Description:
In June of 2015 during a stay in Berlin we visited, on successive days, the Stasi Museum and the Stasi Prison, in former East Berlin. The Stasi Prison operated as a remand and interrogation facility continually from immediately after World War II until the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dismantling of the communist regime in East Germany. Virtually all of the many thousands of citizens who populated the Prison during those four decades were political prisoners, and as such the representation of their experience in the site provides important insights into the nature of the regime and its impact on daily life. The Stasi Museum is in the former headquarters of the East German Ministry for State Security in the Berlin suburb of Lichtenberg, and provides a highly engaging representation of the Ministry’s history, bureaucratic structure and activities (see Stasi Museum 2016). It also furnished us with valuable social and historical background for visiting the Stasi Prison the following day. The account we give in this chapter, however, focuses entirely on our experience of the Prison. The tour we did there was guided by a German national but was conducted in English.
Description:
As criminologists Jeff Ferrell and Cécile Van de Voorde (2010: 40) have said, “the photodocumentary tradition embodies a tension that has long bedevilled criminology and other “social sciences”: that between objective inquiry and subjective analysis.” Documentary photographers, they argue, while employing a device “designed to capture the visual reality of an event”, nevertheless are very much mediators of that reality, “us[ing] their photographic skills to interpret and communicate these events, and so force the viewers … into visual confrontations with horror, violence, injustice and death.” But, as the following discussion will show, those “confrontations” can all too easily be compromised and even negated, both by those very same skills and by the motivation of others to exploit them.