STASI – Secret Rooms

Daniel & Geo Fuchs

Fifteen years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, artists Daniel & Geo Fuchs traveled through eastern Germany to visit places that were used by the Stasi, the East German Ministry of State Security.
Their pictures offer insight into Stasi mechanisms and the amalgamation of architecture, power, and powerlessness. Photographs of blank surveillance monitors in a control room and a long wing with a seemingly endless row of interrogation rooms in Hohenschönhausen depict the system’s desolation and coldness.
In precise, large-scale photographs, the artists show the rooms the East German Ministry of State Security used for interrogations over several decades, the prison cells for political prisoners in Bautzen and Potsdam, and the offices of Erich Mielke, the former minister for state security. The files stored at the Federal Stasi Archives in Berlin – endless stacks of records on control and espionage, division and subversion – testify to the regime’s complete exercise of power over 40 years.