Digital Vergangenheitsbewältigung
Wired Mag has an article online about an estimated US$30 million effort at the Fraunhofer Institute for Production Systems and Design Technology to literally piece together the work of East Germany’s Stasi. Researchers at the Institute are using digital methods to tape together the 5 percent of surveillance files ripped up by the Stasi during the fall of communism.
From the article:
“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.
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.”
According to the article, Frauenhofer is using a system of scanners to “digitally tape together the torn fragments” from 400 bags. Each bag has about 40,000 fragments. The massiveness of the project equals the size of the Stasi’s surveillance program.
“As the enforcement arm of the German Democratic Republic’s Communist Party, the Stasi at its height in 1989 employed 91,000 people to watch a country of 16.4 million. A sprawling bureaucracy almost three times the size of Hitler’s Gestapo was spying on a population a quarter that of Nazi Germany.”
Via Instapundit. Image: jgaray/Wikipedia