In January 1986, a block of the East German brown coal power plant in Jänschwalde came to a standstill due to a peculiar reason. According to Stasi files from the Federal Archives, cited by the “Bild” newspaper, the block A 10 with a capacity of 500 megawatts failed on January 7, 1986, from 1:20 pm to 4:04 pm. The Stasi report states that the cause of the outage was a short circuit, which occurred because decorative tinsel from a Christmas tree got onto the power supply grid of the block.
According to the newspaper, a worker at the power plant had thrown a Christmas tree, heavily decorated with tinsel, out of a workshop window, and the tinsel, carried by the wind, landed about 35 meters away on a collection grid, causing the short circuit that brought the power plant block to a standstill, leading to a “complex energy supply situation”.
Daniela Münkel, head of the research department at the Stasi Files Archive, told the “Bild” that, although the outage may seem like a joke at first, it had significant security political implications for the GDR. The Bezirksverwaltung Cottbus of the Stasi immediately prepared a detailed report on the “Tinsel Gate” and forwarded it to the Hauptabteilung XVIII and the Zentrale Auswertungs- und Informationsgruppe in Berlin.