"The Stasi – the secret police – kept files on more than a third of the population. Building its profiles from informers, the Stasi requested that East German schoolteachers ask children to draw what clock they saw on television the night before.
Full article here
I've always been fascinated with 20th Century history - the sort of stuff our parents lived through without really realising that it would be the history for our generation. The Cold War in particular has had a hold on me since my teens - many is the book upon my bookcase that has been voraciously read when purchased in haste from a local bookshop. My tendency to immediately purchase these tomes when they are found lurking in the History section is due to a general lack of material available on the period.
The above quotation comes from an obscure website I happened upon today and reminds of why it is that my curiosity will never subside. The Stasi - the East German secret police service - was a formidable and terrifying state operated organisation which kept an illigitimate communist state in existence for nigh on 40 years. The ingenuity and macabre practices they used to maintain the public control stretched far and wide - indeed they were almost pioneers in subversive surveillance and coercion. There are many, many more stories like the one above that fascinate and horrify at the same time - our 21st Century indignance stuggles to imagine how it could have been to live in such a society (yet some would argue we do - it's just more subtle).
I knew that the Stasi would check the tv antennae of houses to ensure they were not pointed towards West Berlin and thus pick up "capitalist propaganda". But the fact above is a new one for me....
