The Decomposition of the Soul

A look at the central preventive prison for political prisoners of the Ministry for State Security (the STASI) in Berlin's Hohenschoenhausen district under the former repressive East German regime. The building--which never figured on maps of East Berlin and which, today, still bears the marks of Germany's recent past (Nazism, the Soviet occupation and the Communist dictatorship)--has the sinister distinction of possessing as many interrogation rooms as detention cells. Its topology and organization betray its true function--a huge interrogation center, a veritable laboratory of psychological destruction. It is a symbol of the ex-German Democratic Republic GDR's general system of repression: a place dedicated and devoted to the art of "operative decomposition". The arrest of a suspected enemy of the state was "of course, part of the procedural process. It may be limited to intimidation, or lead to an "investigation" with graver consequences: permanent preventative detention, repeated interrogations, total isolation, the semblance of a trial, heavy sentences, the impossibility of social and professional reinsertion, harm inflicted upon loved ones, stripping of nationality and expulsion from the country, incitement to suicide, or even thinly disguised murder". Part of the detention center's buildings have now been taken over by offices and shops, but a STASI museum was opened there to inform about the inhumanity of the GDR's state security system. In October 2001, the Free Democratic Party tabled a motion to the Bundestag calling for the Hohenschoenhausen detention center to be preserved as a permanent memory to the second dictatorship under the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED)'s regime alongside the STASI headquarters in Normannenstrassee and the Berlin Wall memorial at Bernauer Strasse.