Your first paragraph is mostly myth. I know enough East Germans who told me that the Stasi never bothered them and they never knew anybody personally who was bothered by the Stasi. Travelling to Western countries was a pain, but it wasn't impossible at all. Many people would go on vacations from East to West Germany.

As far as repression, even liberal estimates guess that the number of "victims" was around 300 000 in a country with a population of 20 million. That's 1 in 1000 people. And what qualifies as a "victim" usually ranges from being questioned to being imprisoned wrongfully. There's very few documented cases of torture and execution (about 5000) for holding the wrong opinions, and all of these are in the early years of the state (1950-1960), at the onset of the Cold War and the paranoia that it involved. In a country that still had Nazis in hiding and heavy presence of Western spies, I'd say that's a pretty good outcome.

The label of being an "authoritarian/totalitarian regime" mostly stems from having a one-party rule. But that's a very simplistic and very liberal view of the DDR. In many ways it was a lot more democratic than most countries today. People had a lot of say in the governance of the country.

As an example: in the 1970s, the DDR established a system where any citizen could write a letter to any government official (all the way to the top) stating a complaint, request or suggestion. The office it was addressed to was required by law to a) do their outmost to fulfill the request, fix the complaint or examine the suggestion, and b) respond back within 4 weeks with a detailed report on what steps they took, what the outcome would be and if the answer was negative why exactly they failed or couldn't complete the desired outcome. Then a committee would collect all the data from these letters and make them public (how many were sent, how many were fulfilled and to what degree). This wasn't just a theoretical system. It is estimated that 2/3 of all DDR households had sent such a letter and about 70% of them received a positive outcome.