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The toppling of the Berlin Wall represented for many a way to escape the horrors of living behind the Iron Curtain. For Joern Mothes, however, it was a reason to stay. Although the human rights and environmental activist had been given the opportunity to leave East Germany to take up a teaching post in Nicaragua, the momentous events of Nov. 9, 1989, prompted him to decline the offer.

“I was sitting at home and I was watching it on television. And my wife and I were crying, like many people at the time. And my first thought was my parents had to live 28 years behind this wall,” Mothes said in an interview Tuesday afternoon.

“My second thought was: I can’t leave Germany now. We will come back in three years and all will be changed. It was unbelievable. I had wanted to go [to Nicaragua] for a long time but now, with this historic event, I decided to stay.”

Mothes was invited by the German Institute in Taipei and the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy to give the keynote speech to mark the 20th anniversary of the toppling of the Berlin Wall on Monday. He will give a lecture tomorrow titled Berlin Wall — The Voice of the Other Side, where he will talk about the changes that have taken place in the former East Germany over the past two decades. He will also discuss how Germany has dealt with mountains of files collected by the Ministry for State Security, the former East Germany’s secret police, also known as the Stasi.

Established in 1950, the Ministry for State Security maintained strict control over East Germany’s population through fear, intimidation and violence. By the time the Iron Curtain fell in 1989, the Stasi had 91,015 full-time employees and had built up a network of 173,081 civilian informants who spied on anyone and everyone — even their own parents. At the height of the Cold War, the Stasi had records on roughly 6 million people. It also kept an archive of body odor samples.

The Stasi is something that Mothes has had intimate experience with, both before and after the toppling of the wall. As a rights activist during the Cold War, the Stasi compiled extensive files on him — files that he was able to gain access to in 1992. In 1993, he took up a post at the Stasi Archives for the Federal State of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and served two terms, from 1998 to 2008, as its commissioner.

The lecture begins with Last to Know, a heart-wrenching 2006 documentary that looks at the stories of three families from the former German Democratic Republic who had one or more members imprisoned for dissident behavior and the difficulties they still have talking about their experiences as victims. Ku Chung-hwa (顧忠華), a sociology professor at National Chengchi University, will moderate the lecture.

Taipei Times: Why did the Stasi open a file on you?

Joern Mothes: It was in 1978 or 1979 — I was 15 or 16 years old — and it was because of my personal interest to protect the environment. There was so much pollution and nobody was really doing anything about it. So some of my friends and me organized a tree-planting activity. Thirteen people showed up. And then we organized a second activity to plant trees and 70 people showed up. For the third action 300 people showed up. But so did the security police. And they said: Is this a demonstration against the government? And we said: No, we want to help nature.