As a trained psychologist I’m always curious about the origins and causes of individual and collective human phenomena which aren’t explicit. I mean, how could a whole nation like Germany be brainwashed three times in a row within only one century? It’s a real mystery to me. But in fact, it’s not.
The author who strongly speaks to me emphasizing these tendencies is Hannah Arendt and also Stefan Zweig. A. is referring to the way in which ‘ideology’ had been used as a desire to divorce thinking from action. She beautifully explained how a nation can turn into loneliness. Perfect preparation for totalitarian domination in a non-totalitarian world. It creates wilderness, where neither new experience nor thinking is possible, briefly said.
Walking through the prison and its secret hospital I experienced a strange familiarity. I was magnetically reminded of my childhood in Poland with many similar fabrics, patterns, and distinct colors that you did not see outside communism in that combination in the 21 century. For example, the way in which the interrogation rooms were designed as a blunt absurdity: Homy warm wallpapers, full of flowers, subtleties, and invitations to make you feel at ease, to make you confess more gently, apparently: to make you confess things you never did. The prisoner just was made to feel reminded of home. The Stasi officers were highly trained in human behavior and how to discreetly manipulate their subjects into fatal desperation and longing. Pure evil. All very much non-brutal on the surface and in a non-violent manner. And while being influenced by psychoanalysis and the writings of Sigmund Freud during my psych studies, his theory of The Uncanny instantly screamed at me. Something so haunting and disturbing that touches so deeply on the quality of feeling. Beautiful and wrong at the same time. That’s why I chose to work with that contradiction.