaped the evil East. Thus, all of the paranoia and propaganda makes me wonder how this works to raise tension between East and West Germany? How does this raise tension within East Germany?
Through the Iron Curtain
Within East Germany, the paranoia and propaganda created a huge amount of pressure amongst family, friends, and colleagues. Leaving would not just affect your life, but those you left behind. With such large files, the government could just as easily manipulate people into staying and being dutiful citizens in the same manner that we read about citizens manipulating the government in order to gain benefits. And, with citizens manipulating the government, we see a huge pressure being put on resources that weren’t necessarily available in the East. Promises, such as better housing, simply couldn’t be kept. So, we see this back and forth tension amounting between the government and its citizens as they attempt to outsmart and manipulate the other for their own benefit.