Ein Berliner Sommer: 20 Juli-- Day 26

Wednesday-- so time for another excursion. This one, frankly, sucked. We went to a Stasi Gefängnis (Prison) I was not a fan. Some people liked it, but I didn't like our creepy tour guide, who spoke at like a minute per sentence (actually not joking) and all in all seemed just a little odd. He might have been funny if we could hear his jokes in German... sort of like that weird creepy funny, like Dwight Schrute. However, with the slow speaking and the staring and the complete lack of information given on our tour, he was just weird creepy - funny.

Hohenschönhausen was a Stasi prison, where they would keep political prisoners, and try and wring information out of them, and pretty much just hold them there, like in most prisons.

Prison basement

Interesting thing was that he had experienced a Stasi prison. Not the one we went to, Hohenschönhausen, but some other one. He had tried to escape, but then at one point in his travel from East Berlin, he bought a one way ticket, which tipped off the Stasi that he was going to make a run for it. So he was arrested on the grounds of "Suspicion of an attempt to escape"

Anyway, we were inside the prison, where they had some lovely things like

Chinese water torture

Rubber rooms where they could make you stand in water till your feet pruned up and worse.

And of course they could cram as many of you as they could into these tiny underground cells.

There's this peculiar smell that the DDR had- some sort of mixture of this coal that they had to use and some other stuff. Lots of people still recognize the smell, and many objects from that time still have traces of that particular smell. In one part of the prison, the original flooring still exists, and supposedly the cleaner they used back in the DDR has still left it's mark on the floor. I thought it was repulsive--it smelled to me like formaldehyde and ammonia. I was beginning to get a bit of a headache already, with the changing weather, and this smell made me want to puke. I know it sounds melodramatic, but it made me think of death.

We got to see the interrogation rooms. They used a lot of the same psychological tricks that we use today in interrogations, and the same ones that people have used for years. Intimidation, torture (but not in the interrogation room... at least that they told us about), and tiny things like sitting the person in the corner, playing tricks on them, and making the door open so that the prisoner couldn't see who was informing on them.