At the end of “The Lives of Others,” I was surprised by the amount of documentation kept on Georg Dreyman as well as the overall extent of the Stasi files in the storage room. Upon further research, I discovered that during 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down, the Stasi decided to destroy all forms of documentation and evidence from years of spying on fellow East German citizens. The Stasi tried to use cheap shredders, but when the shredders broke, agents were forced to use their hands to tear the records into pieces. The shreds of paper were never destroyed, however, because the Stasi never had time to incinerate them. Up until now, these surviving fragments fill over 16,000 garbage bags that are stored in the former Stasi headquarters. Starting in 1991, a team of 45 workers began to manually piece together the documents. The process was so tedious that sorting through all 16,000 bags would require roughly 800 years. Very recently, however, scientists in Berlin developed a software program called e-Puzzler. E-Puzzler can piece the shreds of paper together by matching digitalized files by color, texture, font, and outline.
The sheer amount of shredded paper and the time that would have been required to piece the files back together is astounding. In “The Lives of Others,” to his surprise, Dreyman found numerous documents about him, and previously, he suspected that he was never under complete surveillance (Dreyman asks the minister why he was never under complete surveillance). The impacts of E-Puzzler could alter Germans’ sense of history as well as themselves. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Germans were constantly identified as former Stasi spies. Imagine if the files had been intact at the time of German reunification. The Stasi files could have destroyed careers and helped victims discover why they ended up in prison. Finally, twenty years later, the secrets and the workings of the East German Secret Police can truly be deciphered.
Amazing. Thanks for adding to the information about the amount of documentation. Wow....
ReplyDelete