Philip Oltermann - Enemies everywhere: photos show absurdity of life under the Stasi
A football kicked over
a wall, a lightbulb thrown out of a window, a suspiciously unkempt lawn: for
East Germany’s secret police, even the most mundane event was recorded as
potential proof of the capitalist enemy trying to sabotage life in the
socialist republic.
Thirty years after
the fall
of the Berlin Wall, researchers at the Stasi Records Agency have for the
first time systematically analysed the vast photographic archive the
surveillance state amassed as a result of its untrammelled paranoia. The result is a new
coffee table book, Der Blick der Staatssicherheit (The Gaze of
State Security), with previously unseen photographs that cast a melancholy eye
on the absurdity of life behind the Iron Curtain.
They tell the story of
three children who caused an incident when they kicked a football over
the Berlin Wall on
to Soviet soil in May 1978. The children, two girls and a boy from West Berlin,
eventually managed to get their ball back, but not before the Stasi had
thoroughly documented the ball’s position – “around 25 metres from the border
markings” – and photographed the ceremonial return of the offending object....
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/20/enemies-everywhere-photos-show-absurdity-life-under-stasi-east-germany
