Today we visited the site of the main remand prison for people detained by the former East German Ministry of State Security, (or the 'Stasi') that operated between 1945 and 1989.
It was amazing, particularly because the majority of the buildings, equipment and furniture and fittings have survived intact, and unlike other museums I've been to that document life under Stalinism (the Budapest "House of Terror" comes to mind) , the exhibition didn't try and shove liberal ideology down your throat in the crudest way. Tours of the prison are often led by former inmates, but we managed to tag along to a tour organized for a group of British teens led by a man who grew up in West Berlin but worked in the East at a university before the wall came down. He was an interesting character, and really gave you a sense of the bureaucracy and brutal arbitrariness which characterized the regime.
The site has been the subject of a whole swag of books written to document the lives of those who had to suffer through the life of the prison. I felt so frustrated in the bookshop afterwards because all the books were extremely interesting- from Poland's Solidarnosc movement to the novel of the experiences inside of a now famous German children's writer Klaus Kordon called Krokodil im Nacken (A Crocodile Breathing Down My Neck'), to an account of the life of Punks in the DDR- and of course, all in German. More motivation to keep at it I guess.
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