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.