Marcus Jauer on the historical value of the Stasi files

Nearly 20 years after the Berlin Wall came down Marcus Jauer reflects on the current role of the archives containing the files of the Ministry of State Security of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). "The State Security did not collect biographies, it gathered information that was supposed to give it an idea of the general mood in the country. It went to ever greater trouble to do this, and in view of the mass of files that it accumulated it appears today to have been an extremely efficient state-run enterprise. But even this didn't change the outcome. In the end it produced only paper, not security. These documents now make the entire state look like a monstrous experiment on how people behave under dictatorship and imprisonment. Perhaps for those for whom the past has been relegated to the past, this may prove to be the very value of these documents. Now that the cities have been modernised, the factories pulled down and the connections broken they constitute the most authentic piece of the GDR left for posterity. They could easily be used to reconstruct the entire country, but it would only be the country as the secret service saw it."

» more information (external link, German)
More from the press review on the subject » Domestic Policy, » History, » Science / Research, » Germany