Reliving Stasi isolation - for art

Dressed in old prison clothes, Carl-Wolfgang Holzapfel contemplates his cell

By Steve Rosenberg
BBC News, Berlin

On 18 October 1965 Carl-Wolfgang Holzapfel disappeared.

The West German political activist had been demonstrating in East Berlin against the arrest of political prisoners and had suddenly become one himself.

He was locked up in a secret Stasi prison. He spent the next nine months in complete isolation, as his Stasi interrogators tried to break him. He was subjected to psychological torture.

Now Mr Holzapfel has returned to the former Berlin jail, Hohenschoenhausen, to relive his incarceration.

He will spend the next seven days here voluntarily locked in a cell.

This isn't quite the same as the cell I was in. I didn't have a basin or a cupboard Carl-Wolfgang Holzapfel

He'll be wearing his old prison clothes - a blue tracksuit - and eating the kind of food he was given in jail: bread, soup and tea.

Before locking the door for a week, Mr Holzapfel shows me round the tiny cell which will be home for the next seven days.

It has a toilet, a table, a wooden bed, a basin and a small cupboard.

"This isn't quite the same as the cell I was in," he admits. "I didn't have a basin or a cupboard."

He explains why he has decided to lock himself away.

"With this art project, we want to show the role the Resistance played in bringing down the Wall.

"Each one of the 250,000 political prisoners in East Germany played a part in that day - 9 November 1989. We want to reflect, too, the dramas that took place during 40 years of the GDR."

With the help of a webcam taped to the wall, his week of self-imprisonment will be streamed live on the internet. Each meal, each movement, each pause for thought.

Thousands of prisoners were held by the Stasi

And observers can send Mr Holzapfel questions via a website about what it was like to be a prisoner of East Germany's secret police.

He will be handed the questions along with his meagre prison food and will speak his answers directly to the camera. It may sound like some Big Brother-style reality TV show.

But for many thousands of political prisoners, this was the harsh reality of life in East Germany: locked away in Stasi jails, subjected to solitary confinement and psychological intimidation.

One of the organisers of the project is German artist Franziska Vu. She believes it's vital to show the younger generation the kind of repression which occurred in East Germany.

"People should know about our young German history," Franziska Vu says.

"We must learn by our mistakes. This is important so that it never happens again."

Pacing, humming, thinking

The cell door slams shut. Carl-Wolfgang Holzapfel is locked in. I go into the cell next door which has been turned into the "technical" room. On a table there's a computer which is showing the live streaming.

I watch him as he paces up and down. He starts to hum, then to sing. Then he stops at the barred window and stares out.

Just from looking at this figure on a computer screen, you can feel how the darkest memories of his time here must be flooding back, filling the cold and tiny cell.

Mr Holzapfel knows that this time he can walk out whenever he wants.

But he says he's determined to see out his seven-day "sentence".