Day Two: Thurs. June 5th -Leipzig

For the second day of our trip we were in Leipzig.



Everyone who has ever been to Leipzig tells you how run-down it is...but, it is really hard to actual comprehend the extent of what they were talking about until you are there yourself. Leipzig at one time was definitely a really beautiful city with amazing, ornate buildings...but now...since WWII and especially since German re-unification...the town is largely desolute and literally crumbling down. I would estimate that at least 1/3 of the entire city is vacant...and falling into disrepair. At the same time...many parts reminded us of areas of St. Louis...where the exact same thing is happening...to a bunch of beautiful old brick houses.

Among other things, Leipzig also seems to be a center of dark metal/goth culture. When researching the city we learned of a large yearly music and arts festival called Wave-Gotik-Treffen. (somebody's Flickr page with pics from 2007) There was definitely a scene for that here...as seen in the way people dressed as we walked around the city.


We spent the first half of the day going through an enormous former cotton mill and textile factory-turned artist's studios and galleries called Spinnerei. From what we could gather, it became the center of the Leipzig art scene after the success of Neo Rauch and other Leipzig painters, who all have/had studios there.


All of the exhibition spaces were rough but really huge.


A video piece and a Pia Frieze painting.


One of the side courtyards with an exhibition space built out.


Some random graffiti.


R and a mirrored florescent light piece.

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We spent the rest of the afternoon at the Stasi Museum. Stasi is short for Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (Ministry for State Security) who were the official secret police of East Germany. Leipzig was the city where Fall 1989 protesting eventually lead to the fall of the East and the Berlin Wall, so this museum has a special place in that history.


An intact former Stasi office.

According to the museum, immediately following the fall of the East displays were created which informed the public of what had happened there. These displays were so popular that they were soon moved to the old headquarters of the Stasi, where the museum is located to this day. So in a fascinating way, the museum displays were archives of themselves.



Cases housed Stasi uniforms, stamps, and surveillance devices. This cabinet shows confiscated cassette tapes, many of which were of American and British pop stars.

The amount of information that the Stasi collected on individuals is really mind blowing...everything from when and where people went to their scent (yes, literally on a swab in jars). I believe that the statistic is...by the end of their existence there was one Stasi officer for every 3 citizens.

What happened to the files they kept on so many people is an amazing story itself. There was a great article about it in WIRED a few months ago:
"In the chaos of the days leading up to the actual destruction of the wall and the fall of East Germany's communist government, frantic Stasi agents sent trucks full of documents to the Papierwolfs and Reisswolfs — literally "paper-wolves" and "rip-wolves," German for shredders. As pressure mounted, agents turned to office shredders, and when the motors burned out, they started tearing pages by hand — 45 million of them, ripped into approximately 600 million scraps of paper."