Former Stasi Headquarters Provide Headache for Berlin

By Wiebke Hollersen

The former Berlin headquarters of the East German secret police, the Stasi, are in a sorry state of repair, but no one can agree on what to do about it. Civil rights activists, the federal government and local politicians all have their ideas in a dispute that revolves around how to deal with the communist past.

Maybe the police will show up, says Jörg Drieselmann, sounding as if it might not be such a bad thing for the authorities to come and evict them, the people who, for the last 20 years, have been occupying the former office of Erich Mielke, East Germany's head of state security for more than three decades.

Drieselmann looks nervous as perches on the edge of the old couch in his conference room in Berlin's Lichtenberg neighborhood. He glances at the window and the yellowed curtains. The curtain, the light switches, the linoleum -- all the furnishings, in fact -- are "all still genuine East German." Drieselmann, 53, is a gaunt man with a gray beard. As a teenager, he spent time in a Stasi prison in the East German city of Erfurt. Since German reunification, the office of Erich Mielke, the former East German minister of state security, has been his museum.

But now he is being asked to get out, and to take his exhibits with him. According to a letter that Drieselmann and his organization, "Anti-Stalinist Action"(Astak), have received, they are to vacate the building "immediately, but by no later than May 31, 2010, complete with your personal effects." As of Thursday, however, Drieselmann had not been evicted.