And while I’m rummaging around on the BBC’s site – there’s also a piece on the Stasi.
“The Stasi was an organisation that loved to keep paper,” says Joachim Haussler, who works for the Stasi archives authority today.
It therefore owned few shredders – and those it did have were of poor East German quality and rapidly broke down. So thousands of documents were hastily torn by hand and stuffed into sacks. The plan was to burn or chemically destroy the contents later.
But events overtook the plan, the Stasi was dissolved as angry demonstrators massed outside and invaded its offices, and the new federal authority for Stasi archives inherited all the torn paper.
Typical feminists, eh? Can’t even tear up the records properly.
Ha!
6 comments
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Improbable Joe
September 14, 2012 at 9:35 am (UTC -7) Link to this comment
Oh… I thought you might be on about women who can shred on guitar.
No Light
September 14, 2012 at 10:13 am (UTC -7) Link to this comment
There are still people working on those shredded and torn documents today, trying to find any information on the dead and the disappeared.
I find that incredibly moving.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/mar/13/east-germany-stasi-files-zirndorf
AJ Milne
September 14, 2012 at 10:35 am (UTC -7) Link to this comment
So this thread isn’t about killer women snowboarders?
(/Hmph.)
machintelligence
September 14, 2012 at 11:13 am (UTC -7) Link to this comment
AJ Milne @ 3
That was my thought too. I guess I’m not as far behind the current popular culture as I believed.
F
September 14, 2012 at 11:32 am (UTC -7) Link to this comment
Meh. Paper is for chicks. Feminists can tear paper, they just refuse to do the right thing. Bullies.
pipenta
September 14, 2012 at 4:45 pm (UTC -7) Link to this comment
@ Improbable Joe,
Do people shred on guitar? I though it was a sk8 thing.