I think that's an erroneous reading.

Let's say you are five years old and one day you witness the neighbor across the street get into an argument with another person, then you watch as the neighbor takes a machete they'd been using to clean up brush in their yard and starts raining down blows on the other person, brutally murdering them in public right in front of your eyes. This happens, the whole neighborhood knows about it, but nobody does anything, the neighbor is never arrested. The neighbor never does anything similar ever again, and you grow to 80 years old living in the same house across the street, relaying the story to your own children and your grand children as surely others in the neighborhood do as well. Yes, day to day, hour to hour, life would seem superficially normal. But also every day, every hour, every moment, every thought would exist beneath a cloud. There would be no way to deny the reality of the state of the world and your relationship to it. You could not ever forget that a murderer lived across the street. It would effect every aspect of how you lived your life, it would effect many of your day to day choices from the big to the small. You'd avoid coming into conflict with that person, you would probably try to move away if you could, and so on.

The same is true of living in a totalitarian regime or under tyranny or living as a second class citizen or as a slave. Yes, day to day things might seem perfectly "normal". But that normality is itself an illusion. Just as living inside a prison one might "go about one's day" as if what you were experiencing were normal. No, you do not run to the edge of the razor wire topped fence every day, doing so might get you shot. No you do not challenge the status quo every day, doing so is useless and might get you shot. You make do with what you have, you set up your own boundaries that limit the actions you take within a confine that is strictly inside and buffered from the actual hard limits that exist in your world. You don't walk up to the guards at the Berlin Wall and ask "may I leave East Berlin today? I would like to do so" every single day. No, you live your entire life under a cloud of oppression and you live your life with a very different conception of your future possibilities than someone who lives on the other side of the wall.

I'll link here to an excellent /r/AskHistorians reddit post from a while back on what it was like to live in the USSR during Stalin's great purge: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4md4c4/how_m...

An excerpt:

> You would not know, but it would consume your entire being.

> Imagine a disaster.

> Whether it is an earthquake, a tornado or a hurricane, what comes to mind is a catastrophic moment in which lives are upended, homes torn apart, and families scattered. When the disaster ends, the rebuilding begins. Schools are erected, homes renovated, and so on.

> The psychological damage takes longer to heal. A disaster creates uncertainty. You may not know where your next meal is coming from or where you'll sleep tonight. You might not know where your brother, sister, mother or father is. Do you have a job anymore? Can you survive anymore?

> A disaster is not just the single moment when the roof is torn from your home. It lasts until you are again as secure as you were before the disaster.

Living under the thumb of the East German police state would have been similar in character (if not quite in degree). You would know someone (a relative, a friend of a friend) who had run afoul of the regime and been reeled in in one way or another (arrested, executed, denounced, what-have-you). You would see the fingerprints of the totalitarian regime in every aspect of daily life and it would leave a shadow in your mind that would remain for a very long time.