【时代周刊 20140523】走进东德国家安全局的档案

满仓

【中文标题】走进东德国家安全局的档案
【原文标题】Go Inside East Germany’s Stasi Archives
【登载媒体】时代周刊
【原文作者】Jeffrey Ladd
【原文链接】http://time.com/3724509/go-inside-east-germanys-stasi-archives/


在冷战期间，试图逃离东德的人被国家安全部要求重现逃离的场景，并被拍照。


被强迫重现藏在汽车后备箱逃跑的人。年份不祥。


摆拍。1964年10月4日和5日夜间，东德斯塔西（译者注：东德国家安全局）成员清除位于柏林米特斯特林泽大街55号后院的57号隧道。行动中，东德边防军士艾冈•舒尔茨被战友M的流弹射杀。这个场景显示M用他的AK-47向院子中扫射。


来自柏林夏利特医院的军士艾冈•舒尔茨尸检照片，伤口用手工标记。E代表子弹射入的位置，A代表子弹穿出，T代表掠射。这些照片拍摄于1964年10月5日到7日之间。


80年代斯塔西总部大楼的模型，这个模型现在摆放在柏林诺曼大街斯塔西博物馆的大厅。


2014年重访第11号地点，贝尔瑙尔大街。


1973年9月21日，一个东德家庭和帮助他们逃跑的西德人奥利弗•米伦多夫、卡尔亨兹•海斯科尔德在一辆欧宝轿车中潜逃失败后被摆拍。


1983年9月12日，一对母子潜逃失败。大约刚过午夜，他们藏在一辆宝马轿车的后备箱，试图传阅马利恩高速公路检查站。帮助他们逃跑的人和这对母子被抓获后，立即被要求在海关大楼里重现他们试图潜逃的方式。


设置在波茨坦附近的边防站模型，包括电子信号栏杆。这个模型的制作者是驻扎在克莱恩-格林尼克边境的军官弗朗兹•派特利。他在自家车库中保存这个模型长达20年，2011年首次展出。


国有汽车制造商VEB Sachsenring Zwickau生产的一个漂浮装置，由一个汽车轮胎、风扇马达和一块汽车电瓶组成。他在1989年6月26日早9:30被捕，在审讯中承认他在当晚计划从波尔特哈根通过波罗的海逃跑。


摆拍。1981年7月9日，一个人自己制作了一个由聚苯乙烯泡沫、尼龙绳和木板组成的筏子，试图从波罗的海沿岸的波尔特哈根逃跑，原因是害怕犯罪指控。他在到达边境线之前被捕。


摆拍。两个人乘坐一辆施魏因富特牌照的菲亚特124型汽车，试图逃离。两名潜逃者和帮助逃跑的人被捕。驾驶员和前排乘客被要求重现这一场景。


1972年8月，一个五口之家在小型货车中的藏身之处。逃跑的企图失败了。


1965年9月9日，晚8:45，两名美国公民在标致403汽车中偷运一位年轻女性，在柏林和弗里德里希、齐默大街处的边防站。藏身之处是在汽车前部的变速箱，人要从前面座椅下面进入隐藏处，然后用毯子盖上。


柏林米特斯特林泽大街55号后院的厕所，原来的污水沟被改造成一个隧道，57个人通过这里逃往西柏林。

冷战期间，很多国家都设置了相关的机构来保护国土、收集国内外的情报。中央情报局和克格勃是两种意识形态的重要代表机构，但在效率和残暴行方面，似乎都比不上东德的国家安全局，俗称“斯塔西”。斯塔西大范围地刺探东德人民的情报，而且擅于煽动家庭成员相互揭发。

除了间谍行为，那些试图从东德逃往西德的人都保留着想尽的书面和照片记录，通常是逃跑者被捕后亲身示范的潜逃过程。

Hatje Cantz出版社出版了德国摄影师阿尔韦德•梅斯莫的一本新书，叫做《重现MfS》，其中收集的有关叛逃的影像资料，来自他从一位保管斯塔西档案的联邦官员处得到的数十万份档案资料中。《时代周刊》LightBox栏目采访了阿尔韦德•梅斯莫，请他介绍自己的工作，以及摄影作为国家镇压行为的“见证人”这一复杂的性质。

