'Puzzlers' reassemble shredded Stasi files, bit by bit
Reporting from Berlin and Zirndorf, Germany, - Martina Metzler peers at the piles of paper strips spread across four desks in her office. Seeing two jagged edges that match, her eyes light up and she tapes them together.
"Another join, another small success," she says with a wry smile -- even though at least two-thirds of the sheet is still missing.
Metzler, 45, is a "puzzler," one of a team of eight government workers that has attempted for the last 14 years to manually restore documents hurriedly shredded by East Germany's secret police, or Stasi, in the dying days of one of the Soviet bloc's most repressive regimes.
Two decades after the heady days when crowds danced atop the Berlin Wall, Germany has reunited and many of its people have moved on. But historians say it is important to establish the truth about the Communist era, and the work of the puzzlers has unmasked prominent figures in the former East Germany as Stasi agents. In addition, about 100,000 people annually apply to see their own files.
The Stasi, which is said to have had more than 170,000 informers, succeeded in destroying thousands of files, shredding them in machines called "ripping wolves" until the equipment broke down under the weight of the task, then through burning and pulping (the contents, held in buckets in the archive, are known as "Stasi porridge"). At the end, agents tore them by bare hand as the teeming crowds smashed down their doors.
The shredded files, which any good German bureaucrat knows as vorvernichtete Akten or pre-destroyed files -- fill a staggering 16,000 mail sacks that contain about 45 million individual pages, or 600 million scraps. Thus far, the puzzlers are 440 sacks into the process.
"If we carry on at this pace we'll still be here in 500 years' time," says Ernst Schroedinger, a 54-year-old former amateur boxer turned puzzler...
... This month, Metzler has been piecing together documents relating to the life of Stefan Heym, a late German-Jewish writer who chose to live in the GDR but was frequently at odds with the regime and was spied on relentlessly.
"I've just found the sketch of his children's bedroom drawn on orders from the Stasi by his cleaning lady, who they code-named 'Frieda,' " says Metzler, who reads thrillers in her spare time to relax.
The pencil sketch shows everything from the position of the doors and windows, to the cupboards and rugs.
"However many documents I piece together, it'll never cease to amaze and shock me the extent to which friends, colleagues, even husbands and wives, went to betray each other. It shows you what a poison regime it was," she says.
The puzzlers' work helps prevent the public from forgetting how bad the East German regime was, Metzler says.
"Put it this way, I used to think, why do they keep regurgitating all the stuff about the Hitler regime that happened over 60 years ago," she says. "And now, since working here, I know why the reconstruction work is so important, so that we don't forget, and that's what motivates me when some people say our task is hopeless and leads nowhere."...
Read entire article at LA Times
"Another join, another small success," she says with a wry smile -- even though at least two-thirds of the sheet is still missing.
Metzler, 45, is a "puzzler," one of a team of eight government workers that has attempted for the last 14 years to manually restore documents hurriedly shredded by East Germany's secret police, or Stasi, in the dying days of one of the Soviet bloc's most repressive regimes.
Two decades after the heady days when crowds danced atop the Berlin Wall, Germany has reunited and many of its people have moved on. But historians say it is important to establish the truth about the Communist era, and the work of the puzzlers has unmasked prominent figures in the former East Germany as Stasi agents. In addition, about 100,000 people annually apply to see their own files.
The Stasi, which is said to have had more than 170,000 informers, succeeded in destroying thousands of files, shredding them in machines called "ripping wolves" until the equipment broke down under the weight of the task, then through burning and pulping (the contents, held in buckets in the archive, are known as "Stasi porridge"). At the end, agents tore them by bare hand as the teeming crowds smashed down their doors.
The shredded files, which any good German bureaucrat knows as vorvernichtete Akten or pre-destroyed files -- fill a staggering 16,000 mail sacks that contain about 45 million individual pages, or 600 million scraps. Thus far, the puzzlers are 440 sacks into the process.
"If we carry on at this pace we'll still be here in 500 years' time," says Ernst Schroedinger, a 54-year-old former amateur boxer turned puzzler...
... This month, Metzler has been piecing together documents relating to the life of Stefan Heym, a late German-Jewish writer who chose to live in the GDR but was frequently at odds with the regime and was spied on relentlessly.
"I've just found the sketch of his children's bedroom drawn on orders from the Stasi by his cleaning lady, who they code-named 'Frieda,' " says Metzler, who reads thrillers in her spare time to relax.
The pencil sketch shows everything from the position of the doors and windows, to the cupboards and rugs.
"However many documents I piece together, it'll never cease to amaze and shock me the extent to which friends, colleagues, even husbands and wives, went to betray each other. It shows you what a poison regime it was," she says.
The puzzlers' work helps prevent the public from forgetting how bad the East German regime was, Metzler says.
"Put it this way, I used to think, why do they keep regurgitating all the stuff about the Hitler regime that happened over 60 years ago," she says. "And now, since working here, I know why the reconstruction work is so important, so that we don't forget, and that's what motivates me when some people say our task is hopeless and leads nowhere."...