A LEADING former East German dissident has called for a central memorial in front of the Reichstag in Berlin to recall repression in the vanished socialist state.
Roland Jahn, the newly elected custodian of the Stasi secret police files, has said that it was important to recall the injustice visited on the ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED) against those who refused to conform.
"We don't have a memorial with which everyone subjected to political persecution can identify," Mr Jahn told Super Illumagazine.
“Most memorial sites are former prisons in which the regime opponents of the time were locked away. But repression in the GDR didn’t just mean prison. There was the daily chicanery against people who didn’t conform: in school, at work, in sports or culture.”
Mr Jahn rose to prominence in East Germany after criticising state censorship and the forced extradition of singer and activist Wolf Biermann. Repeated political protests led to regular arrests and imprisonment, and he was forcibly extradited in 1983.
From West Berlin he worked as a journalist, smuggling television cameras into East Berlin to film civil rights protest marches. He was spied on by the Stasi until 1990. Last year he became the third person to assume control of the Stasi file authority.
“It doesn’t have to be a big memorial but it should provoke debate about the dictatorship in a central site in the capital,” he said.
“The groups that represent victims of the SED regime suggest putting it near the Reichstag in the seat of power, where many people pass.”
Mr Jahn said a memorial “should not be put on the long finger” because “for all the joy about freedom one cannot forget the victims of repression”.
His remarks came as Berlin unveiled plans for a central memorial to German unification, a 55-metre-long dish that visitors can turn into a giant see-saw.
The €10 million memorial called “Citizens’ Movement” – already dubbed “the fruit bowl” by locals – is expected to occupy a central site before the yet-to-be-rebuilt Prussian palace.
Inscribed with the 1989 slogan “Wir sind das Volk” (We are the people), the construction is set in motion by visitors moving from one side to another.
Critics say the monument, by German designers Milla & Partner, is a security and safety hazard and, in a city filled with memorials, superfluous.