《时代周刊》LightBox：你的新书《重现MfS》展示了斯塔西档案中的一些图片。你是如何得到这些档案的？它们现在可供所有人浏览吗？

阿尔韦德•梅斯莫：研究人员和记者可以接触到这些档案，我就是因为艺术研究需求而接触到的。基本上，任何人只要有正当的学术理由，都可以看到这些档案。他们主要考虑的是保护受害人，我看到的所有资料实现都要接受监察，所有姓名都被隐藏，也包括我的书中的内容。

《时代周刊》LightBox：你说这本书是一个“大杂烩”，能稍微详细地解释一下吗？

阿尔韦德•梅斯莫：“大杂烩”这个词或许有一些误导。我的原意是，我把一些多样化的图片按照自己的审美标准和信息表达力度组合在一起。很多人都对分裂时期的德国感兴趣，但是你已经有了一些相关的作品，比如安奈特•格罗希纳的《另一种观点：东柏林墙》。对你来说，这个主题吸引你的是什么呢？我一直对德国近代史感兴趣，但从未考虑成为一名历史学家。我在1991年移居到柏林，从那时开始，我对历史的兴趣越来越多地成为我的照片的主题。1994年和1995年，我开始接手波茨坦广场零纪元项目，内容是展现柏林市中心在柏林墙倒塌之后，双方发展均衡之前所存在的差异。因为这个项目，我在1996年被授予奥托•施泰纳特摄影特别奖。

《时代周刊》LightBox：你收集了足够的东德第一手资料。柏林墙倒塌之前，你自己，或者你的家人有生活在东德的经历吗？

阿尔韦德•梅斯莫：我有亲戚居住在东德，定期会有走动。但是我生长在西德的西南部，那个地区对东德并不感兴趣，我们更关注瑞士、法国或者意大利。图片仅仅会沉默地展示事实，但是他们缺少现实的背景。所以，作为证据“记录”，它们不一定是可靠的，尤其是当你选择了很多摆拍的“犯罪行为”。你认为这些图片对一个国家来说有多大的意义呢？很多照片一定是在标准犯罪审讯程序中拍摄的，这样的审讯行为全世界都一样。我怀疑，通过这样的摆拍方式，东德当局至少会做出表面上的法治姿态，给检方提供视觉证据，尽管后来的判决结果在逮捕时就已经决定了。

《时代周刊》LightBox：除了作为证据，你觉得这些照片是否有羞辱被捕人的意图呢？

阿尔韦德•梅斯莫：我认为，这种方式的羞辱顶多算是附带伤害，人们把它当作程序的一部分而接受下来。当然，当我第一次看到这些家人的照片时，我想到了阿布•格莱布。

《时代周刊》LightBox：你的照片都没有说明文字（除了一个小册子里面的简要索引）和图片背后的故事，你让读者自己去猜测他们看到的是什么，每个图片之间的关系在哪里。我似乎想到了拉里•苏丹和迈克•曼德尔在70年代的作品《证据》，其中包括了科学和工业档案中的图像资料。你能告诉我们你是如何选取这些图像的，以及如何构建这本书的吗？

阿尔韦德•梅斯莫：把我的书与《证据》相比的确有一些意义，因为我使用的档案图像资料来源不明。在《重现MfS》中的主题与《证据》相比，更具体一些。我主要关注一个问题——企图越过柏林墙的叛逃。我就是用这个标准筛选斯塔西档案中浩如烟海的资料。我做出了一个重要的决定，就是把说明文字与图像分开。即使有那些典型的说明，读者的理解也会千差万别。用另外的一个小册子来重新架构这本书，也花费了一些时间。

