Hohenschönhausen, Berlin: Explorations in Stasiland

Abstract

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, through the personal testimony of former prisoners and the exposure of places of internment, the full extent of the political subjugation of their opponents by the Soviet Union and its allies has been revealed. In 1994, the former East German Ministerium für Statssicherheit (Stasi) prison at Hohenschönhausen, Berlin, was designated as a memorial site, commemorating the victims of post-war political repression. It lies at the centre of a former forbidden zone, der verbotene stadtteil, of Stasi administration buildings, workshops and stores, surrounded by a neighbourhood dominated by housing for Stasi officials. Some of these buildings have found new uses, while others remain empty. Twenty years since the fall of the Berlin Wall the area's past still dominates the character of this urban landscape. In this paper, the authors present the results of a rapid characterisation survey undertaken over two days in 2005. This survey had the aims of exploring, documenting and unravelling the traces that remained, primarily in terms of date, form and function.

The Routledge Handbook of Global Historical Archaeology

“…This is, of course, far from true (e.g., Tipping 2014). More recently, however, the infrastructure of war has become more secret and gone undergroundoften literallyand as such it is even more vulnerable to being lost without adequate record (e.g., see a series of recent studies of Cold War landscapes in Germany and the UK, and their associated social history: Cocroft and Schofield 2010;Gould 2016;Phimester and Tait 2014).…”

Archaeologies of Internment

“…We felt that by taking this dual approach, an interesting and informative documentation of this place might present itself. Here, we focus on the more detailed enquiry; the broader landscape study is described elsewhere (Cocroft and Schofield 2010).…”