Secret East German Stasi files may yield secrets soon
gangstalking | January 9, 2010
Secret East German Stasi files may yield secrets soon
Berlin – German investigators are one step closer to reading thousands of secret service files, torn up during the final days of the East German regime, after a breakthrough in technology. The high-tech computer being built to reassemble millions of hastily torn-up files has learned to distinguish handwriting from typeface, project leader Joachim Haeussler told the German Press Agency dpa.
In addition, Hauessler said the machine can now recognize the colour and contour of destroyed documents.
The Stasi record office, which looks after the former East Germany’s secret police files, had hoped to begin 2010 making use of the new system to decipher 400 sackloads of documents, hastily torn up by ministry officials before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
Regular readers of my reviews will no doubt have noticed a penchant for things Eastern European. This extends not only to travel and the purchase of portraits of Tito (just brought a beautiful one back from Ljubljana – it’s enormous!) but also to a genuine interest in the political and social history of the region in the twentieth century in particular. It’s an interest I’ve often found difficult to put into words but Anna Funder managed to get close to my sentiments writing in “Stasiland: Stories from behind the Berlin Wall” when she said “I think about the feeling I’ve developed for the former German Democratic Republic. It is a country which no longer exists, but here I am on a train hurtling through it – its tumbledown houses and bewildered people. This feeling needs a sticklebrick word: I can only describe it as horror-romance. It’s a dumb feeling, but I don’t want to shake it. The romance comes from the dream of a better world the German Communists wanted to build out of the ashes of their Nazi past: from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs. The horror comes from what they did in its name. East Germany has disappeared, but its remains are still at the site.” Of course, “Stasiland” describes a very particular aspect of post World War Two Europe but Funder conveys through her book the sort of attraction the states of the former Yugoslavia, in particular, hold for me.
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