Gabriele Stötzer – Der lange Arm der Stasi

Spector Books 2022

288pp. with numerous color and black and white illustrations, perfect bound softcover
Width: 21 cm
Length: 26.5 cm
Language: German

Artist Gabriele Stötzer was the powerhouse of Erfurt’s lively underground. After Wolf Biermann’s expatriation in 1976, she herself was held on remand and put in the Hoheneck women’s prison. Her one-year imprisonment did not silence her though. After her release, she ran an underground gallery and established a group of female artists. On 4 December 1989, she was the first to occupy the Stasi building in Erfurt together with a collection of like-minded people. More than twenty-five years after the event, Stötzer researched her own past and that of thirty-two fellow artists as recorded in the Stasi archives. She has written a factual report on the different forms of observation that were used, exposing the internal logic of the surveillance regime. Her text is supplemented by original documents from the files, photos from the underground as well as found footage from the 1960s to 1980s.