stasiland

It's probably surprising to no one who reads this blog regularly that the project I'm currently researching here in Germany is about repression and political prisoners in the GDR (aka East Germany.) How lucky for me that so many relics of repression from this not-so-long-dead dictatorship have been preserved. If you really want to understand a state, you have only to look at its prisons. And, if possible, walk through them.

The GDR was a dictatorship that called itself a democracy, and at least put on a pantomime show of acting like one. But behind the (extremely thin) facade was one of the most effective secret police forces of all time, the Ministry for State Security or Stasi, which maintained hundreds of offices across East Germany, tens of thousands of full-time agents, hundreds of thousands of informal collaborators and informers, and a mind-boggling level of surveillance over its citizens' daily lives. While other states may have been more fearsome in their use of physical violence against their own people, few can beat the GDR in the intense desire for control over the most mundane details of individuals' behavior, and the harsh punishments that were meted out for the most banal acts of resistance.

Something about the modus operandi of the GDR finally clicked for me while on the tour of the former Stasi facility at Hohenschonhausen, which is excellently preserved and today open to the public. Usually referred to as a detention center or a "remand prison," Hohenschonhausen is really a giant interrogation factory. For 102 cells (most single, a few double) there were 120 interrogation rooms. Here prisoners were made to confess to political crimes--rarely completely fabricated but often absurdly trivial--manipulated, tricked, broken, exploited, made to betray friends, family and comrades, sometimes turned into collaborators and spies for the state they once resisted. It didn't happen the way you might expect from watching a few episodes of 24. As is often the case, reality is more creative and more terrifying.

This is one of the interrogation rooms in Hohenschonhausen. Doesn't look so bad, does it? Hell, it even has curtains. Curtains! In fact it looks almost...friendly. And therein lies its deviousness. There is something indescribably creepy about a warm, sunny, friendly interrogation room. Because of course this is not a warm, sunny, friendly place at all, but ground zero for an intense and premeditated psychological assault.

Imagine yourself a political prisoner in the GDR. Perhaps you have tried to escape, been critical of a speedup at work, or simply listened to a banned western radio station. From the moment of your arrest, which is calibrated in every way to be as terrifying and disorienting as possible, you are kept in an environment of intense isolation. Not just physical isolation in the form of solitary confinement, but isolation from information, from news of your family or your own potential fate, from anything familiar and even from the merest scrap of human contact with guards and other prisoners. You are referred to by number, spoken to only in orders, and forced to look at the floor when being moved through the prison so as to not even glimpse the faces of your guards. An elaborate system of signal lights ensures that you will never pass a fellow inmate in the halls while being taken to and from interrogation. Alone, with no stimulus but your own thoughts, you inevitably imagine the worst.

Of course if you are starved for human contact, exhausted, frightened, with no idea what fate awaits you or even if anyone knows you are here, having had enough time alone to conjure up all your own unique worst nightmares, you are ripe for psychological manipulation. You may perhaps be easily disarmed by a friendly man who offers cake, coffee, a cigarette, maybe even a smile, in a sunny room that looks no more sinister than an office. If that doesn't work there is another man (called in, unbeknownst to you, by a secret button under the desk) who is a lot less friendly, who tells you in no uncertain terms what they can do to you and to anyone you care about. Threats to family, loved ones, destruction of your career, long imprisonment, even death--you can bet they have researched, they have watched you, and decided which will cut the deepest. And in this environment where they have total control, who are you not to believe they can carry out their threats? Oh, but on the contrary, all can be forgiven...freedom, safety, maybe even a promotion or a bump up in the queue for a new apartment...all this can be yours. If only you sign this piece of paper.

By now you're probably starting to see the evil genius of this system. Without a single blow or a drop of blood, thousands are made to confess. To me there is something uniquely diabolical about the cleanliness of it all. Everything projects a sense of absolute power. The message is: "We're so overwhelmingly in control, we don't even need to hurt you to get what we want. We can break you without leaving a scratch."

Of course, those who ran the repressive machinery projected the image that this process is infallible and you cannot resist. And of course that is not true. There are always resisters--I'm reading the story of one now. And if there was one, there were others. But after visiting Hohenschonhausen I can fully understand the fury of the well-organized crowds when they stormed Stasi offices all over the country after the Berlin Wall fell, and weight of the message graffitied on the wall of the Stasi headquarters in Berlin: "You've watched us long enough--get out!"