From the cells of Guantanamo Bay, to Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, to the thousands of secret, brutal places in more than 80 countries across the world, the experience of torture is described by Berlin’s Dr Christian Pross as a ‘toxic agent’.
‘This new season of cruelty’, Pross says, ‘infects not only the victim, but the family, friends, the torturer, the therapist, the wider community. It fundamentally disrupts human relations in a diabolical way’.
Pross is Founder-Director of the city’s renowned Centre for the Treatment of Victims of Torture (BZFO) which he set up in 1992 to help those who had suffered at the hands of East Germany’s secret police, the Stasi.
Particularly from the early 1960s, when the West German government began to pay the DDR to release dissidents from its jails. Berlin has had an outspoken community of artists and others who were tortured. One of the sinister side effects of the publicity, as well as the international monitoring of torture by groups such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, was a change in the methods used.
‘At first persecution in the DDR was mainly physical—beatings, bad hygiene, bad food. People often died from TB’, Pross says. ‘Later the Stasi became masters of sophisticated techniques of "zersetzung” (disruption) which can do deeper harm by making you doubt your own perceptions. Victims were told: “When you leave this place, no one will believe you”.
‘And even if people never went to prison, their family and social networks were manipulated to create failures, so that step by step they lost career opportunities, status, job, income, family. Of course it was a world described exactly by Orwell or Kafka.’
The intention was ‘to break a man’s soul’. Pross describes the case of a poet in one of his therapy groups. He was a member of the small underground movement that met once a month to read poetry together. After he was twice arrested and released with the threat, ‘we’ll find a way to shut you up’, he gave all his poems to his closest friend to look after. The third time he was arrested, the Stasi officer sat across the desk from him and read him the poems, leaving him utterly confused and paranoid. During that time he had all his back teeth removed because he was convinced that microphones had been implanted in them. After 1989 when he accessed his Stasi file, he said the