Der Schwarze Kasten

In February of 1990, the author Jürgen Fuchs read diaries from the time of his arrest in a Stasi jail. During the reading, someone stood up and said : I’m one of those you’re talking about, but nobody listens to us. In March we started with on-camera interviews which ended in the summer of 1991. Dr. Jochen Girke, born 1949, was lieutenant-colonel of the Stasi, the secret service of the GDR. He taught operative psychology at the Stasi college. The application of his scientific knowledge had devastating practical effects. The film tries to penetrate into the tiny, closed world of this man who says about himself : I was a criminal by word. An artificial space becomes a sort of closed-cell for the interviewer and interviewed. Nevertheless, the film-makers leave this cell in order to visit the people with whom he lived before and who formed him, and who through approval or silence gave him the feeling of being accepted.