Dark Territory in the Information Age

Learning from the West German Census Controversies of the 1980s

Matthew G. Hannah

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317154778
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Geopolitics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Through a detailed account of the West German census controversies of the 1980s, this book offers a robust and geographical sense of what effective 'resistance' and 'empowerment' might mean in an age when the intensification of 'surveillance society' appears to render us ever more passive and incapable of controlling our own registration.

Chapter 1
The 1983 Boycott Movement: Development, Themes and Tactics

When he replaced the receiver, he looked over at his colleagues, but without, in fact, seeing them, it was as if he had before him a landscape composed entirely of empty voting chambers, immaculate electoral rolls, with presiding officers and secretaries waiting, party representatives exchanging distrustful glances as they tried to work out who might gain and who might lose from this situation, and, in the distance, the occasional rain-soaked poll-clerk returning from the door to announce that no one was coming.

(José Saramago, Seeing, p. 7)

It was out of the political hothouse of West Berlin and onto the pages of taz that the first national public call for a census boycott came in December of 1982. With the slogan “Politicians ask – citizens don’t answer” [“Politiker fragen Burger antworten niche”], members of a West Berlin anti-nuclear group announced the formation of a “VoBo Ini” [”Volkszählungs (census) Boykott Initiative”]. The slogan would eventually catch on and be adopted throughout West Germany, although the group’s specific program for a boycott would find little resonance elsewhere. The West Berlin group had formed in September of 1982 out of a preexisting West Berlin chapter of an international anti-military-service organization [Internationale der Kriegsdienstgegner].¹ The ad in the taz proposed a trade: citizens would give the federal government their personal information only if Bonn would divulge the locations at which it planned to station mid-range nuclear missiles. According to Michael Schroeren, “[w]e make exactly the same claim to information regarding rocket locations that the government makes on citizens with the census.”² According to taz, the local Greens had already signed on with their support of the boycott. In a letter to peace and eco-activists from November of 1982, before placing the ad, Schroeren had laid out the strategic logic behind the bargain, arguing that despite all the massive protests it had organized, the peace movement would not be able to hinder the Reagan-Kohl arms build-up with its current repertoire of actions. The census seemed an opportunity not to be missed: “Because each individual, each household, each family and each business is impacted [betroffen] by the census, it offers a point of connection for a mass act of civil disobedience.”³Der Spiegel’s later account of the movement’s local origins in Hamburg also places the decisive moment in late 1982, when an unnamed woman who had been notified that she was to be a census enumerator stood up to voice her concerns at a public presentation and started the discussion that led to the formation of the first VoBo Im in West Germany proper.⁴

There was an important historical precedent for the 1983 West German boycott. Many Dutch citizens had objected to the census taken in the Netherlands in 1971, and had sabotaged it in sufficient numbers to cast real doubt on the usefulness of its results.⁵ Unlike in West Germany, however, the Dutch state gave credence to citizens’ fears and decided not to take a census in 1981, thereby defusing the issue for some time. Some state officials in the Bundesrepublik, as we shall see, inhabited a quite different world of thinking on obedience to government measures. The clash between this authoritarian tradition and an equally insistent activist culture is ultimately what makes the West German story so fascinating, as will become especially clear in part two of this study. The duration, breadth and energy of the census controversy generated a rich penumbra of arguments, strategies, and tactics that, I argue, can be of great use to democratic politics in the future. But more on that later.

The speed with which VoBo Iris sprouted up all over the Bundesrepublik between December of 1982 and March of 1983 can only be explained against the background of the web of surveillance and security measures detailed in the introduction. The 1983 boycott, then, was the beginning of something new in terms of the political scope the issue would eventually take on. The role of the critical press was crucial. If taz can be credited with first explicitly raising the census issue for a national audience from its West Berlin stronghold, the alternative Hamburger Rundschau played that role in the other major headquarters of the movement, with an article on January 27th, 1983.⁶ But it was Der Spiegel more than any other periodical that ensured the census controversy would be born into a context marked by a high level of public awareness of the larger issue of the surveillance state and the prospect of comprehensive, technologically mediated social control, or, as activists in Hamburg termed it, “cybernocracy” [Kybernokratie].⁷ Der Spiegel had run a long piece in its first number of January 1983 detailing all the ways in which George Orwell’s dystopian world of 1984 could be considered to have arrived right on time, or even a little early. Horst Herold’s visions of the transparent society, and his methods of surveillance, anchor a story that, while it made no mention of the planned census, focused centrally on the problem of data protection in a world of ever-more-formidable computer and communications technology.⁸ The next week, a follow-up article detailed the methods used by the West German security services in 1981 to wire an entire neighborhood in Heidelberg in an attempt to detect and head off an expected RAF attack on NATO generals.⁹ The focus of this second article was the rapidly advancing technology of video surveillance, and the ways in which it had already eroded constitutional and legal rights. Berndt Schmidt, a development engineer at the BKA, had been in charge of organizing the cutting-edge surveillance system in Heidelberg. But he had come to oppose the methods of surveillance used by the BKA when he saw how surveillance cameras, bugs and stake-outs came to be used more and more to register and follow not only suspected terrorists but law-abiding members of their “environment”. He quit his job and resolved to do what he could to warn his fellow citizens about what he had come to see as a runaway security apparatus. This Spiegel article raised most of the key ethical, legal and constitutional issues that would, within just a few weeks, come to shape the controversy over the census. In January of 1983, taz built on this theme, publishing articles on attempts by local and state governments to circumvent data protection regulations, and, a day after Der Spiegel’s second article, its own three-part interview with Berndt Schmidt. To his taz interviewers, Schmidt recounted his discomfort upon learning, for example, that every resident of 145 separate households was observed and researched by the BKA simply because they were located on the same street as a suspected “conspiratorial apartment” [konspirative Wohnnung].¹⁰ The video footage and statistical information the BKA was able to collect on the people in those 145 households was assembled on the basis of perfectly legal activities by residents (walking down the street, telephone use, ownership of an automobile, loan payments). But transferred into the context of a security investigation, it became something different: inherently suspicious raw material for the discovery of criminal activities. Represented in BKA files by the informational traces they had left, these few hundred people unknowingly became suspicious until proven innocent. Fears that this basic relation of distrust would become the norm underlay much of the critique aimed at the census in 1983 and again in 1987.

