Leipzig's Communist Legacy, Part 3... Stasi Banality

The title of the permanent exhibition in the "Runde Ecke" Museum is "Stasi--Power and Banality". Hannah Arendt famously wrote about "the banality of evil" when covering the Eichmann trial in '63. She noted that Eichmann was no sociopath. Rather, he carried out his tasks with an eye to his own advancement in the way many of us do. Clearly, the curators of the "Macht und Banalität” exhibition want to impress on visitors how the police state in the GDR relied on an army of equally unremarkable civil servants who forged documents, manufactured disguises, and removed scent samples from interrogation rooms to save in glass jars. 

The Office

More than anything else, however, I came away exhausted by the sheer volume of documentary evidence on display. I thought the most interesting piece of the exhibition was the preserved office of a high-ranking official. It looks a little bit like Jonathan Pryce’s office in Brazil. In fact, the more I thought about it the more it seems that Terry Gilliam was really onto something deeply true in the way he imagined a future dystopia. The Stasi was a busy hive of busy bureaucrats who must have believed there was nothing particularly remarkable about what they did most days.