On the final morning of this year’s Friends of Scouting in Europe Tour, Mark and I went to prison. The former Stasi prison in Andreasstraße in Erfurt, to be precise. After our visit to Buchenwald on Friday, this was another encounter with a history which is uncomfortable partly because it really isn’t very long ago.
I was alive when people were being held here. This wasn’t some distant period of European history separated from us by centuries. While I was growing up, going to university, beginning my working life and becoming increasingly involved in Scouting, elsewhere in Europe people could find themselves deprived of their liberty because of what they thought, what they said, the people they associated with, or because they wanted to leave their own country.
From 1952, Andreasstraße was used by the East German Ministry for State Security — the Stasi — as a remand prison alongside its district headquarters. More than 5,500 people were held here for political reasons during the years of the GDR. After the Berlin Wall was built in 1961, many of those detained were people who had tried to leave East Germany for the West.
Walking through the building today, what struck me was not simply the physical reality of imprisonment, although the cells and corridors make that real enough. It was the much wider system of control of which the prison was only one part. We explored something of what everyday life was like in a society in which the state sought not merely to control what people did, but also what they thought and said.
Surveillance, informers, interrogation, isolation and uncertainty all had their part to play. You did not necessarily know who could be trusted, what might be reported or how an apparently ordinary conversation might subsequently be interpreted. It is difficult to imagine quite what that does to a society, to communities and friendships, and to the confidence with which people can simply be themselves.
It made me think about the prisons I visited in Oxfordshire during my year as High Sheriff. Those visits were challenging too, and nobody should romanticise imprisonment in Britain today. I saw institutions under considerable pressure and heard about some of the very real difficulties faced by prisoners and those responsible for them. But I also met people working extraordinarily hard to provide education, develop skills, support wellbeing and prepare people for life after release.
That is a very different starting point from Andreasstraße. A democratic society may deprive someone of their liberty because they have broken the law, and we can and should ask searching questions about how well our prisons fulfil their responsibilities to those they hold. But there is a profound difference between a justice system which imprisons someone following a judicial process and a state which uses imprisonment, surveillance and fear as ways of enforcing political conformity.
And that, I think, is the question Andreasstraße ultimately poses: what is a prison for? Is it there to protect society, to punish, to rehabilitate and, ultimately, to help someone return to society and make different choices? Or is it there to frighten people into obedience? The answer tells us quite a lot about the society outside its walls.
There is another part of the Andreasstraße story which I found particularly powerful. On 4 December 1989, as the East German regime was beginning to crumble, citizens of Erfurt occupied the local Stasi headquarters. It was the first occupation of a Stasi district headquarters anywhere in the GDR, and their actions helped prevent records from being destroyed. A building which had represented the power of the state over the individual became a place where ordinary people asserted that the state should instead be accountable to them.
It felt a fitting place to end these few days with Friends of Scouting in Europe. We have spent time thinking about Weimar and Buchenwald, about dictatorship and democracy, and about the challenges facing civil society and Scouting here in Thuringia today. Andreasstraße connected those themes rather neatly. Democracy depends upon institutions and laws, but ultimately it also depends upon people prepared to think for themselves, to speak, to associate freely, to disagree and, when necessary, to summon up the courage to say that something is wrong. Those are freedoms which are remarkably easy to take for granted when, like me, you have enjoyed them throughout your life.
By then, however, Mark and I were ready for something rather less thought-provoking. Our final FOSE lunch was at Restaurant Pavarotti, where the food was really tasty and appeared with impressive speed. Most importantly, Mark finally got the apple strudel he had been hoping to find during our stay in Germany, so one important piece of unfinished business had been successfully resolved.
It was a pleasantly ordinary way to finish a few days which had been anything but ordinary: good food, good company and a satisfied Mark, before saying our farewells and beginning the journey home. This year’s FOSE Tour has taken us into some difficult history, introduced us to inspiring people working for Scouting today, and left me thinking again about just how precious civil society, democracy and the freedom to associate really are — and why none of them should ever be taken for granted.
