Behind the Wall – 15 – The Card in the Rubble

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.

Behind the Wall

Behind The Wall is a series of special feature podcasts accompanying ‘The Wall in the Mind‘, an ambitious new on-location drama series, coming to Newstalk and podcast starting on Saturday the 16th of April @ 7AM & 10PM. Each episode features an interview or behind the scenes clip. Think of it like the ‘making of’ special features on a DVD or Blu-Ray.