George Orwell foresaw in 1949 a world where government surveillance was fully integrated into modern life, and warned us of what happens when the object of power is power. “Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing,” Orwell wrote.
The best way to do this is to know your subject better than they know themselves, to observe them in their daily routines, their habits, the large and the small, and to teach your operatives how to infiltrate their world by putting this knowledge into use. The Stasi, the East German secret police, were notorious for spying on their own populace, employing almost 300,000 people to keep tabs on their citizenry. After the reunification of Germany, most of the Stasi archives were opened to the public, making access to its secrets unprecedented and unique.
Using this access, Simon Menner (born in 1978 in Emmendingen, Germany) edited a selection of photographs for Top Secret: Images from the Stasi Archives (Hatje Cantz), presenting us with an overview of the various uses of government surveillance under one of the most repressive regimes of the twentieth century. From a series of seminars on disguises, where Stasi personnel were taught how to change their appearances in order to camouflage themselves with wigs, fake facial hair, Western tourist costume, or East German professional dress to the collection of body gestures meant to convey secret signals from one agent to the next, the photographs in Top Secret take on the air of the absurd.
This, in part, is because they are so dated, so clearly of a time when appearances were less than flattering, making them a kind of campy pictorial that is creepy in its earnestness. The book continues with scenes of staged surveillance, shadowing a subject on the street, secret house searches, confiscated objects, surveillance of mailboxes and as well the United States Embassy, and perhaps most revealingly, surveillance of Soviet spies spying on them simultaneously.
As Menner writes in the book’s introduction, “The material I was permitted to see in the archive of the Federal Commissioner for the Stasi Archives in fact represents only a fraction of what is stored there. Many of the archived pictures have not been inspected since the fall of the Berlin Wall…. Too little has been done to provide a visual account of the activities carried out by the Ministry for State Security. This is a task for which artists and cultural scientists are perhaps better suited than historians in order to unambiguously underscore the links to present day society.”
For it is true, in this age of unprecedented communications technology, where the United States government publicly acknowledges employing spy tactic on its own populace, the realization that Big Brother is watching us no longer is propaganda of the Cold War. It is the cold, hard, unflinching reality of twenty first century life. We are not only watching: it is we who are being watched.
But what is being seen, and how is this information used? What came of these Stasi inquiries, of these photographs, these agents, these training session, these missions against their own citizens? What was the price paid for the reality of the teenage whose room filled with Madonna posters became the subject of one Stasi search?
And more so, what came of the hundreds of thousands of government agents who no longer were employed by the state to spy on their neighbors: what happened to them after the fall of the Berlin Wall? Did they reintegrate without leaving a trace of the lives they once lived? Did their training come in handy and could they disguise themselves freely, so that no one would ever learn of their former activities?
We may never know, but we slowly begin to learn that it is our responsibility to look critically at the world in which we live, with the awareness not everything—or everyone—is who or what they appear to be.
BOOK
Simon Menner. Top Secret
Images from the Archives of the Stasi
Texts by Simon Menner, graphic design by Simon Menner
German, English
2013. 128 pp., 166 ills.
20.30 x 25.20 cm
softcover
ISBN 978-3-7757-3620-6
http://www.hatjecantz.de/simon-menner-top-secret-5654-1.html
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