Shadow Gentleman | Gu Zheng: The story behind "Eavesdropping Storm"

Gu Zheng, School of Journalism, Fudan University

We might be able to divide the behavior of monitoring into two types. One type of surveillance is when the watcher blatantly tells the person being monitored that I am spying on you, and you must not act rashly. The "panoramic open-view device" prison created by Jeremy Bentham, discussed by Foucault, is a masterpiece of such surveillance. Although the control tower (room) of the prison center may be empty, the prisoners in the cell still believe that someone is watching over them, so their possible desires and actions (such as prison escape, etc.) may self-suppress. Another type of surveillance is when the monitor tries to make the implementer invisible when implementing the surveillance, and throughout the monitoring process, the monitor does not want the monitored to find himself being monitored. The former is because the freedom of action of the person being monitored is often already constrained, so that the surveillance of him or her is often only a deterrent intimidation to prevent further action. The latter is to predict that the monitor will have hostile and irregular actions, so that the whole process of surveillance is not "grass and snakes", in order to wait for a certain action to occur and collect evidence in order to decide on further action, or the monitor has a "long line to catch a big fish" arrangement, although the implementation of comprehensive surveillance but not necessarily immediate action. Both forms of surveillance, whether the former or the latter, whether they are confessions or secrets, require a variety of means to ensure the successful implementation of surveillance. Even if high-tech means are developed today, and how convenient and accurate the collection of data on people, such as biometric means, is, in order to hunt intelligence about people's actions and understand the ideas that govern people's actions, it is still necessary for people to personally confirm and make decisions. What cannot be easily replaced by high technology is man's ability to judge based on experience and his immediate intellectual response. Therefore, in intelligence work, human intelligence is still an important means that cannot be ignored. Human intelligence, an intelligence gathering method, seemed to be more important during the Cold War when high technology was not as developed as it is today. The book Top Secret: Images from the Stasi Archives (Hatje Cantz, 2013), by the German Simon Menner, shows us how East Germany (the German Democratic Republic), which was then part of the Soviet bloc, did everything in its power to conduct state surveillance in the form of human intelligence.

Because East Germany was on the front lines of the Cold War between East and West, the manpower and material resources it invested in using state power to monitor its people were the largest in the Soviet camp, and its scale and means were beyond the reach of its big brother, the Soviet Union. The East German regime's extensive human, material, and financial efforts to carry out comprehensive surveillance of its people caused a significant economic burden, which may also be one of the important reasons for its eventual downfall. The nine-year-long film "Eavesdropping Storm" (also known as "Other People's Lives"),which took nine years to complete, depicts the psychological and ideological changes of East German telephone wiretaps during the eavesdropping process, and also makes people understand the mercury-like exhaustion of East Germany's surveillance of its citizens at that time. At the time of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, photography, as an advanced technical means of peering and collecting visual materials and evidence, also played an important role in the surveillance activities of the East German regime against its citizens.

The specific perpetrator of state surveillance activities in East Germany was the Ministry of State Security of East Germany, whose German abbreviation was Stasi and Chinese transliterated as "Stasi". The author of the book, Meyner, found a large number of photographs from the "Stasi" archive, which was already managed by the German government, and compiled the book according to some classifications according to the specific nature of such actions. Among the photographs are how to train Stasi agents in camouflage and how to teach their members to perform combat. Also included are images of members sneaking into east German homes and of members of the public's daily activities.

In order to track the target, the agents of the "Stasi" had to be good at disguise. In the camouflage lecture photos that Miner found, one can discover how the same agent dressed up as a person of different identities by changing his hairstyle, beard, or dress. He will be a somewhat rogue citizen, a backpacker, an intellectual, and a worker. Camouflage isn't just about tracking, it's also about blending into a particular environment in order to perform a certain task. In a set of color photographs, the same person dressed as a Western tourist dressed up in a different outfit.

