When East Germany collapsed, millions of the Stasi’s victims choose to remain in ignorance about their oppressors. Is it sometimes better to forget the past than to investigate it?
In East Germany, during the communist period, people would sometimes join a queue on the basis that if others were waiting, there must be something worth having at the end of it. Siegfried Wittenburg, whose images accompany this article, photographed this waiting-for-I-know-not-what in his home town of Rostock. It was safer to take photos than to criticise the regime in words, but only just.
