{"id":24,"date":"2004-09-15T13:10:09","date_gmt":"2004-09-15T17:10:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/jackstriptoeurope\/2004\/09\/15\/stasi-museum-pt-2\/"},"modified":"2004-09-15T13:10:09","modified_gmt":"2004-09-15T17:10:09","slug":"stasi-museum-pt-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/jackstriptoeurope\/2004\/09\/15\/stasi-museum-pt-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Stasi Museum Pt. 2"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

DISCLAIMER:  This
\nis a long post.  Hopefully it’s not too self-indulgent and
\nrambling, but I’m not making any guarantees.<\/span><\/p>\n

So last Monday, Mel and I went to the
\nStasi Museum.  Basically they turned the office suite of the heads
\nof the Stasi into a museum; it is but a few rooms in a massive
\ncomplex.  People can go to a different part of the complex and
\nrequest their Stasi files!<\/span><\/p>\n

Speaking of Stasi files, I was
\nshocked by the breadth and depth of the East German surveillance
\napparatus.  They had 40 million files in a country of 16.8 million
\n– and 6 million people were considered “suspects.”  The Stasi
\nitself grew steadily until the fall of communism, so that by 1989 they
\nhad 190,000 employees – and 15,000 informers in the West.<\/span><\/p>\n

They would do stuff like wipe
\nprisoners’ groins to get a really strong scent, and then keep the cloth
\nin a jar for years and years, ready at any time to give to a hound and
\ntrack you down.  And they invented a special microphone that is
\nmounted on a radiator and then listens through the pipes to everything
\nthat’s said four floors up.   Every long distance call was
\ntapped, and when special keywords were uttered, the call was
\nautomatically recorded. <\/span><\/p>\n

As we saw specimens of this stuff and
\ntoured what was basically the de facto government of East Germany, the
\nhorror of the regime began to sink in.  (At the same time, though,
\nit was kind of comical – the whole place was vintage 1960s d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

DISCLAIMER:  This is a long post.  Hopefully it’s not too self-indulgent and rambling, but I’m not making any guarantees. So last Monday, Mel and I went to the Stasi Museum.  Basically they turned the office suite of the heads of the Stasi into a museum; it is but a few rooms in a massive complex.  […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1155,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1453],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-jackstriptoeuropestories"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/jackstriptoeurope\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/jackstriptoeurope\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/jackstriptoeurope\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/jackstriptoeurope\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1155"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/jackstriptoeurope\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/jackstriptoeurope\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/jackstriptoeurope\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/jackstriptoeurope\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/jackstriptoeurope\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}