The terror of the ludicrous

 On Sunday morning, I listened as usual to “Broadcasting House” on Radio Four. I am in the USA, but I wait till 9am my time and then I “catch up” on BBC Sounds (pretending that we are in the same time zone). This Sunday one of the paper reviewers was Rachel Cunliffe (whom, full disclosure, I used to teach a long while ago, before she was famous). In the course of reviewing the papers, she talked about visiting the Spy Museum in Berlin – with its display of cameras hidden in lipsticks, underwear, shoes and ties, plus explanations of how to bug a car or a hotel room (it’s here about 55 minutes in).

I haven’t been to the Spy Museum in DC (or, at least, not in its current location, which is rather grander than when I did visit). But Cunliffe’s brief reference to Berlin took me back to my visit to the Stasi Museum in Leipzig (pictured at the top of this post), just a couple of years after German reunification. My hosts there insisted I should go to see it because (they said) it still smelled of East Germany, which I guess it did. But what has stuck in my mind is the sort of thing that Cunliffe mentioned. I vividly recall the “disguise room”, where lots of amateur dramatic costumes were all lined up on rails: “the nurse’s outfit” etc. I remember thinking that these could have fooled no one (a Stasi agent dressed as a nurse would still have looked like a Stasi agent). Nor, for that matter, could the camera unconvincingly hidden in a briefcase. I felt something similar about the Heath Robinson style of letter-opening machine, which at the turn of a few handles steamed open letters, made them available to be read, then stuck them up again. It could not possibly have worked.

My first naive reaction, as I walked out, was to be slightly puzzled that the Stasi had been so feared. If this was the level of their sophistication, who could have feared them? It took me some days to realize that, in a way, that was the point. Fear is spread, not necessarily by sophistication, but by its techniques being so obviously on display. There is no better way of making it clear that “we are watching you” than by not hiding the techniques of surveillance or doing so only very inefficiently. In an autocracy, the obvious and the ludicrous can also be terrifying.

(Before anyone points out that I soon won’t be able to listen to BBC Sounds abroad, I think that it will still be available on the iPhone or iPad (though the messaging is not entirely clear on this). All the same, it is hard not to regret that the BBC radio network is going to be restricted outside the UK.)

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