Representing Political Oppression: The Stasi Prison as an Edifice of Cultural Memory in Modern Berlin

• In Event: Prison Tourism

Abstract

Anecdotes and interpretive exhibits at prison tourist sites often focus on especially notorious “celebrity” prisoners, spectacular escape attempts, punishment and execution methods, and are routinely couched in tones aimed at entertaining the visitor. In almost all respects, such modes of representation are inverted at the Stasi Prison in suburban Berlin. This paper analyses that representation and discusses the Stasi Prison’s role as a public history site. The Stasi was the East German secret police organization. An exemplary organ of totalitarian rule, for over forty years it controlled East German society with implacably ruthless efficiency. The political prison complex it created in a drab Berlin suburb was designed explicitly to break its inmates psychologically, through rituals and practices of at times ingenious cruelty. The routine scrutiny, psychological torture and extreme conditions in which prisoners lived are presented in a way that gives a voice to the prison population. Contested narratives are recounted without the comedic “keystone cops routines” so often featuring at prison tourist sites. The Stasi Prison is presented with a quiet, unforced gravitas that allows the visitor to assimilate the unutterably awful treatment meted out to people whose only crime, in essence, was to think forbidden thoughts. The paper will examine the ways in which this is achieved, and discuss the possible implications for interpretation of other, more “conventional” prison sites.

Author

• Jacqueline Zara Wilson, Federation University Australia