History & Totalitarianism

Very interesting article in WIRED (h/t Instapundit) about a project to find out what was written on all the East German Stasi reports on their people- alot of them were ripped up or shredded and now they are trying to piece them all back together with technology. This caught my attention for 2 reasons. (1) I finished reading "1984" by George Orwell a couple of weeks ago. It was certainly THE most depressing book I've ever read - (... well, OK "Sophie's Choice" is a close second). But I'm really glad I read it because its so relevant to our times,... issues about privacy, terrorism, torture, PRESERVING HISTORY. I'm still absorbing it. It certainly inspires me to NOT take any government actions for granted, benign or otherwise. (2) I loved the movie referenced, "The Lives of Others"! Its a foreign film I rented on Netflix last summer and its one of those that also really sticks with you long after you watch it, Highly Recommended!

" Requests dipped in the late 1990s, but the Oscar-winning 2006 film The Lives of Others, about a Stasi agent who monitors a dissident playwright, seems to have prompted a surge of new applications; 2007 marked a five-year high. "Every month, 6,000 to 8,000 people decide to read their files for the first time," Bormann says. These days, the Stasi Records Office spends $175 million a year and employs 2,000 people.

This being Germany, there's even a special word for it: Vergangenheitsbewältigung, or "coming to terms with the past." It's not self-evident — you could imagine a country deciding, communally, to recover from a totalitarian past by simply gathering all the documents and destroying them. In fact, in 1990 the German press and citizen committees were wracked by debate over whether to do just that. Many people, however, suspected that former Stasi agents and ex-informants were behind the push to forgive and forget.

By preserving and reconstructing the Stasi archives, BStU staffers say they hope to keep history from repeating itself. In November, the first children born after the fall of the wall turned 18. Evidence suggests many of them have serious gaps in their knowledge of the past. In a survey of Berlin high school students, only half agreed that the GDR was a dictatorship. Two-thirds didn't know who built the Berlin Wall."