Thirteen Days on a Cuban Radio
In October 1962, nineteen-year-old Orlando sat at a military radio outside Havana as the world came closest to nuclear war. Lukas speaks to him, now eighty-two, about what he heard and what he feared.
Reading My Parents' Stasi File
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Show notes
Two hundred and twelve pages
In 2009 Lukas requested his parents' Stasi file and found 212 pages, most of them written by a man who lived two floors up and had dinner with the family every Christmas. This first episode reads from the file, explains how informants were recruited, and includes a phone conversation with the informant's daughter.
- How a file was opened, kept and used
- The informant: recruitment, motive and what he reported
- What Lukas's parents knew and what they chose not to say
- The 1992 law that opened the archive and the arguments about it
- The call to the neighbour's daughter, recorded with her consent
How to request a file of your own is explained on the episode page.
Transcript
Hello, my name is Lukas Brandt and this is Dead Drops and Dial Tones, a series about the Cold War as ordinary people actually lived it. I want to start with the reason I make this show. In 2009 I requested my parents' Stasi file and received 212 pages. Most of it was written by a man who lived two floors above us in Prenzlauer Berg and who sat at our table every Christmas. In this first episode I read from the file, I explain how someone like him was recruited and what he was asked to report, and I describe what my parents said when I showed it to them, and what they did not say. At the end there is a phone call with his daughter, which she agreed to let me record. It is not the conversation I expected. You are listening on Witspeak Podcasts.
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