Siegmar Faust discusses life in East Germany under the watchful eye of the State Security Police, or "Stasi," which at its height employed one in every sixty members of the population. As a university student, Faust fell under a Stasi investigation and was accused of writing and disseminating poems against the German Democratic Republic (GDR). He was expelled from the city of Leipzig and was twice arrested for being a public enemy, spending 742 days in solitary confinement. Faust endured more than two months of "starvation punishment," but it only made him "more unbreakable."

About

Siegmar Faust is a German human rights activist and writer. As a young man, his outspoken protests against the autocratic government of East Germany caused numerous conflicts with the Ministry of State Security – the Stasi – widely regarded as one of the most effective and repressive intelligence and secret police agencies in the world. A blossoming writer, he was expelled from university and arrested for publishing “subversive propaganda." He was sentenced to four and a half years in prison in 1974 and spent most of that time in solitary confinement.

While in prison, he illegally published a handwritten inmate newspaper called "Poor Germany," the title of which was a mockery of the official state newspaper of the time. Faust was released in 1976 due to both domestic and international pressure, narrowly avoiding the "closed facility," or psychiatric prison, where the Stasi wanted to drag him. Today he is helping to build a human rights center on the prison ground where prisoners of conscience were tortured. The secrets of the GDR dictatorship are now revealed in the Stasi Files. These public archives show how the most surveilled state in history operated on a daily basis. Faust has been a member of the International Society for Human Rights since the late 1980s; he currently serves on its Board of Trustees.