renhuiyoong's journal

My Scholarship entry - A 'place' I have visited

GERMANY | Friday, 5 July 2013 | Views [585] | View Larger Image

Gilbert Furian was a former inmate, arrested in 1985 for writing about the punk subculture in the former East Germany. Such activity was considered to be against the interests of East Germany, and he was sentenced to two years and two months for his “crime”. Gilbert has since obtained the file the Stasi kept on him, and he showed some of the material he was imprisoned for as well as his Stasi mug shots.

Genslerstrasse, Berlin. Tucked away in a leafy Berlin suburb lies an unassuming compound surrounded by guard towers and barbed wire. Formerly an infamous Stasi prison, it is now home to the Berlin- Hohenschönhausen Memorial.
Stepping through the heavy metal door into one of the cellblocks, the air is cold and damp, and the bright afternoon sunshine outside seems to have been consumed by a much darker world. This particular block was nicknamed the “submarine”, as it is underground and does not get much natural light.

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Like all other prisoners, Gilbert was interrogated here multiple times, and always without warning. They could come for you anytime of the day or night, and there was no official time limit on how long the sessions could last. The interrogation room's layout was designed to convey a sense of helplessness for the prisoner - the prisoner's table is slightly lower than that of the interrogator, and there would always be another interrogator seated behind to intimidate.
Many former Stasi men were never persecuted and are out and about in Germany today. A few years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Gilbert actually accidentally ran into one of his interrogators at a departmental store in Berlin.

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My Scholarship entry - A 'place' I have visited

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