Twenty years ago thousands of protestors stormed the offices of East Germany's secret police, the Stasi, looking for secret files on their lives. Deutsche Welle spoke with the commissioner now in charge of the archive.

A Frenchman is building a resort for well-heeled tourists among the ruins of a former communist gulag in Romania. Hundreds of prisoners died in this forgotten area along the Danube River. Now it is being turned into a haven for nature lovers.

There isn't much snow on the ground and there is no ice in the river yet. Nevertheless, the nights are frosty in Periprava, a remote and seemingly forgotten Romanian village in the Danube Delta.

Periprava lies in a forgotten corner of the country, right up against the old border with the Soviet Union. Every other day, a ferry crosses the river from the Ukrainian side, passing the rusty skeletons of ships, the onion-shaped domes of Orthodox churches and abandoned observation posts. Periprava, 30 kilometers (19 miles) from the spot where the northern branch of the Danube empties into the Black Sea, is the last stop on the ferry route.

Popular interest in history is peaking like perhaps never before in the 21st century. Films such as Spartan gore-fest 300 have proven big hits at the box office in recent years, and many more ancient world movies - including Centurion, Clash of the Titans and Valhalla Rising - are set to arrive in 2010.

TV historians such as Simon Schama and David Starkey are household names. Dan Brown's Lost Symbol dominated the fiction chart in the past year and all of the novels shortlisted for the Man Booker prize in 2009 were set against historical backdrops, with the winner - Hilary Mantel's Tudor England-based Wolf Hall - proving the most popular Booker prize winner of all time.

The past most definitely sells. Yet, for some reason, interest in history as a subject of study is dwindling among young learners - in England pupils taking history at GCSE level has dropped as low as one in three. Some voices argue that we need to do a better job of firing youngsters' imaginations when it comes to teaching history, by using learning tools that excite as well as enlighten - in other words making better use of edutainment, as it's known.

Can historical fiction - in the form of novels, plays, films or even video games - pass as education when it comes to teaching history? Or are the old fashioned ways still the best? We asked a number of commentators, and their responses were consistent: with caveats, there's undoubtedly a place for entertainment in modern learning, as a means of channelling youngsters into the streams of traditional education.

The BBC has been warned to stop chasing young viewers and mass audiences by wasting money on sports rights, such as for Formula One coverage, and formulaic game shows, such as BBC One's Hole in the Wall, that could be provided by commercial channels.

A report by Policy Exchange, the centre-right progressive think-tank regarded as influential within David Cameron's Conservative strategy team, calls for the BBC to be made to spend 5 per cent of its licence fee income on making distinctive programmes for other broadcasters. It says that the BBC should not be trying to outbid commercial broadcasters to hire popular entertainment presenters and should end its obsession with attracting viewers under the age of 35.

(In case people forgot what the Tories are about.)

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}