Translator: Andrius Družinis-Vitkus Reviewer: Ivana Krivokuća
I would like to speak about heroes
and how the image of heroes has changed in the last 100 years.
And I want to take you on a voyage of discovery to a location
which was kept secret for decades.
And the ancient word "heroes"
normally were young brave men
who did something exceptional.
For example, overcoming an enemy or a monster,
or rescuing a virgin in need.
Their stories were told in heroic sagas,
like the famous one of Achilles.
Since the Roman Empire,
a new kind of hero entered the scene:
famous military or political leaders were honoured with statues,
which showed them in a heroic pose.
This tradition lasted nearly 2,000 years.
In the picture you can see Otto von Bismarck,
founder and first chancellor of the German Empire.
The statue stands in Hamburg
and was built at the beginning or the 20th century.
At 34 metres high,
it is one of the biggest monuments of a politician in Europe.
After the French revolution,
and even more so, after World War I,
a new type of hero was invented:
the ordinary soldier who died for his motherland.
Because so many soldiers were killed,
monuments were built all over Europe and exposed their names
as here, at the Mémorial de Notre-Dame-de-Lorette in France,
built in 2014.
During the totalitarian dictatorships of fascism and communism,
the cult of heroes was taken to the extreme.
In the socialist countries, even outstanding workers
were declared as "heroes of labour" and honoured with a medal.
Here you can see a monument in Berlin, which shows a Red Army soldier.
30 metres high, built in 1949 by the Soviets.
Like Bismarck, he has an oversized sword in his hand
that smashes a German Hakenkreuz.
The communists loved those monuments.
Not long ago, the Eastern part of Europe
was full of statues of Marx, Engels, Lenin, or even Stalin,
the murderous leader of the Soviet Union.
In Lithuania you find a lot of them in Grūtas Park now.
But in the last decades in democratic societies,
the idea of what a hero is has changed.
Neither the political leader, nor the fallen soldier,
is primarily seen as a hero.
But rather, the powerless, weak, victim, persecuted or killed
by stronger powers.
It is the anti-hero, who gets the public attention today.
This is the former central prison of the communist secret police
in East Germany.
More than 11,000 people were arrested here;
most of them because of political reasons.
Unsung heroes who suffered under physical and psychological torture.
Later I will present to you some of them.
Here you can see the so-called "submarine".
A cell block under the earth with more than 60 small chambers.
There was no daylight below and it was cold and humid.
The prison was situated in the Eastern part of Berlin,
in the district of Hohenschönhausen.
And it was kept secret for more than 40 years.
The cells were furnished only with a wooden bench
and a bucket which served as a toilet.
Whoever came into one of these cells
had the feeling of being buried alive.
On this map you can see all the cells,
including the panel cells for standing and darkness detention.
Every cell can tell you a story of one or several unsung heroes.
Let's have a closer look at them.
In cell number 57, Ewald Ernst was imprisoned.
He was a manager of the Christian-Democratic Party
in Sachsen-Anhalt, a state in East Germany.
He was arrested in 1947
because he tried to keep the ties
to fellow party members in West Germany
during the beginning of the Cold War.
He spent 21 months in a dungeon of four square metres,
strictly isolated and punished several times
by standing detention.
After awful interrogations, he was sentenced to 25 years
in a labour camp.
We don't know which cell Walter Linser was in.
He was a lawyer who worked for an organisation in West Berlin,
that published rights violations in East Germany.
In 1952, he was kidnapped in front of his apartment.
Pulled in a car, shot in his leg, and brought to Hohenschönhausen.
He was heavily tortured by Soviet interrogators,
which you can even see on the official photo,
which was made by the secret police.
Do you notice the traces of torture under his right eye?
After more than one year of interrogations,
he was brought to Moscow
and he was executed there, in the Butyrka prison.
His ashes were spread in a mass grave.
This and the following pictures were also made in prison.
It shows Karl Wilhelm Fricke,
a young journalist, who had escaped from East Germany
to avoid his imprisonment.
In the western part of Germany, he started to publish articles
about political persecution under the communist regime.
He was 26 when he was invited for a drink at a flat of a friend.
But the friend was a spy and the drink was poisoned,
with the result that he fell down and lost consciousness.
He woke up in the prison of Hohenschönhausen,
surrounded by yelling Stasi officers who brought him in cell 52.
Karl Wilhelm Fricke spent more than 5 years in prison.
In cell 36 sat Walter Janka,
the head of a famous publishing house
in East Berlin.
He was a communist
and under the Nazi regime, he was sent to a concentration camp.
After his release, he fought in the Spanish Civil War
on the side of the republicans and the International Brigades.
In East Germany, he participated in discussions
of how to reform the socialist system.
In 1956, he was arrested, brought to Hohenschönhausen
and later sentenced to 5 years in prison,
for, as it was said, "building a counter-revolutionary group."
