APPROXIMATELY TWO DECADES AFTER THE FALL OF THE BERLIN WALL, a number of theater practitioners began to work with documents related to the German Democratic Republic's Ministerium fur Staatssicherheit (Ministry for State Security), the so-called Stasi files, in which the secret police service had gathered information on the lives of its fellow citizens. This chapter focuses on artistic engagements with this specific type of life writing in theater productions which encouraged individual performers who had been directly affected by the surveillance to engage, along with their audiences, with fragments of Stasi files in public performance spaces in and around Germany's capital, Berlin. It focuses on Staats-Sicherheiten (State Securities, 2008), directed by Clemens Bechtel, and the audio tour 50 Aktenkilometer (50 Kilometers of Files, 2011) by the performance collective Rimini Protokoll.

The two productions approached the Stasi files in different ways: In Staats-Sicherheiten, former detainees from the Stasi remand prison Hohenschonhausen recounted directly to the audience important chapters of their lives as victims of the Stasi, both in and out of prison. In 50 Aktenkilometer, individuals reconstructed their experiences with secret police surveillance in recorded personal interviews with the Rimini Protokoll team. These interviewees spoke only indirectly, addressing two separate audiences: first, when excerpts from the recorded interviews became part of a “radio play for walkers” through Berlin, and second, when selected passages from the interviews were subsequently integrated into a more traditional, publicly broadcast radio play. In the latter project, the protagonists’ individual engagement with their personal files was juxtaposed with other audio files from the period between 1975 and 1990. These included original surveillance recordings and original audiotapes of informants being briefed and reporting information, as well as telephone records from the Stasi's telephone switchboard which received all calls reporting surveillance activities. Rimini Protokoll and their team edited this audio material into 125 short narratives of two to fifteen minutes in length and distributed them across the Google map of Berlin. Participants of a prebooked audio tour received headphones and a GPS phone that triggered the playback of a narrative whenever they approached one of the zones to which one of the more than a hundred “acoustic bubbles” had been allocated.