Aug 11, 2021 | For one group, at least, the erection of the Berlin Wall on August 13, 1961 was a stroke of luck. Over the following decades, the Wall would be the lifeblood of the East German secret police, known as the Stasi. By the time the Wall fell, in 1989, thousands of Stasi agents were employed with a single goal: to make the Wall insurmountable.
The film tells the story of this existentially symbiotic relationship from the perspective of the Stasi under its notorious leader Erich Mielke. It’s the first time this most sensitive chapter of East Germany's history has been told in such an exemplary and coherent way: including the deaths that took place at the Wall, and the cover-up and concealment of many of those murders.
We learn about the arrests and imprisonment of tens of thousands of refugees, as well as the Stasi’s elaborate construction of tunnels and underground listening stations to track down tunnel diggers. From the billion-dollar business of selling GDR prisoners to West Germany, to the "filtering" of Western traffic at border crossings to recruit unofficial collaborators, Mielke's specialists were everywhere.
We see how Mielke's power grew, as the Wall and the border system were perfected, and how the walling-in of the population created more and more work for the Stasi. The Wall became the Stasi’s main field of activity, and its daily bread.
The fall of the Wall brought an abrupt end to both East Germany and its security apparatus. An irony of history is that, on November 9, 1989, it was a Stasi man who opened the first barrier on Bornholmer Strasse and thus initiated the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Feb 18, 2026 | Five letters came to symbolize dictatorship, terror and mass surveillance: STASI. The Staatssicherheit, East Germany’s state security service, employed 100,000 people, relied on nearly 200,000 informants and operated across 16 regional offices with their own prisons, making it one of the largest secret police systems in the Soviet bloc. After the fall of the Berlin Wall more than 30 years ago, the Stasi disappeared, but it left behind 111 kilometres of files, 41 million record cards, 1.4 million photos and countless recordings, many saved from destruction by human rights activists.
Today, historians, journalists and victims continue to examine these archives, including 16,000 sacks filled with millions of torn documents now being reconstructed by hand and with specialized software. These records have revealed the recruitment of minors, the coercion of former Nazis, the use of psychological torture known as “Zersetzung,” and contingency plans for camps designed to detain 80,000 opponents within 24 hours. Through newly uncovered documents, expert analysis, interviews with former officers and testimonies from victims, this film explores the workings and legacy of the most effective secret service in the Communist bloc. It invites viewers to consider how confronting these archives shapes both personal memory and democratic accountability today.
Documentary: Stasi : A State Against Its People (2022)
Directed by: Barbara NECEK
Production: ET LA SUITE PRODUCTIONS
July 31, 2025 | Even 35 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, there’s still an imbalance between eastern and western Germany. Many executive positions in the former East are still held by people from the former West Germany. What are the reasons for this?
Since the fall of the Wall, the former East Germany has undergone an unprecedented transformation, in which immigrants from former West Germany still play a significant role. Often, they arrived as young people, networked and rose to leadership positions. From here, they shaped and continue to shape eastern Germany today. According to figures published by the Federal Government Commissioner for Eastern Germany in September 2024, more than 3 decades after reunification, only around 12 per cent of the leadership elite in eastern Germany were actually born there. The documentary ponders the reasons for this - and its consequences. Does it go some way to explaining the widespread rejection of the democratic system and the great popularity of the far-right AfD party in eastern Germany?
The fact is that immediately after the fall of the Wall, West Germans were urgently needed - for example in the judiciary. Many East German lawyers didn’t make the grade. Iris Goerke-Berzau came to Saxony-Anhalt from West Germany in the 1990s and helped to rebuild the judiciary. She has stayed to this day. When it came to the economy in the new federal states, the rebuilding process also relied on skills of West Germans like Ludwig Koehne. The Oxford graduate came to the former East Germany in 1992 and worked for the Treuhandanstalt, a government agency set up to privatize East German state-owned enterprises. When the agency was dissolved in 1994, he took over a railway crane manufacturer in Leipzig and turned it into the global market leader in its sector. Koehne says this economic salvage operation wouldn’t have been possible without western knowledge and capital.
Angela Merkel and Joachim Gauck are prominent exceptions - former East Germans who have excelled in their field. Another is 45-year-old Manja Kliese, who heads the crisis response center at the Federal Foreign Office. "Many East Germans wouldn’t even dare to apply for careers like mine,” she says. Eastern Germans are also underrepresented in senior positions at the Federal Foreign Office. "We have a huge democracy problem,” says Kliese, "when people in the East have been controlled by others for decades.” This is another reason why people feel very distant from elite groups and are more likely to support right-wing extremists, she says. But still, she encourages other eastern Germans to get involved -- and better represent their part of the country.
Oct 3, 2024 | Every year on October 3, Germany celebrates its reunification. But even decades after reunification, Germany remains politically divided. The right-wing populist, anti-immigration AfD is on the rise, especially in the east. Former civil rights activists are outraged.
Oct 5, 2019 | An American journalist, writer and popular speaker, who defected to the USSR in 1952, Victor Grossman has since lived in East Germany, then the reunified Germany, chronicling life, politics and humanity.
Victor's latest book is published by Monthly Review Press and titled "A Socialist Defector: From Harvard to Karl-Marx-Allee": [Click here.]
Recorded at Der Rote Laden, Friedrichshain, Berlin on 3 October 2019.
Please note well that the mere fact that I am posting this video here should not be in any way misconstrued. I am not posting it because I have any liking for the then GDR, communist East Germany; rather, I am posting it for educational purposes. I, for one, had absolutely no idea that the GDR was progressive in matters gay rights.
Jul 16, 2019 | Victor Grossman defected to East Germany while serving in the US military in the 1950's. His latest book recounts his assessment of life in the US, in East Germany, and in the united Germany. We discuss the book with the author
He was a dedicated Communist who chose to live in East Germany. He became a dissident and the regime later revoked his citizenship. In the DW interview Wolf Biermann talks about his break with Communism and his conviction that you have to speak out.
