At the end of 1989, when the Germans were destroying the Berlin wall that was separating the freedom from the communism, I was in Berlin. STASI, the German Security, tried to save itself by changing its name and pretending it was a different institution. The Germans didnât buy it.
On the 11th of December 1989, in the morning, the German TV stations were broadcasting live from the STASI headquarters. The doors were sealed. The notes on them were informing that the institution had been dissolved and the 18 buildings of STASI had been taken over by a "Staatliches Brgerkomitee" (Civic State Committee).
"My name is Hans Joachim Gauck and I am a parson", were the words of a civilian that came from the windows of the No. 1 building - where I had often met my East-German counterpart, General Markus Wolf. "I wanted to study journalism", Gauck continued, "but STASI rejected my file because my father had been arrested by NKVD and taken in Siberia when I was ten. I graduated from theology eventually. I am not a religious person, but the wish of believing in something has become more and more important for me during the hard years I have lived until today, when our civic committee gave me the task of taking the STASI headquarters under control".
When Gauck finished his speech, the few thousands of STASI members who had come to work looked sadder than ever. Over the night, the defendants became accusers.
I have revisited Berlin regularly since then. During the first years after the unification of Germany, STASI was on everyoneâs lips. They were blaming their crimes. Everyone was talking about the more than 200 km of secret archives of STASI and about the six million files of operative individual investigation that were covering 30% of the German Democratic Republic population. The people were talking about the fact that the city of Erfurt, with 200,000