Beer, spies and videotape: Stasi drinking den angers Berliners

When you pop into your local, you do not expect to be interrogated under a bright lamp or recruited to the secret police while your pint is being pulled. But the owners of a new Berlin pub plan to offer these services and more at their espionage-themed drinking den, which pays tribute to the east German Stasi.

The Firm - the slang term to describe the secret police of the communist regime - is decked out with memorabilia from the bygone era, including shredded surveillance logs, Stasi porcelain and an urn the owners claim contains the ashes of the former east German leader Erich Honecker. A surveillance camera at the door tracks the guests as they enter.

The pub - which is situated on Normannenstrasse in east Berlin, the street that was once home to the former Ministry of State Security - has provoked outrage among former victims of the secret police.

"This pub cannot be beaten for tastelessness," Marianne Birthler, director of the government's archive of Stasi records, told the Leipziger Volkszeitung newspaper, adding that anyone who had seen inside the regime's files "would not have the stomach for a beer in that bar".

It is estimated that the Stasi employed 90,000 full-time spies and 100,000 unofficial informers, who snitched on and terrorised hundreds of thousands of citizens.

But the pub's owners, Willi Gau, 60, and Wolle Schmelz, 53, who launched The Firm after being sacked from a call centre and claim to have never been members of the Stasi, insisted the pub was merely a "provocative but serious piece of satire".