Encounters

When I grew up in East Germany, they always told us that our socialist system was the real deal. We were constantly being brainwashed by newspapers, TV and radio. One thing that supposedly proved socialist superiority were the East German crime statistics, which were of course totally state controlled. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, along with many other truths, people learned that these statistics had been tampered with. The East German prisons had been packed not only with political prisoners, which were labeled as ordinary criminals, but also with murderers and rapists–a category that, according to socialist propaganda, only capitalist societies generate. People also learned that the man who had been in charge of their national security had a criminal past himself. "Encounters" comprises six short stories about six cases over which the East German regime cast a mantle of secrecy.