Rights & Records: Germany’s Stasi Records Archive & Ireland’s National Centre for Research and Remembrance

Rights & Records: Germany's Stasi Records Archive & Ireland's National Centre for Research and Remembrance

Accessing records created by the state about a citizen is of enormous value when addressing rights violations by the state. The case of the secret police archive of East Germany that was opened for public access after the Peaceful Revolution of 1989 is a model case in that respect. Rights-based access, even to intimate and difficult records, allows for individual and collective dealing with the past. Dagmar Hovestädt will present the history and impact of the Stasi Records archive and place it in other post-conflict situations, particularly in the reckoning with the Irish history of institutional abuse and family separation.

This public lecture is part of a larger "Rights and Records" initiative. Focusing on Ireland's proposed National Centre for Research and Remembrance (NCRR) at the former Magdalene Laundry on Sean McDermott Street, the initiative was organized by Maeve O'Rourke (University of Galway) and James Smith (Boston College), pulling in various academics, advocates, and affected people from across Ireland, the US, the UK, and Germany. Working closely with Ms. Patricia Carey, the Special Advocate for Survivors of Institutional Abuses, the group is engaged with key stakeholders, including government officials, legal and archival practitioners, and civil society, to debate and draft a "Framework Document" to help negotiate a path towards human rights-based preservation of, access to, and input into records and archives related to Ireland's institutional and family separation-related abuses and their ongoing legacies.

Dagmar Hovestädt is a researcher, author, and communication expert at the intersection of archives and transitional justice. She is currently an adjunct professor at the Irish Center for Human Rights at the University of Galway and works with human rights archives in Germany and Syria, as well as with the Section on Archives and Human Rights at the International Council on Archives (ICA). From 2011 to 2021, she was the spokesperson for the Federal Commissioner for the Stasi Records in Germany. She started her career as an investigative journalist in post-unification Berlin and worked as a foreign correspondent from California.