Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
9
THE STASI
East Germany's infamous Staatssicherheitsdienst (State Security Service), or
Stasi
, kept tabs on
everything in the GDR. It ensured the security of the country's borders, carried out surveillance
on foreign diplomats, business people and journalists, and monitored domestic and foreign
media. It was, however, in the surveillance of East Germany's own population that the
organization truly excelled. Very little happened in the GDR without the Stasi knowing about it:
files were kept on millions of innocent citizens and insidious operations were orchestrated
against dissidents, real and imagined. By the time of the
Wende
the Stasi had a budget of £1
billion, 91,000 full-time employees and 180,000 informers within the East German population;
figures brought into context by the more puny, albeit more ruthless, 7000-strong Nazi Gestapo.
At the beginning of 1991 former citizens of the GDR were given the right to see their Stasi
files. Tens of thousands took the opportunity to find out what the organization had recorded
about them, and, more importantly, who had provided the information; many a friendship
and not a few marriages came to an end as a result. The process of unravelling truths from the
archives also provided material for numerous stories, including Timothy Garton Ash's
book
The
File: A Personal History
(see p.273) and the
film
Das Leben der Anderen
(Lives of Others; see p.278).
Not all documents survived, though; many were briskly shredded as the GDR regime collapsed,
resulting in an unenviable task for one government organization who spent literally years
piecing them together to bring people to justice, thankfully with some success.
during the Stalin years and forced resettlement from border zones throw light on
otherwise little-known aspects of GDR history.
Dorfkirche
Just north of the rather sinister-looking Rathaus Lichtenberg, at the junction of
Normannenstrasse and Möllendorffstrasse, is an improbably rustic
Dorfkirche
, a church
dating back to Lichtenberg's village origins. he stone walls date from the original
thirteenth-century structure, but the rest is more modern, with the spire tacked on as
recently as 1965.
Gedenkstätte der Sozialisten
Gudrunstr. • 1km or so northeast of U- & S-Lichtenberg
he
Gedenkstätte der Sozialisten
or “Memorial to the Socialists”, is perhaps only for
die-hard fans of GDR relics. Its centrepiece is a 4m chunk of red porphyry bearing the
inscription
Die Toten mahnen uns
- “he dead remind us” - commemorating the GDR's
socialist hall of fame from Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg onwards. A tablet bears
a list of names that reads like the street directory of virtually any town in pre-
Wende
East Germany, recording the esoteric cult figures of the workers' and peasants' state in
alphabetical order; until 1989 the East Berlin public were cajoled and coerced into
attending hundred-thousand-strong mass demonstrations here. he whole thing actually
replaced a much more interesting Mies van der Rohe-designed memorial that stood here
from 1926 until the Nazis destroyed it in 1935. Altogether more uncompromising,
featuring a huge star and hammer and sickle, the original memorial caused problems for
Mies van der Rohe when he came before Joseph McCarthy's Un-American Activities
Committee in 1951. he Gedenkstätte is also the burial place of Walter Ulbricht, the man
who decided to build the Berlin Wall, and Wilhelm Pieck, the first president of the GDR.
Tierpark Friedrichsfelde
Entrances on the eastern side of Am Tierpark • Daily 9am-sunset or 6pm • €12 •
W
tierpark-berlin.de • U-Tierpark
Lichtenberg's sprawling zoo,
Tierpark
Friedrichsfelde
, ranks as one of the largest in
Europe and a thorough exploration of its wooded grounds could easily absorb the
better part of a day. Some visitors may balk at the traditional nature of the place; some
of the animals are kept in very small cages, though others have much more space to
roam around. Virtually every species imaginable, from alpaca to wisent, can be found