For nearly 30 years, he was afraid of speaking about his detention.
It was not until 1989 that he published his memories
and I organised a reading with him in West Berlin.
It was the most successful event I ever conducted,
because a few days before the Berlin Wall had fallen
and hundreds of citizens of the Eastern part
wanted to hear him.
Now let's go back to the dark past.
In 1960, the Stasi built a new prison with almost twice the number of cells.
The windows were walled with glass bricks
and the prisoners were isolated from any communication.
The only one who spoke with them was the interrogator.
One hundred twenty interrogation rooms were in use.
In endless questionings,
the prisoners were forced to sign a confession.
This is the mugshot of Jochen Scheidler.
At the age of 25, he protested
against the Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia.
He was outraged that Moscow sent in 1968 tanks and soldiers
to stop the Prague Spring –
an attempt to democratise the socialist system.
Jochen Scheidler printed 800 leaflets with stamps made for kids.
In the eyes of the Stasi, this was hostile agitation
and he was sentenced to more than two years in prison.
In cell 117, Jürgen Fuchs was imprisoned.
He was a young writer
who had studied psychology in East Germany.
In the age of 25, he was exmatriculated because of some critical readings.
In 1976, he was arrested and brought to Hohenschönhausen.
There he did something very unusual.
He studied the behaviour of the interrogator
and of himself like a psychologist in an experiment.
Because he had no pencil, no paper,
he wrote down his observations with his finger on the table.
When he was released and expatriated to West Berlin,
an entire book was in his mind,
which was published only a few weeks later.
From the West, he supported the East German opposition,
unlike anyone else in his time.
We became friends
and often I felt ashamed
that he was much more resolute than me.
Jürgen Fuchs died at the age of 48.
He was conviced that it was caused
by the Stasi by using radioactive rays
during his stay
at the Hohenschönhausen prison.
Also Rudolf Bahro,
one of the famous dissidents of East Germany,
died because of blood cancer.
He wrote a critical book about the socialist system.
His ex-wise informed the Stasi
already when he was still in the process of writing it.
In 1977, he was arrested and sentenced to eight years in prison.
Officially because of spying,
because he could publish the book only in the West.
When I was a student,
I founded a committee for his release.
But I never thought that one day I would work at the prison
where the Stasi interrogated him for almost one year.
This is Bärbel Bohley,
a young East German painter
who was arrested in 1983
because she participated in protest
against the deployment of new missiles in Eastern and Western Europe.
She was such a brave and sensitive woman.
If you look closely, you can see a tear running down her left cheek
when the Stasi took this photo.
She must have felt very alone in this moment.
She was released after six weeks because of international protests.
And some years later, she became the leader
of the peaceful revolution in East Germany.
We became friends, too.
But also Bärbel Bohley died some years ago because of blood cancer.
Last but not least, I want to present to you Vera Lengsfeld.
A young dissident, who was excluded from the Communist Party
because of her pacifistic activities.
In 1988, she was arrested because she tried to participate
in an official demonstration with a self-made banner.
On the banner she quoted only the East German constitution.
"Every citizen has the right to express his opinion freely".
She was charged of hooliganism for that.
And after the fall of the communist regime,
she found out that her own husband
collaborated with the Stasi and had spied on her.
This was the situation in Europe for more than 40 years.
Half of the continent was ruled by communist dictators
and thousands of places for detention
like the prison in Hohenschönhausen
existed in the socialist countries.
None of the inmates thought that this situation would be soon changed.
But at the end of the 80s, the small number of dissidents
grew to a large mass movement.
The unsung heroes multiplied unexpectedly.
Altogether they succeeded to overturn the tyranny in Europe.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall
and the reunification of Germany,
the prison of Hohenschönhausen became a memorial,
and my team and I started to discover the secrets of this dark place.
Today, the memorial is visited by hundreds of thousands every year.
Former inmates guide the visitors through the prison
and tell them their life stories.
Do you recognise the guy in the picture?
It is Jochen Scheidler,
the man who distributed leaflets in 1968.
And this is Vera Lengsfeld,
the woman who was betrayed by her own husband to the Stasi.
So the question remains:
Who are the coming heroes of today?
Political leaders, like the President of the Russian Federation,
Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany,
Barack Obama, President of the United States,
or perhaps Edward Snowden,
the ex-employee of the National Security Agency,
or Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani girl who informed the world
about the Taliban terror in her region,
especially against the education of girls.
She was heavily injured after an assassination attempt
on her life in 2012.
Or is it Liu Xiaobo, the Chinese rioter who has been in prison since 2008
because he had initiated an appeal to democratise China.
In 2010, he was honoured with a Nobel Peace Prize,
but the Chinese authorities didn't allow him to participate
in the award ceremony.
Only the future will show who the true heroes of all times are.
Perhaps, there's also one among you.
It's up to you what you make of your life.
Thank you.
(Applause)