The surveillance tools
Cameras in bags, buttons and drink cans.
Prof.Quatermass — CC BY 3.0 · Anagoria — CC BY 3.0 · Anagoria — CC BY 3.0 · Anagoria — CC BY 3.0
This building is the command and administrative centre — the offices, the minister, the surveillance equipment, the apparatus seen from the inside. Hohenschonhausen, in the city's north-east, is the remand prison where political detainees were held, and its tours are often led by former inmates. The two complement each other, and the prison is the harder experience.
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The Stasi Museum is not a museum built to tell a story but the agency's own headquarters, left as it was. The Stasi was East Germany's state security service, and this building in Lichtenberg was its command centre — together with files on millions of citizens gathered by the largest domestic surveillance apparatus Europe has known relative to population. The second floor is the core of the visit: the office of Minister Erich Mielke, who ran the service for thirty-two years, preserved with his furniture, carpet, telephone and adjoining bedroom — everything in place as it was left in November 1989 when demonstrators occupied the building. The effect is powerful precisely because the space is ordinary and bureaucratic rather than sinister. The other floors display the tools of the work: cameras concealed in bags, buttons and drink cans, microphones in walls, and glass jars in which the scent of targeted individuals was preserved on cloth so dogs could track them later — a detail that sums up the whole logic of the organisation.
Cameras in bags, buttons and drink cans.
Cloth preserving the smell of targets.
Ruschestrasse 103, 10365 Berlin