From 1950 until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the Ministry for State Security (known as the Stasi) operated one of the most sophisticated and oppressive intelligence networks ever known. The East German secret police had a roll call of more than 100,000 officers and 170,000 spies who maintained order by keeping the country under a blanket of fear. They tapped thousands of telephones, drilled peepholes into people’s apartments, and controlled the press. Political offenders were sent to the prisons documented in these photographs by Daniel and Geo Fuchs.
The two photographers, who are married, grew up in West Germany. “People didn’t think much about it, about what a repressive system it was there, and how hard it was that people had no possibility to say what they want to say or have a free political opinion,” Geo Fuchs says. They remember the time before the Berlin Wall came down, the time when the east and west were worlds apart. “There was not much exchange,” she says. “It was very filtered, what they could see on television. Of course there were people trying to get West German television, but it wasn’t possible.”
This year, it has been a quarter of a century since the Berlin Wall came down, and the Cold War came to an end. To mark this occasion, Nikolaj Kunsthal presents the photo exhibition Stasi Secret Rooms by Daniel & Geo Fuchs.
Stasi Secret Rooms explores a world that only few East German citizens wanted to get in close contact with. But at least third of them nevertheless did. Stasi, or as it was officially known, the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (MfS), in its heyday numbered some 100,000 full-time employees and probably more than 200,000 informants. It is estimated that together they gathered information on at least every third East German citizen. The objective was to defend socialism East German style.
This required an endless number of interrogation rooms, office facilities, and not least 180,000 running metres for the information collected and stored on East German countrymen and enemies, often on secret addresses far way from the public eye.
When the Wall came down in 1989 so did Stasi, and its buildings and information material were confiscated in 1990. Some of the old rooms have been given new functions, some have been left standing as monuments to a time, and yet others have been left in virtual time capsules for 25 years.
This is the universe that Daniel & Geo Fuchs have been exploring for several years with Stasi Secret Rooms, now to be experienced at Nikolaj Kunsthal.