Encounters

by Andre Baganz

When I grew up in East Germany, they told me that the socialist system was the real deal. Like 17 million other people I was brainwashed by newspapers, TV and radio. One thing that supposedly proved socialist superiority was the East German crime statistic. Only after the fall of the Berlin Wall, people learned along with many other truths that this statistic had been tampered with. The East German prisons had been packed not only with political prisoners, who of course were labeled as ordinary criminals, but also with murderers and rapists–a category that only capitalist societies generate according to socialist propaganda. People also learned that the man who had been in charge of their national security for decades had a criminal past himself. "Encounters" comprises six short stories that are based on cases over which the East German regime had cast a mantle of secrecy.

70 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 2, 2014