The Black Box (1992)

In THE BLACK BOX (Der schwarze Kasten), an insider gives an insight into the inner workings of the surveillance systen of communist East Germany. It was shot between March 1990 and June 1991, just after the East German Peaceful Revolution. As one of the earliest films about the infamous Stasi, it is a unique and invaluable document of unparalled access and immediacy. The documentary's main protagonist is Jochen Girke, a Lieutenant Colonel in the Ministry of State Security (MfS). He was born in 1949, the very year in which East Germany was founded and named "German Democratic Republic" (GDR). When the GDR experiences a Peaceful Revolution in 1989, Girke, a native of Thuringia, is forty years old and faces the ruins of his professional life to date. In the first and only free elections in East Germany on March 18, 1990, a clear majority of voters have chosen parties that want a swift dismantling of their state and a fast-track to German unification. The GDR is going to disappear in the very near future. When filming wraps in June, 1991, unification has been a reality for 9 months already. As a lecturer with a doctorate in operational psychology at the Stasi college in Potsdam-Golm, Jochen Girke was one of the leading cadres of the defunct country. His classes had been frequented by future Stasi officers and investigators whose duties also included the management of tens of thousands of unofficial informers. As a researcher, Girke taught the future State Security specialists how to use psychology not only to spy, but also to actively destroy human relations and personalities in the name of fighting state enemies. "Operational decomposition" (Zersetzung) - the destruction of circles of friends, families and individuals - was an integral part of the Ministry's tasks. Girke, on the other hand, states in the film that he pursued a "humanitarian approach. His goal was to use psychology to ensure that only real enemies of the state would be persecuted, and not citizens with more righteous motives. Psychology with, for - but also against people, was his formula. Girke began his career in the MfS with a 3-year service in the guard regiment "Feliks Dzierzynski". After that, the MfS delegated him to study in Jena, but his true employer was concealed. One of his fellow students at the psychology department was Jürgen Fuchs, who later became a leading civil rights activist in East Germany. How did Jochen Girke become what he is? Why did help to roll out the extensive surveillance of East German and other citizens? Director Tamara Trampe experienced the perfidious methods of the MfS firsthand. Yet she does not ask accusatory questions. Rather, she wants to find out what it takes for a human being to become part of a machine of oppression. THE BLACK BOX is Trampe's first feature-length film and also her first congenial collaboration with cinematographer Johann Feindt. Born in 1942, she had previously worked as a story editor at the East German film studio DEFA. Apart from a single short documentary, she had not been able to realize any films there. She died 2021, leaving a small but outstanding oeuvre of documentaries that oscillate between the past and the present and address existential questions of human life.