The owner of the room has left. He raised the Polaroid camera and pressed the shutter at the desk. This inadvertent move may be the most perfect and evil application in Polaroid history.
"Big Brother is watching you."
We have all seen this sentence in the book, but obviously Big Brother will not just be satisfied with seeing you. With the declassification of the East German Stasi archives, people finally have a chance to get a glimpse of what Big Brother is looking at.
Before that, let’s get to know Stasi.
This is the nickname of the East German people with strong disdain, disgust and fear. Its real name is the Ministry of National Security of the German Democratic Republic, or MFS for short.
At the beginning of its establishment, Stasi's business scope only included "collecting intelligence for the motherland" and "counterintelligence collected by other countries". But as its business continued to expand, the objects it monitored turned to East German citizens.
In this monitoring process, the camera acts as the pervasive eye of the big brother.
German photographer Simon Menner studied Stasi’s photo archives, compiled and published it into an album called "TOP SECRET", showing people a world of images beyond common sense.
The spy capital of the Cold War
The story of Stasi begins with the division of Germany.
After the end of World War II, capitalism and socialism quickly opened a new historical period-the Cold War. Germany, as a country under the jurisdiction of the two camps, was split into East Germany and West Germany.
Under the deterrence of nuclear weapons, no matter which camp is willing to trigger World War III. As a result, the focus of the confrontation between the two sides shifted to a more secret intelligence war.
With the help of the Soviet Ministry of State Security (the predecessor of the KGB), East Germany quickly established its own Ministry of State Security, the Stasi.
In the early days of its establishment, the main task of Stasi was to collect information from the outside world.
However, after World War II, nearly 3 million East Germans emigrated to West Germany, accounting for 16% of the total population of East Germany at that time. In order to curb this turbulent wave of immigration, the East German authorities began to build the Berlin Wall on August 19, 1961. It began to take shape three days later and was completed in a week.
The “voting with their feet” behavior of the East German people was tantamount to subverting the regime to the authorities. It also prompted Stasi’s business to gradually shift from “outside” to “inside”, and began a large-scale campaign against its own nationals. Monitoring and monitoring.
The following photos from the Stasi archives show the authorities’ communications surveillance of the people of this country-
After the Berlin Wall was built, Western countries increased their investment in espionage wars in Berlin. Similarly, the Soviet Union and East Germany also launched countermeasures.
During the Cold War, Berlin became the “capital of spies” and was the main battlefield for East German Stasi, the Soviet KGB, and the US Central Intelligence Agency. According to statistics, at the end of 1961, a total of 70 intelligence agencies from all over the world were in Berlin. This density is unprecedented.
Big brother is filming you
In modern German, there is a notorious acronym-IM, which specifically refers to the "unofficial whistleblower" who works for Stasi.
As of 1995, there were 170,000 IMs who had confirmed their identities alone, accounting for 2.5% of the total population of East Germany between the ages of 18 and 60. Among them, IMs under the age of 18 were as high as 10,000.
Some people describe that in the East German era, "the husband told his wife the secret, and the son told his father."
According to estimates by a colonel who had served in Stasi, plus temporary spies, in the entire East Germany, a total of 2 million people worked as informants for Stasi in 40 years.
When faced with such a behemoth dedicated to monitoring its citizens, even the well-known Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal had to sigh: "It is much more evil than the Gestapo!"
According to statistics from historians, during the Nazi period, the secret police organization "Gestapo" had 40,000 people and was responsible for monitoring 80 million people. The Soviet KGB has 480,000 full-time employees and is responsible for monitoring 280 million people.
In contrast, Stasi’s data is extremely scary-in its heyday, on average, for every 6.5 East German citizens, there was one informer.
There are many celebrities among these secret agents, such as Heinrich Fink, who is a professor of theology and served as the vice-chancellor of East Berlin's Humboldt University. Since 1968, he has served as a Stasi secret agent until his identity was exposed and he was fired immediately.
This complex network of sight lines composed of mutual surveillance and self-surveillance constituted the basis for East Germany to rule the country.
