The data for the 400-bag pilot project is stored on 22 terabytes worth
of hard drives, but the system is designed to scale. If work on all
16,000 bags is approved, there may be hundreds of scanners and
processors running in parallel by 2010. (Right now they're analyzing
actual documents, but still mostly vetting and refining the system.)
Then, once assembly is complete, archivists and historians will
probably spend a decade sorting and organizing. "People who took the
time to rip things up that small had a reason," Nickolay says. "This
isn't about revenge but about understanding our history." And not just
Germany's — Nickolay has been approached by foreign officials from
Poland and Chile with an interest in reconstructing the files damaged
or destroyed by their own repressive regimes.
This kind of understanding isn't cheap. The German parliament has
given Fraunhofer almost $9 million to scan the first 400 bags. If the
system works, expanding up the operation to finish the job will cost
an estimated $30 million. Most of the initial cost is research and
development, so the full reconstruction would mainly involve more
scanners and personnel to feed the paper in.
Is it worth it? Günter Bormann, the BStU's senior legal expert, says
there's an overwhelming public demand for the catharsis people find in
their files. "When we started in 1992, I thought we'd need five years
and then close the office," Bormann says. Instead, the Records Office
was flooded with half a million requests in the first year alone. Even
in cases where files hadn't been destroyed, waiting times stretched to
three years. In the past 15 years, 1.7 million people have asked to
see what the Stasi knew about them.
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.
The files hold the tantalizing possibility of an explanation for the
strangeness that pervaded preunification Germany. Even back then,
Poppe wondered if the Stasi had information that would explain it all.
"I always used to wish that some Stasi agent would defect and call me
up to say, Here, I brought your file with me,'" Poppe says.
Reading the reports in that first set of 40 binders spurred her to
uncover as much as she could about her monitored past. Since 1995,
Poppe has received 8 pages from the group putting together documents
by hand; the collection of taped-together paper is in a binder on her
Stasi shelf.
The truth is, for Poppe the reconstructed documents haven't contained
bombshells that are any bigger than the information in the rest of her
file. She chooses a black binder and sets it down on the glass coffee
table in her living room. After lighting a Virginia Slim, she flips to
a page-long list of snitches who spied on her. She was able to match
codenames like Carlos, Heinz, and Rita to friends, coworkers, and even
colleagues in the peace movement. She even tracked down the Stasi
officer who managed her case, and after she set up a sort of ambush
for him at a bar — he thought he was there for a job interview — they
continued to get together. Over the course of half a dozen meetings,
they talked about what she found in her files, why the Stasi was
watching her, what they thought she was doing.
For months, it turned out, an agent was assigned to steal her baby
stroller and covertly let the air out of her bicycle tires when she
went grocery shopping with her two toddlers. "If I had told anyone at
the time that the Stasi was giving me flat tires, they would have
laughed at me," she says. "It was a way to discredit people, make them
seem crazy. I doubted my own sanity sometimes."
Eventually, the officer broke off contact, but continued to telephone
Poppe — often drunk, often late at night, sometimes complaining about
his failing marriage. He eventually committed suicide.
Poppe is looking forward to finding out what was in that last,
reconstructed 5 percent. "The files were really important to see," she
says, taking a drag on her cigarette and leaning forward across the
coffee table. "They explained everything that happened — the letters
we never got, the friends who pulled away from us. We understood where
the Stasi influenced our lives, where they arranged for something to
happen, and where it was simply our fault."
Andrew Curry (andrew@andrewcurry.com) is a journalist based in Berlin.