Publishing Grass's Stasi Record

Apparently they’re going to publish the files the Stasi took on Gunter Grass whenever he visited East Germany.

Grass was completely surrounded by spies when he came to the GDR. All his official interlucutors were IMs, ‘unofficial employees’ (spies), all of them,” said Schlueter, who went through over 2,000 Stasi files to compile his book.

I suppose there’s some merit to this kind of thing being available for posterity, though this doesn’t sound like the most engaging reading.

These informers would then tell a Stasi officer what Grass, now 82, has said and done, which would then be meticulously recorded in documents that after German unification in 1990 were opened to the public.

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