My life with the Stasi

It's tough being a Stasi operator. You work long hours for low pay in cramped and uncomfortable conditions. You can't tell anyone about your work, even though you know half the people you're spying on are probably employed as informers for your employers anyway.

On this occasion I was watching and listening in on every visitor to a rock music festival - all probably with subversive thoughts and tendencies. All needed to be thoroughly documented, though the working conditions were cramped and uncomfortable, the instruments were crude, the feedback rang in my ears, and it was hard to see anything useful really.

This was part of the fun to be had in Berlin's DDR Museum, an excellent little museum designed to give visitors and younger Germans a taste of life as it was behind the Iron Curtain. As well as the state's intrusion into the lives of everyone, it was also about shortages of goods, collective military  and potty training, nudist holidays (the regime tried but failed to stamp this out), and how everyone who owned a Trabi became a first class mechanic (because they had to). There was a game in which you tried to advance your education by all kinds of strategies, but the only one that worked was to be a patriotic and faithful party loyalist. And in another game I was a factory manager desperately trying to meet production targets using the tools of the planned economy. I actually did manage a slight surplus once, but then got swamped by the corresponding increased target for the next year.

It wasn't all bad though. Apparently quite a few East Germans harbour a bit of nostalgia about the bad old days. They even have a word for it: ostalgie. Here's Wikipedia's piece on it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostalgie  It's largely about the absence of unemployment and severe poverty during the period.

The DDR Museum's site is at http://www.ddr-museum.de/en