Nine Dead Babies

 

General Culture

A small deviation from photography today and a look at the country that I grew up in and that has started to transform itself in quite a rapid fashion lately - or maybe it’s just me, watching it from the outside, now for over five years: “Investigators found the bodies of nine babies buried in flower pots in an east German town. […] A crime like the one discovered in Frankfurt an der Oder has never happened here before, although the nation has already lived through the horrifying story of the German cannibal — a man who chopped up and ate his lover for dinner. But, nine dead babies, their bodies found in flower baskets and a sand-filled aquarium, is even more grisly. All the infants died, at least according to [the woman], in her four-room apartment on Democracy Square in Frankfurt an der Oder. When she was evicted from the apartment, she carefully transported the flower pots and aquarium to her parents’ house.” (story). What really bothers me about this is what they say right at the beginning: “Nine pregnancies, nine babies born and no one noticed a thing” even though “at the time of the killings, the brown concrete block was packed with professional spies. All 44 people who leased apartments at the time receieved checks from the Stasi, the East German state secret police.” Maybe some things will never change in Germany.