Introduction: ‘Wissen wie es war’?

Abstract

Saturday 14 January 2012 saw an estimated 5,000 visitors from Berlin and beyond swarming over the precincts of the former Stasi headquarters on Normannenstraße (Fuchs, 2012), which had been reopened following extensive renovations. The date for the event had been chosen to coincide with two significant anniversaries: the twentieth anniversary of the law which first granted German citizens the right to examine their Stasi files (2 January 1992) and the twenty-second anniversary of the storming of the Stasi headquarters by East German civil rights activists (15 January 1990). Visitors were able to participate in a full day’s programme of walking tours of the precinct, visits to the archive and back-to-back talks, culminating in the first ever podium discussion between all three heads of the Stasi files authority: the present incumbent, Roland Jahn, and his predecessors, Joachim Gauck and Marianne Birthler. The event included contributions from many prominent actors from 1989–90 and was conducted under the title Wissen wie es war (‘Knowing how it was’).¹ Quite coincidentally, that same evening a group of five cabaret singers from the group named ‘Chansonwerkstatt’, four of them born in East Germany during the 1970s, presented the final performance of a show titled Ostpaket: Wendekinder packen aus! (lit: ‘Package from the East: Children of the Wende unpack’) (see Chansonwerkstatt, 2012).²

Throughout the volume, East and West Germany are used to designate the pre-1990 GDR and FRG respectively, while east(ern) and west(ern) Germany are used to refer to present-day geographical regions.