The 1982 census law

In March of 1982, with the unanimous support of all parties, the West German Bundestag had passed the law providing for the 1983 census (the Volkszählungsgesetz, or VZG).¹¹ The two and a half page law included 13 paragraphs encompassing: (1) announcement of the census (reference date for the enumeration: April 27th) and preparatory surveys; (2) types of data to be gathered (but not the exact questions to be asked) on the population and employment part of the census (the part all residents were required to answer); (3) types of data to be gathered in the census of residential buildings and spaces; (4) types of data to be collected on workplaces (the third main part); (5) specification of the obligation to respond to the different parts of the census; (6) specification of the obligation to act as an enumerator (all adults between 18 and 65, with some exceptions, could be required to act as enumerators) and some of the basic outlines of enumerator duties; (7) the duty of governments at all levels to make officials available to act as enumerators; (8) the obligation of local tax authorities to provide census offices with names and addresses of owners of the buildings to be surveyed in the second part of the census; (9) description of the conditions under which, and the form in which, census data could be transferred to statistical and administrative government agencies or non-government researchers; (10) specification of the number, scope and permissible types of questions to be included in test-surveys taken previous to the census itself; (11) the financial contribution of the Federal Government to lower levels of government to offset the cost of the census; (12) application of the VZG to West Berlin; and (13) indication that the law came into force the day after its signing.

Nine months later, by January 26th, 1983, taz journalists had gotten hold of the census form [Fragebogen] and had a chance to comb through the law. The headline for that day, “Big brother orders a count” [“Großer Bruder läßtzählen”], appeared below a cartoon by Harald Juch showing the Virgin Mary ripping a census form in half while Joseph and the donkey shrink away startled. Mary’s exasperated comment: “What, go to Bethlehem so pregnant for a census? This Herod with his surveillance state can [kiss my rear end]!” [“kann mich mal” ]¹² An extended analysis of the law and the census form appeared on page three, along with an article originating with the Hamburg VoBo Im that surveyed the darker sides of the state’s justifications for the census. The focus in both pieces was on what happens to personal data after it is surrendered to an enumerator. Citing the census law’s list of the various different public and private organizations for which the census would serve as an “indispensable basis” for planning, the articles detailed many of the ways in which the state and federal statistical agencies could become a data “supermarket”, to the disadvantage of individuals and vulnerable groups. Data on housing and rent levels could be used by landlords to raise rents among populations expected to put up minimal resistance; as mentioned earlier, the BKA and other security agencies could incorporate census data, especially on WGs, both into their pursuit of terrorists and into the ever-finer evaluation of the “protest- and resistance-potential” of urban neighborhoods and larger regions; large business firms could use census data on income and unemployment to locate plants in places where wages could likely be kept at the lowest possible level, or where resistance to associated infrastructure upgrades could be expected not to flare up; and information on primary residence and automobile registration could be used to ferret out young men seeking to avoid military service by claiming falsely to live in West Berlin. The most controversial provision of the census law was clearly going to be § 9, which detailed the ways in which personal information gleaned from the census form could be shared. Paragraph 9, part (1) was immediately singled out as particularly problematic, because it provided that personal data including name, address, telephone number, sex, birthdate, family status, membership (or not) of a religious confession and citizenship could be used by local authorities to correct residency registers.¹³ The residency register, or Melderegister, a peculiarly German institution, was (and remains) a registry maintained by special offices of local municipal governments, at which all individuals are required t...