《时代周刊》LightBox：你自己的照片也在书中出现，它们往往会和斯塔西档案中的照片混淆。你能介绍一下你在柏林各地拍摄的照片，以及“重访”系列照片的信息吗？

阿尔韦德•梅斯莫：如果你仔细观察，可以发现“重访”系列并非基于斯塔西的档案。我并不打算让历史和现在有一个对比，所以“重访”系列可以有序地安排在书中。我必须要说，这些犯罪场景和物体照片的来源不明，所以我在2014年拍摄的内容也并不很确定，包括斯塔西所保存的，并让我随意使用的照片。所谓随意使用，我指的是技术上和内容方面。虽然一切都不确定，但是读者对此的见解或许可以提供一些信息。

《时代周刊》LightBox：在你今后所从事的工作中，你觉得这些档案还会扮演重要的角色吗？

阿尔韦德•梅斯莫：两个月以来，我一直在搞一个新项目，有关给前西德造成巨大创伤的“红军派”。这个项目的核心是一张来自警方档案的照片。我的目标是再一次利用今天的视角，使用一些来自各方的图片，包括经过处理和被摆拍的照片，以及我自己的新照片。我希望通过视觉角度来观察这个给当时国家造成巨大威胁的事件。我已经得到了一项奖学金，所以在2015年会一直关注这个项目。我恐怕要在档案中花费不少时间。我不想制定一个不变的原则，尽管我有自己的偏好。我找到的每张照片、每个主题都应该按照它们自己的方式来表现。除了红军派项目，我还与作家安奈特•格罗希纳合作一个新项目，收集60年代柏林城市规划的大量图片。但是这个项目需要资金支持才能确保研究的顺利，并出版一本高质量的书。

《时代周刊》LightBox：你的很多工作最终都是通过书籍和展览表现出来，对你来说有哪一个是更重要的吗？当你着手一项新工作的时候，你是否已经设想好最终要出版一本书，还是举办一次展览。如果是，这会影响你开展工作的方式吗？

阿尔韦德•梅斯莫：对我来说，书比展览更重要，《另一种观点》和《重现MfS》都是先有书籍出版。我会说，我是一名“书籍摄影师”，不是“展览摄影师”。我觉得，关注于书籍让我有今天的成就。




原文：

During the Cold War, escape attempts from East Germany were thoroughly reenacted and photographed by the Ministry for State Security

Enforced reenactment of an escape attempt in the trunk of a car, no year.

Reenactment by members of the East German Stasi of events during the elimination of tunnel 57 in the night of Oct. 4/5, 1964, in the courtyard at Strelitzer Straße 55 in Berlin-Mitte, during which East German border guard non-commissioned officer Egon Schultz was accidently hit and killed by a stray bullet from the gun of his comrade M. The scene here shows border guard M. firing his AK-47 into the yard.

Autopsy photos of non-commissioned officer Egon Schultz, from the Berlin Charité hospital, showing injuries marked by hand. E stands for the entrance of a bullet, A for its exit, and T for tangential (grazing shot). The photos were taken between Oct. 5 and 7, 1964.

Model of the Stasi headquarters in the 1980s. This model is today in the foyer of the Stasi Museum in Normannenstraße in Berlin.

Revisited Places #11, Bernauer Straße, 2014.

Presentation of an East German family and their West Berlin escape helpers Oliver Mierendorf and Karlheinz Hetschold after a failed smuggling attempt in an Opel Admiral car on September 21, 1973.

Documentation of a failed escape attempt by a mother and son on Sept. 12, 1983, around half past midnight, at border crossing point Marienborn/freeway in the trunk of BMW car with Munich license plates. Both the escape helper and the mother and son were forced to reenact the attempt in a custom’s building immediately after they were caught.

Part of a model of the border installations at Potsdam, including the electric signal fence. This model was made by Franz Pateley, the border commander for the Klein-Glienicke section in border regiment. He kept the model in his garage for twenty years, and it was first shown to the public in 2011.

