At the beginning of the 1980s, my elderly grandmother smuggled George Orwell’s forbidden book ‘1984’ in her underwear through ‘Check Point Charlie’, from the West. The reality in East Germany mirrored the worst of the paranoid excesses set out in Orwell’s book.

IM's ( Unofficial Collaborators)
By 1989 the Ministry for State Security State Security had about 189,000 unofficial collaborators working for it

Fatalities I
Between 1949 to 1989, 327 people were killed along the internal border between the former East and West Germany

Fatalities II
Between its construction on 13th August 1961 and its demolition on 9th November 1989, 139 people were killed at The Berlin Wall

On The Payroll I
The total number of official full time employees of the Ministry of State Security (MfS or Stasi), nationally, was around 97,000 in 1989

Hostile Element
A person deemed to have a negative attitude towards the GDR

Department M
was responsible for the controls and analysis of international and national circulation of mail

Politically Negative
A person not being prepared to educate students using socialist propaganda; a reference to my work as a teacher

Unsuitable
A person deemed to be unsuitable to work as a teacher and ordered to be removed from their school

Who is Who
A reference to the Stasi's constant effort to identify people's true political attitudes, their way of thinking and behaving

To Clarify A Matter
The standard statement 'Zur Klarung eines Sachverhaltes' was used by the Stasi to summon people for an interview, a phrase that could be the beginning of imprisonment in GDR prisons.

Sympathiser
A person who sympathised with the polish clergy; a reference to a confiscated letter I sent to my uncle about my work experience in Warsaw, Poland, in 1984

Going Nowhere
A judgment that Individual A did not influence Individual B to apply for relocation in the Federal Republic of Germany (the former West Germany) (FRG)