It doesn't take long..

Perhaps it doesn't help that I've been watching bits and pieces of The Lives of Others the last two nights.. so I've got old East Germany on the brain and I come across this article by Andrew Curry in Wired magazine tonight ("Piecing Together the Dark Legacy of East Germany's Secret Police") about the guys in East Germany tasked with piecing together, until recently entirely by hand, the millions of shreds of paper left behind by the old Stasi secret police.
It's an awe-inspiring read for a couple of reasons:

1. it's a stark reminder of the lengths to which the East German government went to keep hold on the quite literally captive populace there. I mean we're talking about agents deflating people's bicycle tires repeatedly to give them a sense that they're going crazy...
2. the numbers of documents this team is having to contend with are just ridiculous. A 60,000 square-foot warehouse, three stories tall, stacked to the rafters with bags-- just bags stacked on bags-- full of documents, transcripts, carbon paper, file folders, all torn to shreds.. many of them by machine.. but millions of pages were torn apart by hand in the last days of the East German dictatorship, as the Wall was coming down. These people tore these documents up by hand. For weeks.

At their current rate, reconstructing the documents by hand would take another 700 years.
700.

So now some smart guys have figured out how to have software piece the documents-- once scanned into a server farm-- together once and for all and give some of these people who were targeted by the Stasi some piece of mind about what was recorded.

I know, I'm paraphrasing much of what's in the story.. but my mind is just blown away by this whole endeavor-- the back-story, the problem, the solution, and everything that's at stake.

And then, buried deep in the article, near the end, there's this small stat that I found really unsettling:

In November, the first children born after the fall of the wall turned 18.... In a survey of Berlin high school students, only half agreed that the GDR was a dictatorship. Two-thirds didn't know who built the Berlin Wall.

I was in highschool when the Berlin Wall came down and I guess, even as young as I was, it had stood as such an icon of that era-- the Cold War, Eastern Bloc totalitarianism.. it's shocking to me to consider that there are kids coming of age now who live in a world that never had a Berlin Wall-- this is good-- but who also don't know enough recent history to know how it came to be erected or who was responsible for it. That's shocking to me. I can only imagine how it must be for some of those people who's names appear on those shreds of Stasi paperwork.