The German government has taken a step forward in its move to ban former employees of communist East Germany's Ministry for State Security, or Stasi, from working in the authority that administers the archive of Stasi files.
One in five eastern Germans have some sympathy for the communist regime's decision to build the Berlin Wall, according to a new poll, published nearly 50 years after the Cold War barrier was erected.
A new exhibition at the German Historical Museum (DHM) in Berlin offers insight into everyday life in East Germany and post-communist eastern Europe with never-before-seen photos. Curator Yara-Colette Lemke took The Local on a tour.
An amendment to the law relating to East German secret police files on Wednesday will likely lead to more investigations into the pasts of people working in the public sector, a spokesman for the file archive said.
A handful of tattered photos are all that remain of Mozambican Anacleto Amade's two years in East Germany, where he worked in the 1980s under a labour scheme between the then-communist allies.
Now the symbol of German reunification, the Brandenburg Gate is among Berlin's most famous sights. Images of revellers atop the Wall in 1989 evoke strong memories even 20 years later.
The train station at Friedrichstrasse was one of only two checkpoints for foreign visitors to Berlin, and home to the "Palace of Tears" - a pavilion nicknamed after from the many sad goodbyes said there. After the wall came down, this "palace" became a disco, but is currently being redeveloped into a museum.
Twenty years have passed since the fall of the Berlin Wall, but victims of communist East Germany's despised Stasi secret police say fighting off history's ghosts is still a daily struggle.
The last reel to be dug out of East Germany's banned film vault premieres for the first time in Dresden on Wednesday, 43 years after it got the censor’s ax.
The neo-Nazi NPD party is entering several German city parliaments for the first time after this weekend’s local elections, news magazine <i>Der Spiegel</i> reported on Monday.
Karl-Heinz Kurras, the recently exposed Stasi collaborator and former West Berlin police officer who infamously shot a student protester in 1967, was almost discovered six years ago, the Office for Stasi Files (BStU) said Thursday.
The feared East German Stasi secret police misused the identities of innocent Western German citizens as covers for secret agents, daily <i>Berliner Zeitung</i> reported on Wednesday.
A former West German police officer who infamously shot a protestor in 1967 may face trial for a third time after reports emerged on Friday that he was an unofficial informant, or IM, of the Stasi.
Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) is planning a campaign against communist nostalgia and the rise of the hard-line socialist Left party, according to daily <i>Financial Times Deutschland</i> on Monday.
Politician Wolfgang Böhmer has apologized for offending East German women with his comments about recent baby killings - but his opinion remains the same.
<b>Wolfgang Böhmer, the conservative premier of the eastern German state of Saxony-Anhalt, unleashed a wave of outrage on Sunday by blaming a grim spate of baby killings by their mothers on the brutal legacy of communist East Germany.</b>
