Abnormal Friday

This morning I went into school and worked on some homework, as well as finishing up a film for class.  It was The Lives of Others (as I told you, one of my favorites), which we're watching because next Wednesday we'll be visiting an actual Stasi prison on the outskirts of Berlin.  I'm really excited for this experience, it's such a unique one!!

When my friend Devon and I finished up watching the film (which was even better this time, so obviously I still highly recommend it) we stopped in Ella's office to wish her a nice weekend.  We got distracted and talked with her about the movie a bit.  She said she was really happy that we had heard of it in the states, and that it's not just known in Germany - this way people can know how crazy and often unnavigable life in the GDR was. (Background info: in the film, the main character is a famous GDR playwright and because of one tip off, his house is wired and he's under surveillance for years - he doesn't find out until long after the wall falls, but it completely ruined nearly every aspect of his life.  This was not uncommon in the GDR).  So anyway, Ella was telling us how often people in her generation and older think back to this era when meeting new people.  They think "who is he/she, and who was he/she?".  The Stasi employed 274,000 people, so the odds of meeting someone who used to be an informant (or who had their life turned completely upside down because of one person accusing them) is quite high.  That's something I didn't realize people still thought about a lot here, but after all, the wall only fell 2 decades ago.  And seeing the depth with which the Stasi penetrated these individuals' lives, it definitely isn't something you just forget after a few years.

Interestingly, after the fall of the Wall, the Stasi archives were fairly quickly opened to the public.  There are 50 MILES of Stasi documents on GDR citizens.  Anyone who lived in the GDR can walk into one of these offices and request their file.  They can over conversations they had in their bugged apartments, locations where they'd been watched/overheard, and the names of those who'd informed on them.  As we learned in class, many people preferred not to read their records.  In many cases even wives informed on husbands, in order to save themselves from imprisonment, so I see why they wouldn't want to look.  But at the same time, the curiosity would kill me.

In other news, I had several nice interactions with Germans today.  People held doors, said "have a nice day," and other uncharacteristically kind things.  It's probably because I looked quite german today.

Tomorrow I'll be getting up at 4am to catch my train to Hamburg.  Hopefully my travel companions don't drive me crazy and I have a good time.  I'll report back - hopefully with lots of photos!