Daniel & Geo Fuchs

15 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall german photography artists Daniel & Geo Fuchs have traveled east germany to trace down the visual remains of the STASI. They discovered former rooms of the STASI -locations still in use, mostly for new purposes, places still intact, preserved as memorials of injustice - some have just been closed down and appear as if time stood still.

They have photographed the investigation prisons in Potsdam and Hohenschön- hausen, the archives of the Gauck/Birthler authority, the office of Erich Mielke - leader of the ministry of Staatsicherheit from 1957-1989, the Stasi bunker in Leipzig, the only Stasi prison in Bautzen, the border crossing in Marienborn...

The interrogation rooms and floors with it’s often Kafkaesque seeming atmosphere, symbols of this former institution of suppression and injustice, the design of terror, with flowered wallpapers and upholstered doors, thoroughly thought through arrangements of humiliation, where the prisoners were even told in which position they had to remain while sleeping.

The STASI, or Ministry for State Security was created in 1950 by german communists in the soviet zone of occupied germany and was disbanded with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Responsible for both domestic political surveillance and foreign espionage, it soon earned a reputation for effectiveness.

Almost 91.000 fulltime employees and about 174.000 unofficial informers (by 16 million inhabitants of the GDR) worked for the organization, supposed to oversee almost every aspect of life in communist east germany.

The aim of the government was to make sure that any kind of opposition, any preparation work to flee out of the country, any action, which would demonstrate disagreement with the official point of view, would be discovered in an early stage and be extinguished.

In the Gauck authority / today called Birthler authority / still millions of files, documents of human fate, are being kept and stored away. The Birthler Department is still busy to trace, research and analyze STASI activities. Nearly 2500 people are employed to inform people on request about their files or puzzle together shredded papers, stuffed in sacks.

Daniel & Geo Fuchs
STASI - Secret Rooms & Toygiants, Photographie

Photographies
Ort: Espace 2