Top Secret: Bilder aus den Archiven der Staatssicherheit

Simon Menner mined the archives of the Stasi, East Germany's secret police, to surface formerly classified photographs of officers and employees putting on professional uniforms, gluing on fake beards, and signaling to each other with their hands. The Stasi's archive held roughly 1.4 million photographs from a force of nearly 300,000 employees, a workforce per capita larger than that of the CIA or KGB, and Menner drew from that material to build the book's sequence. One recurring section documents disguise training, images taken during seminars where personnel practiced blending into public life unnoticed. Hatje Cantz published the book in 2013 as a 128-page bilingual German/English softcover with 166 illustrations. The photographs carry the weight of a surveillance-state document while reading, decades later, as comic and absurd; the New York Times Book Review noted it as the first visual study of the Stasi's activities, and LensCulture called it a well-researched, historically grounded selection with contemporary relevance to present-day surveillance debates.