Puzzle Pieces

A few years back, veteran editor Tina Brown opined that “bloggers were the new Stasi.” In response, I opined that if our journalistic betters were going to hurl epithets at us that it wasn’t too much to ask that they know what those epithets mean so that they could be sure that the epithet was appropriate before hurling it. “Stasi” is German shorthand for Staatssicherheit— literally ‘state security,’ the late East Germany’s infamous and feared secret police force. Think of all the images and concepts conjured by the phrase “secret police force in a communist country.”

The Stasi not only embodied those images and concepts, it defined them. As far as I know, bloggers have not banded together to kick down doors and drag ideological enemies away for interrogation and/or confinement. Banding together to fact-check and trade information on the public writings of our betters as we imbibe adult beverages is another story, however. But now, I can see where Brown’s comparison made some semblance of sense; the Stasi watched the every move of every citizen and visitor in German Democratic Republic* and bloggers watch every move of professional journalists.

One might also argue that with all of the personal cameras and microphones lurking around every corner to capture images of everything happening that some bloggers are fast approaching the Stasi’s level of nosiness. But Brown’s metaphor was still a very imperfect one that shouldn’t have been used. I thought that journalists wanted their offerings read and dissected. :::snark:::

Anyway, that’s a setup to point you to the fascinating story of the Stasi’s legacy, dark-sided as it is and the attempts to preserve that very tangible legacy as a reminder. Embodying stereotype of German efficiency, the Stasi kept meticulous records of everyone they surveilled. In the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall, they succeed in destroying roughly 5% of it.

That might not sound like much, but the agency had generated perhaps more paper than any other bureaucracy in history — possibly a billion pages of surveillance records, informant accounting, reports on espionage, analyses of foreign press, personnel records, and useless minutiae. There's a record for every time anyone drove across the border.

Which means I have one.

In the chaos of the days leading up to the actual destruction of the wall and the fall of East Germany's communist government, frantic Stasi agents sent trucks full of documents to the Papierwolfs and Reisswolfs — literally "paper-wolves" and "rip-wolves," German for shredders. As pressure mounted, agents turned to office shredders, and when the motors burned out, they started tearing pages by hand — 45 million of them, ripped into approximately 600 million scraps of paper.

There's no way to know what bombshells those files hide. For a country still trying to come to terms with its role in World War II and its life under a totalitarian regime, that half-destroyed paperwork is a tantalizing secret.

The machine-shredded stuff is confetti, largely unrecoverable. But in May 2007, a team of German computer scientists in Berlin announced that after four years of work, they had completed a system to digitally tape together the torn fragments. Engineers hope their software and scanners can do the job in less than five years — even taking into account the varying textures and durability of paper, the different sizes and shapes of the fragments, the assortment of printing (from handwriting to dot matrix) and the range of edges (from razor sharp to ragged and handmade.) "The numbers are tremendous. If you imagine putting together a jigsaw puzzle at home, you have maybe 1,000 pieces and a picture of what it should look like at the end," project manager Jan Schneider says. "We have many millions of pieces and no idea what they should look like when we're done."

The wholesale destruction of the files was prevented by the East German citizens themselves.

In several small cities, rumors started circulating that records were being destroyed. Smoke, fires, and departing trucks confirmed the fears of angry Germans, who rushed in to their local Stasi offices, stopped the destruction, and spontaneously organized citizen committees that could post guards to secure the archives. Demonstrators spray-painted the walls with slogans like "The files belong to us" and "Stasi get out." Finally, on the evening of January 15, 1990, thousands of demonstrators pushed in the front gate of the Stasi's fortified Berlin compound.

It's long, but very interesting--especially in light of the fact that some of our betters seem to be forgetting the inefficiencies and abuses inherent in socialist/communist governments--or hoping that the average citizens forgets. Read the whole thing.

(Thanks to Instapundit)

*In an important tie to my ongoing Kenya series, Kenya’s Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) opposition leader Raila Odinga received a degree in mechanical engineering from what is now Otto von Guericke University of Magdeburg in Magdeburg, Germany. Magdeburg was part of East Germany when Odinga was a student there.

Comments

[Mescalero]

Interesting post -- the blogs emulate the STASI. For any clear-thinking individual who had family members suffer under the STASI and their KGB controllers, this kind of stuff is nothing but crap! A good case can be made that today's American mainstream media is nothing more than a resurrected PRAVDA.

[Wry Mouth]

Wo-o-ow. Awesome computer skills augment an overwhelming plotline to begin with. Bravo, German scientists!

[Rich]

I guess if you are used to getting away with shoveling unfettered crap, the moment someone say "hey wait a minute" maybe for them it seems like the Stasi is on the loose.