Shredded Stasi Files
The Stasi, the East German secret police, conducted one of the most extensive surveillance operations in history. At its height, in 1989, 91,000 people spied on a nation of 16.4 million. As the Berlin Wall fell, agents destroyed documents. 16,000 bags of shredded files (roughly 5% of all the Stasi’s paperwork) were preserved in an archive. For the past 13 years, restorers have reassembled documents by hand, but at its current rate the project will take 700 years to complete. Now new computer algorithms are expediting the process and unearthing more of the secrets of the German Democratic Republic.
 
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2.6.08
| 10:51 AM - |
meatandpotatoes - Why would they store shredded files anyway? If you shred a document isnt the idea to have the pieces separated by as much space as possible, not stored in the same bag for decades?
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2.5.08
| 03:48 PM - |
Let Justice Be Served
endless - If someone snitched on their neighbor's innocuous activities, which ended up getting them carted away to a death camp, don't the families of both have the right to know? Just because the truth isn't pretty doesn't mean that you should be covering it up.
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| 11:01 AM - |
Whose rights are to be resepcted?
sultanofswing - You have people whose parents "disappeared" on an anonymous "tip" from an unkown neighbor. In these files lie the secret to their parent's death. Who pointed the finger? Who came to take them away? Why? They have the right to know - after all, it is their parents? But what happens when you tape together those shreddings and find that it was your neighbor's father that was responsible for your death? Neighbors for life, and now enemies for life. Both people are better off laying down their memories and pains and moving forward with life, but what happens when you must know the guilt of others in order to sleep at night. And what happens when you fear the guilt of those you love?
Not easy. |
| 10:58 AM - |
let em' burn
Anonymous - that kind of stuff would have just been better off getting lost in the chaos - it's not like they are actually useful except at tearing apart a recently unified society - and are only valuable to those who actually care about the contents because they continue to exist... so I say burn them to the ground in an "accidental" fire.
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2.2.08
| 02:41 PM - |
What's the point?
stickywicket - What are we trying to learn? The way that the GDR worked, or about the lives of those that they spied upon, which are better kept secret? It's actually an interesting question that this raises about privacy: are we committing the same breach of privacy that the GDR did in restoring these documents? Or is it only a breach of privacy when the people whose private worlds we are probing into are still alive?
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2.1.08
| 11:15 PM - |
at last...
Anonymous - Will all the Georg Dreymans (ya'll have seen Lives of Others, right?) find out what was really going on for them in those dark days of the GDR? And will the rest of us know what this most diligent and paranoid of the communist fascist states was really up to? What a fascinating topic. I'm eager to see how the story plays out.
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