EBRecently, I read one of our fall 2011 books, Stasiland. It’s been published to wide acclaim all over the world, but never in the US. In it, journalist Anna Funder looks at what East German life is like—both before and after the wall came down. She talks to people who were victimized by the Stasi, the East German police, and people who were members of it or spied for it. While the book was interesting on many levels, one of the things that most stayed with me was the pervasiveness of the Stasi, the way they recruited average people to spy on their friends, families, and co-workers and report back on even the most mundane of things. At one point, Funder even visits a building where “smells” were collected—so that if someday you betrayed East Germany, they could open up a jar with an old handkerchief of yours and a dog could track you down.
On his website, artist Simon Menner has collected photos from Stasi archives, ranging from the mundane to the absurd. He wonders “what it really is that the Big Brother sees. Can the terror such a repressive system spreads be found in these images? Or is the ‘gaze of evil’ pretty banal and we have to attach the terror ourselves?” Now you can see for yourself.
