Published on :
Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, a discreet team of archivists has tirelessly searched, glued and assembled documents torn up by the Stasi, the East German secret police. A challenge worthy of the myth of Sisyphus for these guardians of collective memory, because the quantity of damaged documents, some of which are no bigger than a fingernail or which deteriorate over time, is immense and the archivists are not enough many. They are nicknamed “Puzzle Women”, shadowy heroines. Reporting by Niagara Tonolli.
In 1989, the East German communist regime collapsed with the fall of the Berlin Wall, which was supposed to protect it. In the panic and emergency, at the Berlin HQ of the Stasi, the all-powerful secret police, the order was given to immediately destroy the millions of cards and files which record decades of police surveillance. When the crowd of rebels finally enters the Stasi headquarters, 111 kilometers of archives of all kinds and 16,000 bags filled with strips of paper, relics of millions of torn files, are saved by the citizens.
At the dawn of reunification, a team of archivists was set up to try to make sense of this gigantic paper puzzle. Women, mainly, who have dedicated themselves to this titanic task for around thirty years. With the will and self-sacrifice of the copyist monks of the Middle Ages, they patiently assemble the fragments of files, thus reconstructing the history of their fellow citizens.
By coming to read their file with yellowed letters, the victims come to search for what the Stasi took from their lives, sometimes learning that a husband, a relative or a work colleague had betrayed them.
See alsoNiagara Tonolli, director: “In the GDR, everyone could spy on everyone”
The work of the Puzzle Women is essential to understanding the history of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). But the task is colossal. Only the contents of 500 bags out of the 16,000 in total could be processed in 30 years. We imagine that it would still take several hundred years to manually restore the content of the 55 million pages that are still waiting to be assembled. Unless new technologies and political will come together to decipher as quickly as possible this pile of confetti, dust and memory that some would like to reread… and others to forget.