Float made of a car tire tube, fan motor, and car battery by a car body maker from the state enterprise VEB Sachsenring Zwickau. After he was arrested on June 26, 1989, at 9.30 pm, he admitted under interrogation that he had wanted to escape via the Baltic Sea at Boltenhagen the same evening.

Reenactment of an escape attempt in a homemade raft of polystyrene slabs, nylon string, and wooden boards, with which a man wanted to flee via the Baltic coastal resort of Boltenhagen on July 9, 1981, because he was afraid of criminal prosecution. He was apprehended in the border area before reaching the coast.

Reenactment of an escape attempt in a Fiat 124 car with Schweinfurt license plates. The attempt ended with the arrest of an escaping couple and the escape helper. The driver and front-seat passenger are reenactors. C. 1975.

Hiding place of a family of five in a small van, Aug. 1972. The escape attempt failed.

Attempt by two US citizens to smuggle a young woman in a Peugeot 403 on Sept. 9, 1965, 8.45 pm, at the border crossing point at Berlin-Friedrichstr./Zimmerstr. The hiding place was in the gearbox at the front of the car. Access to it was under the feet of the front seats and was covered by a carpet.

View of the toilet in the yard at Strelitzer Straße 55 in Berlin-Mitte, where under the former cesspit there was an entrance to a tunnel through which 57 people escaped to West Berlin.

During the Cold War many countries had agencies set up under the premise to protect their state and gather intelligence whether of foreign nature or domestic. The CIA and KGB were the main agencies on the two sides of the ideological coin but neither seemed as effective or repressive as East Germany’s Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (Ministry for State Security), colloquially known as the Stasi. The Stasi was known for its widespread spying on the population of East Germany and turning family members into informants against relatives.

In addition to spying, escape attempts from East into West were thoroughly documented in written reports and in photographs — often restaged with participation by the actual escapee after they were caught.

The German photographer Arwed Messmer has a new book from Hatje Cantz called Reenactments MfS which gathers a “collage” of this evidentiary material from those escape attempts from among the hundreds of thousands of documents he found in an archive held by the Federal Commissioner for the Stasi Records. TIME LightBox spoke with Arwed Messmer about his project and the complicated nature of photography as a “witness” for State repression.

TIME LightBox: Your new book Reenactment MfS presents images from the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, MfS (commonly referred to as Stasi) archives. How did you access these files and documents? Are they open for anyone to access?

Arwed Messmer: It is possible to access the archive for research or journalism, and this was the basis for my artistic research there. Basically, anyone who can properly justify research interests is given access to the files. Protecting victims is a high priority, and all the files I wanted to see were first checked and names made anonymous. This was the case for both photos and text.

TIME LightBox: You mention the book is a ‘collage.’ Can you write a little about this approach?

Arwed Messmer: Maybe collage is a little confusing in this context. What I mean is that I combine very heterogeneous images using my own aesthetic criteria and assessments of messages and content.

A lot of people are interested in the time of a divided Germany but you have made several books inspired by the subject, some with coauthor Annett Groeschner (The Other View: the Early Berlin Wall, Berlin Fruchtstrasse on March 27, 1952). For you, what is the attraction to this subject and time?

I have always been interested in recent German history, but I never once considered becoming a historian. I moved to Berlin in late 1991, and since then my interest in history has become more and more present in my photo projects. In 1994 and 1995 I worked on the Potsdamer Platz, Anno Zero (Potsdamer Platz, Year Zero) project, which took a look at the great physical gap right in the center of Berlin, after the Wall had come down but before new developments had been built. For that project I was awarded the Otto Steinert Prize by the German Society for Photography in 1996.

TIME LightBox: You are old enough to have experienced East Germany first hand. Did you ever live or have family that lived in the East during the time of the Berlin Wall?

Arwed Messmer: We had relatives in East Germany and visited them frequently. But I grew up in the south-west of West Germany, and from that perspective East Germany was not significant. We looked rather to Switzerland, France, or Italy.

