Final forgiveness for spy who betrayed his wife to the Stasi
BERLIN -- There can be few marriages quite as strange or as burdened by history as that of the German politician Vera Lengsfeld and her former husband, who spied on her for the East German secret police. “I have forgiven him,” the 54-year-old former dissident said. But she made it clear that personal forgiveness was as complex as the uneasy unification of Germany.
This, after all, was no conventional marital betrayal — no fling with a neighbour or office romance. Every halfway political conversation, every dinner with friends became the subject of a report to the Stasi.
“Now we have to see if he wants to meet me again,” she said. We are sitting in a corner of the high-walled Hohenschönhausen prison in Berlin, one of the most notorious of Stasi jails that is now an open museum. Ms Lengsfeld has just shown me her old cell and the exercise yard, seven paces long, five paces wide. Prisoners were deliberately subjected to radiation. “Thousands were psychologically destroyed,” she added.
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This, after all, was no conventional marital betrayal — no fling with a neighbour or office romance. Every halfway political conversation, every dinner with friends became the subject of a report to the Stasi.
“Now we have to see if he wants to meet me again,” she said. We are sitting in a corner of the high-walled Hohenschönhausen prison in Berlin, one of the most notorious of Stasi jails that is now an open museum. Ms Lengsfeld has just shown me her old cell and the exercise yard, seven paces long, five paces wide. Prisoners were deliberately subjected to radiation. “Thousands were psychologically destroyed,” she added.