Der Papierkrieg, Mark Campbell w/ Ines Weizman, Tom McCarthy
The activities of the East German secret police generated an incredible amount of paperwork. In fighting this papierkrieg, the legions of Stasi administrators and archivists were driven less by a sense of paranoia, or an underlying suspiciousness, than by a pathological commitment to being thorough. A dedication enabled by boundless financial resources and elaborate organisational machines. To keep track of the two million photographs, twenty thousand audio recordings, three thousand films, and one hundred and ten kilometres of collated files on surveilled ‘suspects’ and ‘suspected activities’, the Stasi used forty–six million index cards. These colour–coded 3” x 5” cards comprising shards of information that needed to be referenced to other shards of information held on other cards. One card leading to another and then on to another, producing a hallucinatory web of connections akin to what Gilles Deleuze’s termed as ‘dividuation’; the final segmentation of the individual into their bureaucratic parts.
This project considers the bureaucratic interiority of the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit by examining how their administrative offices acted as a mechanism for the cruel indexing of the ‘lives of others’. In this reading, these interiors – now preserved in the Stasi Museum, Berlin – evoke less the ‘banality of evil’, to cite Hannah Arendt’s famous characterisation, than the photogenic bureaucracy of evil. With these hoovered floors, worn laminate desks, direct–line telephones, unwieldy paternoster filing machines, well–used typewriters, and inbuilt storage systems swollen with observations, trivia, and manufactured accusations, accenting the pathologies and degradations they housed.
All Images: Mark Campbell
artefact, other
