She leaned over to me and said that we would detrain at the Magdalennestrasse and take the steps up to Frankfurterallee, which is the main drag past the Stasi complex. As we left the train, I glanced at the great rectangles of public art that lined the opposite walls of the platform, highlighted by the gleam off the pale green ceramic tiles that surround them.
 
Like everything in Berlin, I had to deconstruct what I was looking at. This tunnel had been planned by the Kaiser’s engineers, and decorated by the Nazis. The current murals showed abstract scenes of heroic labor, so the Communists must have chartered them, and the capitalists had not got around to papering them over with ads. They reminded me of the subway in Pyongyang or Moscow.

There are so many layers to Berlin, and I was not completely prepared for the additional layers we were about to see.
 
It was chilly that morning, the skies gray above Frankfurterstrasse. Just outside the subway entrance a simple sign was painted on the side of a building, directing us up a narrow alley toward the headquarters of an organization that billed itself as the Sword and Shield of the State.

If you arrived here in the back of a van, it would have been very bad news indeed. And with a ratio of one security officer of informant to every seven DDR citizens, there was an awful lo of bad news o go around.
 
It was a lot to take in. The Museum is housed in the headquarters building, one of dozens that tower over a campus bigger than Whitehall in London. There was a sign on one. My associate pointed it out.
 
“For rent,” she said. “You could set up shop right here at State Security Central.”

(For Rent)

I thought about that for a moment and tried to deconstruct how that would feel, having an office in the heart of bad karma-land.

There was one of those portable beer gardens in a corner of the courtyard in front of the main entrance to the most feared organization in a whole country. A couple was having an early beer. A tour bus was drawn up next to a steel booth that had been a checkpoint for the examination of credentials. Under an overhang were some gray steps that led to a tall glass door.
 
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s meet the Secret Police.”
 
I will have to tell you more about that tomorrow. Building One is the evil twin of a place I used to work. It was really emotional for an old spook, and I can’t for the life of me get my brain wrapped around it yet.

Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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