After the Berlin Wall fell, agents of East Germany’s secret police frantically tore apart their records. Archivists have spent the past thirty years trying to restore them.
By the time the Berlin Wall fell, in 1989, there were some two hundred thousand unofficial collaborators working for the East German security service, known as the Stasi—one spy for every fifty to sixty people in the country. Among the informants was Salomea Genin, whose family had fled Germany before the start of the Second World War, and who returned as a young woman dedicated to the Communist cause. “There is only one way to live with my life,” Genin explains to Burkhard Bilger in a captivating piece from this week’s issue. “And that’s to be open about the facts.”
Genin is not alone in wanting to face the past. In January, 1992, the newly unified government made almost the entire archive of Stasi reports available to the public, an act of radical official transparency. But there was still much that the Stasi had managed to hide. In the weeks before the Wall came down, their agents destroyed as many documents as they could—much was pulped, shredded, and burned, but between forty million and fifty-five million pages were torn up and stuffed in sacks. The Germans have spent the past thirty years trying to piece those back together, by hand. So far, less than five per cent of the torn documents have been reassembled. Now an effort is under way to automate the process, using A.I. programs and the latest digital scanners. “The Stasi files,” Bilger writes, “offer an astonishingly granular picture of life in a dictatorship—how ordinary people act under suspicious eyes.” They are “like an endless police blotter: a meticulous, bewilderingly detailed account of an entire society’s deceptions and betrayals.” As far-right and authoritarian groups are on the rise across Europe, “the files have never seemed more relevant.”
For more: A short documentary from 2020, titled “Betrayal,” tells the story of how the flight of a spy from East Germany affected the family members he left behind.