The nature of photographs is that they mutely show facts but they often lack any context with reality. So as ‘documents’ of proof they are not very reliable, especially since many of the images you have chosen are reenactments of ‘crimes.’ What purpose do you think they actually served for the state?

Many of these pictures were surely made within the kind of standard crime investigation routine you can find all over the world. In these reenactments I suspect that the East German authorities wanted to at least keep up the semblance of the rule of law, by giving state prosecutors visual evidence, even if a later trial verdict was already pretty certain at the time of arrest.

TIME LightBox: Aside from the pretense of evidence, do you think that these photographs might also have been made with the intention to humiliate the people who were caught?

Arwed Messmer: I would say that the humiliation caused by this form of documentation was more like collateral damage, and that it was accepted as simply part of the process. Of course when I saw these photos of families for the first time I was reminded of Abu Ghraib.

TIME LightBox: By leaving off captions to the individual photographs (except in an index that appears in a small booklet separate from the main book) and re-contextualizing the images, you are leaving the viewer to do a lot of guessing as to what they are looking at and how the images relate to one another in the sequence. I am reminded a bit of Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel’s book from the 1970s, Evidence, which represented images from science and industrial archives. Can you tell us about how you chose the images and then constructed the sequence for the book?

Arwed Messmer: A reference to Evidence makes sense, since I use archive images whose provenance is not clear, and often remains unclear. In Reenactment MfS my theme is much more closely defined, compared to Evidence. Here I deliberately concentrated on only one specific issue—escape attempts across the Berlin Wall. This was a way of managing the mass of material I found in the Stasi archives, and also of staying focused. A key decision was to separate the images from any explanation of their content. With classic captions these images would be ‘read’ very differently. Recontextualizing them by using the booklet is an active process, and it has to be a bit like work.

TIME LightBox: Your own photographs appear throughout the book and they often could be mistaken as Stasi archive photographs. Can you write a little about including your own photographs made in specific places around Berlin and the ‘Revisited Places’ series?

Arwed Messmer: If you look closely, it is easy to see that the ‘Revisited Places’ series is not based on Stasi material. I was not aiming to set some kind of pictorial counterpoint here, so the series was intended to blend in well with the whole book. I would say that there is less clarity as to provenance in all the photos of objects and crime-scene exhibits, so that it is not always immediately clear what was photographed by me in 2014, and what was photographed by the Stasi and then I later manipulated and used freely. By freely used I mean both technically and in terms of contents. There is no certainty here, but some of the ambiguity can be clarified when using the appendix, above all the false links that viewers make when looking at these images.

TIME LightBox: For future projects, do you foresee these archives continuing to be a part of your work?

Arwed Messmer: For two months now, I have been working on a new project about the Red Army Faction, one of former West Germany’s great traumatic events. The nucleus of this project is one single photograph from a police archive. The aim is again to take today’s viewpoint and use a mix of found images, processed or manipulated images, and new images of my own. I want to take a look at this subject through the (pictorial) perspective of the state under threat at the time. I have received a scholarship, and so should be able to concentrate on this project in 2015.

I expect to be busy in the archives for some while. I do not want to develop one unified approach, even if I will always have my own personal preferences. Every object or photograph I find, every theme, has to have its own appropriate form and approach. In addition to this RAF project I am also working together with the writer Annett Gröschner on a new project based on a large collection of photographs made for urban planning purposes in Berlin in the 1960s. But considerable financial resources will be needed to be able to properly research and process this material, and to produce an exhibition and high-quality book.

TIME LightBox: Many of your projects exist as both books and exhibitions. Is one more important to you than the other? When you are working on something new, are you imagining it already as a book, and if so, does that influence the way the project evolves?

Arwed Messmer: The books are always more important for me than the exhibition. “The Other View” as well as “Reenactment MfS” developed as books first. So, I would say I am a “book photographer”, not a “wall photographer”. I guess to be focused on the book, makes a difference.