As long as it takes, I guess. After an accidental discovery in the Stasi spy archive put an interesting new twist on a shooting “that changed West Germany” forever (back in 1967), everyone is wondering again just how many more dark and dirty unread secrets are still buried there. And please keep in mind; these archives have been researched by hundreds of thousands of Germans for nearly twenty years now.

Someone found out that a West-Berlin cop who shot a demonstrator at an anti-Shah of Iran demonstration was not the capitalist lackey of the evil reactionary West German establishment he was supposed to be but an East German Stasi agent instead. This shooting is said to have ignited the more militant German left-wing protest movement which then followed, by the way.

Hmmm. Makes you wonder, or it makes me wonder. But I’m always wondering about stuff like this so who cares. Anyways, about 100,000 Germans apply each year to get a look at their own Stasi files, but the director of the archive says that even extensive rifling through these old folders barely makes a dent in the whole collection. Germans have always been good at keeping records, you see. They’re just not very good at destroying them. And this is a good thing.

“It’s said that if the files were lined up in a row, they would stretch for well over 100 km.”