The Life of Others, a 2006 thriller film, informed a wide audience about practices of eavesdropping on telephone calls and private conversations in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). By the end of the 1980s, GDR’s Ministry of State Security (Stasi) was able to execute 20,000 wiretapping and eavesdropping actions in East-Berlin at one and the same time. This frantic activity required the use of automatic recording technologies and a voice data bank. From the 1960s onward, the Stasi also felt forced to work on the issue of how to identify speakers by the characteristics of their recorded voice, as its employees did not always know whom they were listening to. Yet how did these employees make sense of the taped voices? Which aspects of the recorded sounds did they consider relevant for their diagnostic purposes? How did they dissect these sounds, and how did listening become a legitimate way of knowing in this context? These questions will not only be answered on the basis of Stasi archives and by situating the Stasi activities in the Cold War, but also by comparing the Stasi strategies with twentieth-century “sonic skills” in science, engineering and medicine more widely.
About the Author
-
Karin Bijsterveld
Karin Bijsterveld is historian and professor of Science, Technology & Modern Culture at Maastricht University. She is author of Mechanical Sound: Technology, Culture and Public Problems of Noise in the Twentieth Century (MIT 2008), co-editor (with José van Dijck) of Sound Souvenirs: Audio Technologies, Memory and Cultural Practices (AUP 2009), and co-editor (with Trevor Pinch) of The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies (2012). She is coordinating Sonic Skills, has edited Soundscapes of the Urban Past: Staged Sound as Mediated Cultural Heritage (Transcript, 2013), and is co-author of Sound and Safe: A History of Listening behind the Wheel (Oxford UP, forthcoming).