If you have ever dreamed of being a startlingly effective secret policeman in a paranoid German Communist dystopia, I mean.
The Stasi fashion collection was extensive. The agency sent thousands of spies into West Germany and had access to vast amounts of cash to buy western goods to equip agents with.
“For me, the banality of some of these pictures makes them even more repulsive.”
That the IOC seems determined to find a way to strip Armstrong’s time trial medal prompted Bill Mallon, one of the world’s leading Olympic historians, to ask in an email why the Olympic officials can’t do it for the medals won by doped East German athletes.
It’s a good question.
There actually is more documented evidence of East German doping than there is of Armstrong’s. The Stasi (East German secret police) files opened after the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall gave names, dates, and dosages, implicating many East German Olympic medalists from 1972 through 1988.
This is just what we need these days: Uplifting communist photography. More specifically, a nostalgic retrospective of art photography produced in communist East Germany.
They just don’t make German democratic republics like they used to.
“Berlin is littered with relics of its communist past, with one of the eeriest being Spreepark, where the remains of what was once East Germany’s only amusement park still stand.”
This whole city is one big abandoned communist funfair, lady (or at least big chunks of that Wild East part of town are).
They are everywhere I tell you, all around us, immer und überall, like vampires, or even zombies if you prefer. But maybe that’s just me.
By the way, that park was way cool when it was still running. Really cheesy and schräg. But maybe that’s just me too.
The amusement park’s history is as colorful as its rides once were. The Kulturpark Plaenterwald, as it was known under communism, was also used as a meeting point by youths rebelling against the state’s collectivist system.
Death and transfiguration, although glorification is probably the more accurate term. Nothing new here, folks. Just move along now and go about your business.
Death as in the GDR, of course, as in dead as a doornail, long, long ago. Transfiguration/glorification as in the twenty-five percent of East Germans (or Germans of the East, if you prefer) that still thinks old communist Germany wasn’t such a bad place to live after all.
This wouldn’t be so bad if these were all just old communists thinking this, of course, but that’s clearly not the case.
Eine Studie der Linkspartei.
Observing Hermann 