The Unification Treaty of 1990 gave public employers in the former East Germany a special ground for dismissal. Work for the Stasi could justify dismissal without notice if keeping the employee seemed unzumutbar, unreasonable to expect. On 3 April 1990 the theologian Heinrich Fink was elected rector of Humboldt University in Berlin. In November 1991 the federal commissioner for the Stasi records reported that Fink had been registered as an informant. The university dismissed him without notice. On 8 July 1997 the Federal Constitutional Court ruled that the special ground is compatible with the Basic Law. Each case, it said, must be judged on its own. The more important the employee’s position, the less the employer can be expected to keep him.
Time and openness also counted in a related ground, a lack of personal fitness. On 13 September 1995 the Federal Labor Court ruled on an employee who had answered a Stasi questionnaire falsely. A deliberately false answer belegt nicht zwangsläufig, does not necessarily prove, a lack of personal fitness. It counts in the employee’s favor if the Stasi work lies far in the past. It also counts if he reported it als er noch nicht mit der Aufdeckung seiner früheren Tätigkeit für das MfS rechnen mußte, when he did not yet have to expect his past to be uncovered.