It is an unusual romance which has captured the public imagination. A former interrogator with Communist East Germany's Stasi security police is planning to marry a woman he once helped jail.
Regina Kaiser is a fresh-faced 53-year-old with auburn hair. She was 31 when the Stasi arrested her in 1981 for involvement in an outlawed pro-democracy movement.
Her interrogator Uwe Karlstedt, then an ambitious young Stasi officer, is now a gray-haired, somber-looking man, who appears considerably older than Kaiser although he is more than five years younger.
The couple fell in love during tense interrogation sessions. Karlstedt spent three months grilling the pro-democracy activist beneath spotlights in a dank Stasi prison cell.
"It was love at first sight," said Kaiser. "The first time he walked into the room, I was devastated by the feeling and I told myself it couldn't be true that this man was my enemy but I was powerless to resist."
Karlstedt was attracted to Kaiser but did not reveal his feelings until months later. He still managed to extract the necessary information to send her to jail for three years.
"I never thought for a moment we would ever get together," Karlstedt said in an interview. "It was the wrong feeling in the wrong place. It wasn't just forbidden, it was totally inappropriate. She might as well have been on Mars."
He told Kaiser towards the end of their near-daily interrogation sessions that he felt attracted to her.
They kissed once, briefly, in room 770 of the Stasi headquarters in Berlin, but that was the end of the story.
Had their secret come out it would have spelled certain disaster for Karlstedt, so the couple resolved to sacrifice their feelings and face up to the inevitable.
After three years in jail, Kaiser was deported to West Germany. She lived in West Berlin just a few kilometers from Karlstedt, but their paths never crossed again -- until eight years after the Berlin Wall fell.
"I kept thinking about him but it was like an unfulfilled teenage crush," said Kaiser.
Their remarkable story has created a media sensation in Germany since details began emerging in the run-up to the publication of a book due next month.
The couple say they would never have believed such a story possible.
Kaiser was just one of 2.4 million people tracked by the Stasi, most of whom were just ordinary East German citizens. The archive containing the Stasi's files was first made public in 1992 -- if lined up flat, the papers would stretch 180km.
Karlstedt rose to the rank of Stasi major before its demise following the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989. He later became an accountant.
In 1997, Kaiser was showing a group of people round one of her former interrogation blocks in East Berlin, when she stumbled across a list of Stasi employees. She decided to trace "Uwe."
"I wanted to know if I'd been manipulated into falling in love," she said. "If what happened was just an attempt to break down my defenses. And I wanted to face him on an equal footing."
Karlstedt recognized her voice on the phone.
"I knew immediately who it was when she called me, but I just couldn't deal with it," said Karlstedt. "All the old feelings came back and I just said it wasn't me. Thank God, she didn't give up and she wrote to me and then we met up."
Both Kaiser and Karlstedt were in marriages when they met in 1997 but quickly separated and have lived together for more than five years. They plan to marry as soon as her divorce is final.
Ironically, the pair's prospective marital happiness is in stark contrast to the fate that a number of marriages suffered under the auspices of the Stasi. Some marriages and families were shattered by revelations of betrayal to the secret service.
Kaiser was no exception. Although she could have viewed her Stasi files in 1992, she hesitated, putting it off until 1995 -- when she discovered her mother, father and sister had all spied on her for the Stasi.
"They felt it was their duty to report me," she said, without any trace of bitterness.
Kaiser is unwilling to ascribe any special significance to her unlikely love-match.
"To me, it just goes to show that even in the most perverse circumstances, the most normal thing can happen," she said. "Two young people meet and fall in love."
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