The Stasi Museum is essentially a brief history of Soviet repression of Eastern Europe with a particular focus on East Germany. Outside there 6 panels with a great timeline and photographs from 1945-1989.
• the map shows the geographic reach of postwar Soviet control
• Vaclav Havel, who worked as a laborer for four years during one of his many imprisonments
• East Germans would travel to Eastern Bloc countries and then seek asylum with West German embassies.
• three photos that struck me as especially poignant and remarkable —-couple walking to refugee center in Budapest; mother and daughter saying goodbye at Prague West German embassy; guess trying to pull down East German trying to scale the West German embassy walls in Prague
• Cars gathered by the Stasi in East Germany. Left behind by escapees.
• Stasi used delivery trucks like these with 5 tiny cells/ compartments to arrest/kidnap dissidents. The space is tiny. You can’t stand up and you can barely fit in. Plus you’re handcuffed.
• As with all intelligence outfits, the head of Stasi had this briefcase with incriminating documents about Erich Honecker, the head of the GDR from 1971-1989. Honecker was imprisoned by the Gestapo during WWII and apparently made statements that would discredit him. All evil is eventually banal and the Stasi Museum shows the extent of that evil and the bland, mind-numbing surveillance of millions of people. At the end, the people surrounded the Stasi headquarters and went through all this stuff, including the briefcase.
But the terror of it all can only be imagined.
Samba to the Reckoning 