'Puzzlers' reassemble shredded Stasi files, bit by bit

... Metzler, 45, is a "puzzler," one of a team of eight government workers that has attempted for the last 14 years to manually restore documents hurriedly shredded by East Germany's secret police, or Stasi, in the dying days of one of the Soviet bloc's most repressive regimes.

Two decades after the heady days when crowds danced atop the Berlin Wall, Germany has reunited and many of its people have moved on. But historians say it is important to establish the truth about the Communist era, and the work of the puzzlers has unmasked prominent figures in the former East Germany as Stasi agents. In addition, about 100,000 people annually apply to see their own files.

The Stasi, which is said to have had more than 170,000 informers, succeeded in destroying thousands of files, shredding them in machines called "ripping wolves" until the equipment broke down under the weight of the task, then through burning and pulping (the contents, held in buckets in the archive, are known as "Stasi porridge"). At the end, agents tore them by bare hand as the teeming crowds smashed down their doors.

The shredded files, which any good German bureaucrat knows as vorvernichtete Akten or pre-destroyed files -- fill a staggering 16,000 mail sacks that contain about 45 million individual pages, or 600 million scraps. Thus far, the puzzlers are 440 sacks into the process.

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The few files that have so far been pieced together hold piquant details about life in the GDR. Among them are 1,000 pages of the dossier of Sascha Anderson, an avant-garde artist who was in the service of the Stasi but always denied any deep involvement. The file showed the extent to which Anderson betrayed fellow artists and dissidents.

There was also the file of Heinrich Fink, a theology professor who was exposed as the spy "Heiner" who regularly informed on students and colleagues. Other prominent cases involve former Red Army Faction terrorists who were harbored by the Stasi, and a Berlin sports doctor who doped East German athletes.

This month, Metzler has been piecing together documents relating to the life of Stefan Heym, a late German-Jewish writer who chose to live in the GDR but was frequently at odds with the regime and was spied on relentlessly.

"I've just found the sketch of his children's bedroom drawn on orders from the Stasi by his cleaning lady, who they code-named 'Frieda,' " says Metzler, who reads thrillers in her spare time to relax.

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