BERLIN -- Peek inside the great, gray empire of Joachim Gauck and you will find the petty gleanings of 170,000 neighborhood snoops, plus reams of other information gathered during four decades by East Germany's Ministry for State Security, or Stasi.
Open this empire to public scrutiny and you will begin to see why, to some people, Mr. Gauck has become the most feared bureaucrat in Germany, as well as a symbol for lingering east-west division.
Revelations from the files have been embarrassing prominent Germans and destroying careers for more than three years. But it is the files' staying power that has begun to fray nerves. In some instances the fear of being exposed as a past Stasi informer has become so great that people have confessed pre-emptively, only to discover that their deeds weren't documented in the files.
Those cases, plus the prospect of disclosures for years to come, have stirred debate over just how long the files should remain open. The issue, the opposing sides say, is nothing less than how the country should go about stitching up the wounds left by East Germany's Communist regime.
"It is very important to have a look in the files," explains Mr. Gauck, whose realm of paper, if laid out end to end, would stretch from the Brandenburg Gate to the border of the Czech Republic -- more than 110 miles. "In the files we can find the part of our lives [in East Germany] when we were guilty, but also when we developed civil courage.
"It is the only way to have freedom from this oppression of the past."
Yet he, too, is disturbed by the superficial way in which the public reacts to information taken from the files. Media reports linking prominent persons to Stasi activity become instant condemnations; few people bother to examine the context or depth of involvement.
Such reactions have prompted everyone from former Stasi spies to Chancellor Helmut Kohl to call for the files to be closed.
"If I could decide on my own, I know what I would do with them," Mr. Kohl said last year, after declaring that the files were "poisoning the atmosphere."
He quickly backed off from his protest, however, if only because so many eastern Germans were still waiting to find out what information the Stasi had collected about them. More than 850,000 have asked for a look, and a quarter of those are still in the bureaucratic backlog.
Those who have examined their own files have often been appalled. Wolf Biermann, a poet, learned that Stasi agents had offered him drugs, alcohol and prostitutes in trying to derail his career. The Rev. Heinz Eggert, a Lutheran pastor who is now a Cabinet minister in the Saxony state government, spoke his mind too freely for Stasi tastes. Agents injected him with paralyzing drugs, recruited dozens of informants from those who sought his counsel, nearly forced his car off a highway and planted rumors that he'd sexually abused children. The most heart-rending discovery may have been that of Vera Wollenberger, a reform-minded activist who learned that the agent informing on her all those years, code name "Donald," was her husband, Knud.
It could take years to exhaust the possibilities. In a country with a population of 17 million, the Stasi kept files on roughly 6 million people, partly through the diligence of 90,000 employees, but largely through the help from those 170,000 part-time snoops, known to the Stasi as "informal cooperators."
The Stasi's victims aren't the only ones who can look at the files. Potential employers, criminal prosecutors and government agencies also have access. Anyone who shows up as one of the informers is automatically disqualified for a public job, and for many private jobs as well. Mr. Gauck's office also releases reports from time to time that feature prominent Germans.
Through these means, says former Stasi administrator Klaus Eichner, people have been subjected to "a kind of witch hunt."
"Even for a simple criminal, the principle is that he is innocent until proven guilty," Mr. Eichner said. "But anyone whose papers are found by the Gauck administration, however minor they might be, has to justify his behavior."
As the second-ranking person in the Stasi's counterintelligence division, Mr. Eichner kept tabs on the CIA, and three years ago he was one of several ex-Stasi employees who founded the Insider Committee, in hopes their viewpoint would be heard amid the hue and cry.
He freely admits to being ashamed of some of his past work, especially of the time when his duties included helping crack down on opposition movements in East Germany. But he still wonders why it was so wrong for him to conduct the same sort of counterespionage work that every nation's intelligence agency does. And he is still baffled by some of the rage.
"Personally I was very shocked at how much hatred there was against us from the majority of East German people," he says.
His background has prevented him from finding steady work, and on most days he can be found at his small apartment in a dreary concrete block that East Germany built for Stasi employees.
Mr. Eichner's group doesn't want to close the files. He says it calls only for better controls of what information is released, and better understanding of what that information means.
The respected Munich newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung wrote that if the words "informal cooperator" show up in someone's background, "he might as well be HIV-positive. That is that. No one stops to consider that the person in question might have been recruited as a 19-year-old student just after helping a friend to escape to the West. . . . No one is interested in the fact that the Stasi both appealed to his idealism and made use of his fear."
The fear of being labeled an informer has been too much for some.
When Gerhard Riege, a member of the German parliament for the reformed Communist Party, the PDS, was revealed to have had low-level Stasi contacts 30 years earlier, he hanged himself from a tree in his back yard. "I am afraid of the media publicity," his suicide note said. "I cannot fight against it."
Those affected by the most recent disclosures have been people who had managed to attract a following in western Germany.
In the past two months, two increasingly popular radio and television personalities were knocked off the air by revelations of their past as Stasi informers.
First came Lutz Bertram, known as a sharp interviewer (particularly sharp, in fact, whenever he was grilling east German politicians about their possible Stasi connections). It turned out his file as a Stasi informer was 400 pages, and that he'd worked for the agency right up until the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Another popular broadcaster, Jeurgen Kuttner, feeling that he would be the next target, confessed to his past days as an informer and went off the air. Workers at Mr. Gauck's office so far haven't found a single thing about it in their files.
For all the fear and loathing of Mr. Gauck, he is a breath of fresh air among German public servants. Mr. Gauck is open and reflective, a former Protestant clergyman who's used to thinking about the consequences of his actions, then sharing those thoughts.
He also knows first hand what it means to have been spied on, snooped at and harassed. As one of those clergymen who was a bit too open-minded and outspoken for his own good, Mr. Gauck knew he was drawing the attention of the Stasi. But he never realized how much attention until he saw his own file.
With a neighbor's permission, the Stasi had put a microphone in the wall of his apartment. They opened his mail and cut off his contact with his sister and friends in West Germany. And, yes, he says, he was disappointed to learn of some people who had informed on him.
But overlooked in the rush to judgment, he says, is that the majority of the population refused to help the Stasi. Although 1 percent of the population said yes, a larger percentage said no.
"It has been very interesting that we've found so many [Communist] party members who refused," he says. "Not only Christians, artists and so on. There were officers in the army who said no. Policemen refused, too. This is often forgotten, or not mentioned, these moments of civil courage."
He continued, "It is difficult for a German to lead a life of civil courage. We have something in Germany which is called obedience in advance, before it is necessary. A behavior like that is great for dictatorships -- the more fear one has, the more adapted one is to the system. So, you see, this secret service topic is connected to far bigger topics and problems."
And, that, he says, is the sort of thing that will prove the ultimate value of keeping the files open. The things that are glossed over or under-emphasized today, will be placed in their proper context by historians. As long as they have access to the records of the era.