In his archives, Meyner found a number of training manuals made up of photo editing. An important feature of modern industry is mass production. Mass production, on the other hand, breaks down the production process into several actions, and teaches workers on the production line in an illustrated manner to learn and accurately perform the actions they are required. Photography has a role to play in teaching people how to accomplish technical requirements precisely. The most practical application of photography appetite is to apply the fragmentary nature of photography to the decomposition of action, so as to compile a training manual that teaches employees how to accurately move. When a frame-by-frame photographic frame breaks down an action or action into multiple frames, the mission of photography is achieved. The "Stasi" training manual found by Miner includes photographs of how to teach agents how to follow the steps to attach a false beard and wear a wig, as well as photos of how to teach agents how to make a move when they make an arrest or how to fight and win when an opponent has to fight a short battle. As a training guide, there are also photos that record the agent's secret sign gestures. But what these code gestures mean is now unknowable. Interestingly, the peculiar poses of the agents in the photographs to signal them, in the absence of captions to understand, have a grotesque sense of absurdity in the camera. This is like the effect of Duchamp turning a toilet upside down and rendering its useful function ineffective.

The private lives of the East German people, who lived in great fear, were, of course, also closely monitored. Burglary searches are a masterpiece of Stasi agents. However, in order not to be suspected by the owner of the intrusion after the burglary search, how to carry out the search without showing flaws is a demanding task. In order to restore the scene as much as possible after the search, polaroid cameras produced in the United States became a sharp weapon. Entering the room with the technique of chicken and dog theft, the "Stasi" agents will first take a few photos of Polaroid. After rummaging through the search, they followed the scene on the Polaroid photo. However, although these photographs were taken only to restore the scene, today they are also a visual record of the material living standards of the people of East Germany at that time. East Germany's industrial development at that time far exceeded that of its big brother, the Soviet Union, and its material living standards were much higher than those of the Soviet Union. Although there are reasons why the East German government, in order to prove that it is not worse than West Germany, can only meet the material demands of the people as much as possible in order to accept and endure its rule, the East Germans also sincerely believe that they should and can live a better life than the Soviets. Allow me to say a digression here that is not a digression. The 798 Cultural and Creative Park in Beijing, now famous all over the world, was originally a factory built by East Germany to aid China to produce electron tubes. It is said that the East German construction experts at that time were scornful of the technical and management level of the Soviet Union. They often quarreled with Soviet experts, believing that their advice was not of a high level. They saw the Soviet Union as a big brother in leading East Germany and other Eastern European countries as a mistake. Similarly, the Czechs I have come into contact with have the same idea of the level of industrial production in the Soviet Union as the East Germans. They also saw a shame that a low-level country like the Soviet Union was leading the Czech Republic, which had already had highly developed levels of industrial production before World War II. In a sense, the collapse of the Soviet camp was sooner or later, because the Soviet Union actually did not have enough appeal in terms of "soft power". The Polaroid photographs that Mena showed us really proved that the standard of living of east Germans at that time was not bad. In East Germany, which was seriously lacking in foreign exchange at that time, the use of large amounts of foreign exchange to import Polaroid cameras and film from the West for surveillance was a considerable amount of foreign exchange expenditure. The huge cost of spying on the people may also have been one of the reasons for dragging the Soviet bloc, including East Germany, into collapse.

Similarly, Meiner showed us a set of photographs showing the interior of an East German teenager's home. The book does not explain exactly what motivation the photographs were taken for. Maybe it was a kind of fieldwork carried out by agent "Stasi", but it was carried out secretly. From the photos, it can be seen that the penetration of Western popular culture into East German teenagers was already quite serious at that time. One room was full of photos and posters of Madonna's performances, and behind the door of another room was an American flag. In a sense, the fall of the Berlin Wall was closely related to the infiltration of Western popular culture in East Germany and the yearning of East German teenagers for the Western way of life.

Western diplomacy and various economic and cultural institutions in East Germany certainly became the focus of the "Stasi" agent's photographic betting on the national gaze. Among them, the U.S. Embassy in Berlin is a top priority. The book shows surveillance photos of agent Stasi focusing on the entrance and exit of the embassy. The photographs were incorporated into the photo window on the left side of the embassy entrance. This window showing the current state of the United States also reminds me of the photo window at the entrance of the U.S. Consulate General in Shanghai in the 1980s. Some current affairs news photos of the United States are regularly displayed there. Every time I pass by here, I always stop and watch. In a four-person panel discussion at the "40 Years of Contemporary Chinese Photography" exhibition at OCAT in Shenzhen in September 2018, I also talked about the American and American photography (mainly photojournalism) I saw from this window at that time, as one of the sources of my personal visual experience in the extreme lack of information. Judging from today's Sino-US relations, the relations between the two countries at that time were really a bit of a "honeymoon" feeling. Seeing these pictures in this book, I can't help but wonder if I have ever been gazed at by some kind of gaze and recorded my figure in some way.