The camera has become Big Brother's most powerful eye, and is widely used in Stasi's surveillance work.
Even more paradoxically, the head of Stasi knows the power of the camera, but deliberately avoids the lens-Stasi's long-term second-in-command never takes pictures and never appears under his real name. Western countries only know that his code name is "Mischa" and his nickname is "The Person Who Nobody Knows What Looks Like".
East German Spy Guide
In addition to the surveillance and shooting of the citizens, the book "Top Secret" also contains demonstration photos of how spies put fake beards, how to fight, how to make secret gestures, how to arrest criminals, how to secretly photograph and track objects, and how to collect evidence. Called "East German Spy Guide".
The cover of the album is a man wearing a mink coat, a mink hat and dark sunglasses — this photo comes from a Stasi spy training manual, which is used to guide spies to disguise themselves in order to Unobtrusive when going in and out of various public places—obviously, this man is disguising himself as a local tyrant in mink.
Another Stasi spy demonstrated how to dress up as a Western tourist, reflecting the eerie history of the last century in a highly condensed manner.
Imagine a spy from a socialist country, disguising himself as a tourist from an imaginary capitalist country, with the purpose of monitoring the contact of his country’s compatriots with these tourists.
This is almost a metaphysical impossible thing.
The most attractive is a set of Polaroid photos. The picture is full of empty shots of no one, such as a desk, full of mystery.
The purpose of this photo is for the spies to take a picture of it before searching the desk, and after the search is completed, place it back as it is based on the photo, leaving no trace.
This may be the most perfect and evil application in the history of Polaroid cameras.
The rest of the teaching also includes-
In addition, the book also contains some photos that are not so purposeful, such as the selfies of Agent Stasi, and their photographs of ducks, kittens, and squirrels.
Perhaps the literary and artistic elements among the spies who took these photos, the author believes, are the same as people's motivations for taking pictures of their own cats.
After the passage of time, these photos will inevitably look funny, but as the author Simon Menner said: “Never forget that the content of this book is completely serious. Its photos are completely used to oppress the people. It is normal to want to laugh. But you have to feel as if you are in your throat."
After all, all this has not really changed in time.
Can go home to wash and sleep
On November 9, 1989, Egon Krenz, chairman of the East German Unity Socialist Party, promulgated a new tourism law on radio and TV live broadcasting, allowing East German citizens to travel to West Germany.
Within an hour, 15,000 people poured into West Germany. Four weeks later, the East German authorities reopened the Brandenburg Gate and the people began to demolish the Berlin Wall spontaneously.
At Christmas that year, 2.4 million people from East Germany travelled to West Germany, accounting for one-sixth of the total population of East Germany.
On October 3, 1990, East and West Germany were formally unified, and East Germany was merged into West Germany. Stasi also withdrew from the stage of history.
After Stasi was disbanded, its leader Erich Mielke did not get the chance to go into exile in the Soviet Union. His elder brother KGB failed to abandon or give up at the last moment. Erich Mielke was finally sentenced to 6 years in prison.
The liquidation of the former regime in East Germany involved very complicated legal dilemmas, and this process has not completely ended even today. This involves Hannah Arendt's famous viewpoint-"Mediocre Evil", an evil that is difficult to reflect in sentencing.
But it is intriguing that among all the official employees of Stasi, only one person was sentenced to prison. His name is Werner Funk. He worked as a janitor in a branch of a certain urban-rural junction of Stasi. One day he drank. Too much vodka and accidentally wounded two passersby.
May 31, 1990 was the last day that Stasi made it onto the stage of history. It broadcasts to the entire West Germany: "The mission is over." Let the spies pack up and prepare to go home.
In the previous week, the East German Military Intelligence Department also broadcasted a broadcast to West Germany, also asking its spies to suspend their missions, but in a more obscure way. What was broadcast was a chorus of officers, and the repertoire was a nursery rhyme describing a swan playing in the lake.
It is said that the meaning of the lyrics is, "You can go home to wash and sleep."
*The pictures in the article are from "Top Secret", author SimonMenner.
Written / Sticker
Editor / Hu Lingfeng
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