The ambivalence of detail – documenting wiretapped phone conversations by the State Security Service of the former German Democratic Republic

Abstract

The German Democratic Republic (GDR) State Security Service (Stasi) had to archive vast amounts of data about the everyday lives of GDR citizens. Simplifications and reductions are common features of record-keeping in every institution and there was considerable variation in how detailed the Stasi records of wiretapped phone conversations were. The special focus of this study is the detail that shapes phone records into powerful objects of knowledge among other documentary genres of the Stasi archive. The article describes, in the context of suspicion, how decisions were made about the level of detail in the records given the information overflow, and which communicative and institutional tasks were solved using the different levels of detail in the textualization. Records fulfilled the function of (subjective) information selection for the creation of such categories as ‘strange’, ‘dangerous’, ‘suspicious’ and ‘guilty’. Objectifying practices were necessary to legitimize the records as objective proof of suspicion. The ‘subjective–objective’ relationship turns from a dichotomy to a co-presence within one record and serves to legitimize the record as evidence.