Stasi is now on the map

Berlin: Hubertus Knabe looks through his office window at the cluster of grey, socio-realist buildings outside.

"This whole area did not officially exist 20 years ago; it was simply a white spot on the map," he says.

He is in Hohenschonhausen, a district in East Berlin once reserved for the top echelons of the Ministerium fur Staatssicherheit, or Stasi, the notorious secret service of the former German Democratic Republic. The district is widely known as Stasiville.

"The dormitory for their recruits is now a conference hotel," says Knabe, the director of the memorial centre that was once a secret prison complex at the heart of Stasiville.

"Those apartment blocks were for lower-ranking officers; the top brass lived a bit to the left, in the two-storey houses."

A lot has changed since the Stasi was abolished in 1990, but not in Stasiville. "They are still here, of course," he says.

The guardians of a regime that ceased to exist almost two decades ago are now living in retirement in the place where they once worked. The Stasi is back in the spotlight thanks to an Oscar-winning German film, The Life of Others, which opens this week in the UK. It tells the fictional story of a Stasi officer who obsessively monitors a prominent artistic couple, but ultimately risks his life to help them.

Historic facts

The filmmakers wanted to shoot parts of it in Hohenschonhausen, but Knabe refused permission. "There is no record of a humane Stasi officer; it goes against historic facts," he says.

When the Stasi was abolished in 1990, half of its 91,000 employees were stationed in Berlin. Many seem not to have accepted fully the disappearance of their communist homeland. "They live in a world parallel to ours. They have their own websites, their own publishing house, their own monthly papers. They devise ways to disseminate their version of history, portraying themselves as decent people who only did their jobs," Knabe says.

Just a 20-minute tram ride from the city centre, Hohenschonhausen was surrounded by walls topped with barbed wire and guarded by armed soldiers. The Stasi officers who lived and worked here spied on millions of East German citizens and co-ordinated an elaborate network of domestic and foreign informants.

At the prison gate below, tourists pour out of their buses to join the guided tours by former inmates at the prison. A high school class from Leipzig is listening to Mario Rollig, who was 19 when he spent three months in the prison after an attempt to leave the country without authorisation in 1987.

His family only found out where he was kept after the existence of Stasiville was revealed in 1990.

"The people who threw me and many other innocent people in jail are still living in the houses around us," he tells the teenagers. "They are enjoying their state pensions in peace and will never answer for what they have done."

Many Stasi victims who spent years in jail or were banned from working in their professions are now not eligible for pensions, and receive only symbolic support from the state. Former Stasi employees, however, who were among the top earners of the GDR, continue to receive pensions.

Cherry trees

Outside the prison, cherry trees are in blossom around the apartment blocks built in 1950s, which mostly house lieutenants and majors. A little further away is the area for the colonels and the generals, neat brick houses with gardens similar to those of an upmarket English suburb.

Rudolf, a retired lift mechanic, parks his Trabant, the East German plastic-fibre car, in front of a discount supermarket two blocks away from the prison, just outside the formerly restricted area.

"There are Stasi officers living in my building. Some of them are nice people; the others we used to hate. We only found out they ran a prison here after the regime collapsed," he says. Rudolf drinks in the local pub, the Efinger. But he did not go there before 1989, when it was reserved for the Stasi.

Froze in time

In the Efinger time seems to have stopped in the early 1970s: the bar with its carvings and heavy curtains, the old stereo tuned to a local radio station playing 1970s German pop.

"The owners have changed, but it's just like in the old days," Gunter Bohnsack says, as he tucks into his schnitzel. In the old days, Bohnsack, 68, was a colonel in the HVA division of the Stasi, the equivalent of MI6. "We had our people in top places in the West. We did our job just like any other secret service. True, we worked for a totalitarian regime, but we served our country - the only one we had."

Pensions

Bohnsack's former colleagues informally meet at the pub; formally, they run associations of former Stasi members, the agendas of which range from debating negative press reports to devising campaigns and legal action to increase their pensions.

One of those campaigners is Wolfgang Schmidt, another former Stasi officer. Schmidt worked as a special adviser to the makers of The Life of Others; like its main character, he was in charge of monitoring prominent dissidents.

He does not think much of the film he helped produce: "Good acting, but the plot relies on cliches that do not correspond to reality." In any event, like Bohnsack, he does not feel responsible for his Stasi past.