In the final behind the scenes episode of 'The Wall in the Mind' I talk about the mysterious find that inspired the mystery at the heart of the series. At a town outside Berlin called Blankenburg. There lie the ruins of a barracks of the dread Volkspolizei Bereitschaft. It was here that protestors rounded up on the 7th and 8th of October 1989 were taken and tortured. A notorious incident that helped bring down the East German government. Hidden in the rubble I found this card, dropped by a staff member in the last days of communism. Today's episode is about how our modern bureaucracy parallels some of the worst aspects of the DDR. How ubiquitous surveillance creates a panopticon to rival the worst communist tyranny. The card served as the link, a physical connection between our time and the past. Hidden in a city somehow inoculated by it's experience of tyranny. Somehow protected from the worst extinctions of imagination at the heart of late capitalism. The city as contradiction, trap, exception, lesson. A card in the rubble.
