Stasi-Zentral. Getty images. All rights reserved.Four decades of domination over almost all aspects of life in East Germany came to an abrupt halt 25 years ago on 31 March 1990. One of the most intrusive surveillance organisations in human history, the Ministry for State Security, more infamously known as the Stasi, was dissolved. This is a poignant milestone as a global debate about privacy rages in the wake of revelations of massive US surveillance of internet communications.
Two months ago I was at the old Stasi headquarters, today a museum in Berlin, for an open day commemorating the storming of the building by East Germans a few weeks after the Berlin Wall fell. There were film screenings, discussions, information stands and a tour through the Stasi’s enormous archive that at one point contained files on an estimated six million people. Some say a file was kept for one in three citizens.
It took me an hour to wander through the archive. Thousands of Germans visiting the site appeared shell-shocked amid the labyrinth of corridors and ceiling-high filing cabinets that had documented and controlled their lives – or the lives of others – for years. The very building, with its grey concrete Communist-era architecture, was a symbol of fear – the place you were taken for interrogation or intimidation.