The faces of the watchers representing the state are, of course, state secrets. They have the privilege of photographing other people's faces, but their faces are unknown and unknown. It was only after the fall of the Berlin Wall that portraits of Agent Stasi were found in the archives by Meyner and published in this book. These portrait photographs from the interior of the "Stasi" give us a slight glimpse of the inside story of this secret institution, although this revelation is very limited.

Strange and interesting, the book also contains selfies of the "Stasi" agents. By the nature of intelligence work, taking selfies like this should be discouraged. Stealth agents need a humble and humble personality, and their superiors will not encourage agents to appreciate or even narcissize themselves through photography, and it is not good for them to leave their own photos for their own safety. We don't know what their motivation was for taking these selfie photos. Perhaps it is necessary for them to present this photo as a photo of their work to a higher level of leadership to prove that they are faithfully performing their duties? Or is it that, as in the previous film era, one or two pictures would be taken as a test at the beginning of a roll of film shooting, and the results gradually accumulated such selfie photos?

More interesting photos are yet to come. Miner also found photos of people taking at a birthday party for a senior "Stasi" official. In the photo, a group of "Stasi" members, disguised as various people, stand against the wall, one by one, step forward to extend birthday wishes to officials with their backs to the audience. These people are disguised as athletes, bishops, or members of the U.S. Peace Corps. Interestingly, these trades that they are happily pretending to be amused here are the ones that the "Stasi" agents should focus on tracking and monitoring. Among them, there is also a member who is more than half a hundred years old who wears a white miniskirt skirt on the upper body and long leather boots barefoot on the lower body. Exposed between the skirt of the gauze skirt and the black boot cuff are two hairy legs. In order to ensure the real effect of the makeup, he actually stuffed two breasts in his chest. Perhaps, in this way, they are competing to show their "superb" makeup skills to their superiors, in order to win the favor of their superiors in order to be knighted as soon as possible? Of course, this may also be a way for the members of the "Stasi" who have long been on the front line of the tense "struggle against the enemy"?

In the book, we can also see the image of the spy that the spy gets when the spy shoots each other. According to the agreement, the four allies of the United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union, which occupied Germany, had the right to conduct open military activities in East and West Germany. Both sides can take portraits of each other's military spies at this time. This is a godsend opportunity to make surveillance public. Through the photographic gaze of the opponent, it is also the sense of its own existence presented by the gaze, and it further shows a deterrent of a national nature.

Born in 1978 in Emmandingen, Germany, the author Meiner is currently active in art scenes around the world. Meynah became famous for the book. After the book was published in 2013, it was reprinted the following year, and its popularity is evident. And his interest in "surveillance" has never been out of control. After completing the book project, he applied as an artist to photograph a sniper in the Bundeswehr. He hopes to show through his own photographs how snipers representing the country are seamlessly hidden in border areas or in certain areas with special circumstances for the sake of the country, as a country. Isn't the stealth of these snipers actually the invisibility of the state? The purpose of such invisibility is to preemptively see and annihilate the object.

In the practice of contemporary art, the use of archival photographs to carry out a kind of historical writing, reshaping memory has become a kind of explicit learning. From the historical context of the development of modern art, this can also be regarded as a transformation from "found object" as the creative material to "found image" as the creative material. Mainer's book is actually a work of art that organizes archival photographs as "current imaging". His book is a work of art. So when we discover Thater's transition from editor to artist, there's no need to make a fuss. In fact, his work is also expanding the definition of artistic creation. Whether he edits the book from archival photographs or runs his own camera to photograph the invisible man, the human practice he cares about that is closely related to our present and future is surveillance.

Editor-in-Charge: Huang Xiaofeng

Proofreader: Ding Xiao