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'For Volker Höffer, who directs the Stasi archive in Rostock, those who consulted their files almost always found it a liberating experience – especially if they had been persecuted as a result of Stasi spying. “In numerous conversations, those affected told me that they could now dissolve dark holes within themselves,” he says. But he also saw it as a necessary step for Germany as a whole, an attempt to “extract the eternal essence of dictatorships and to develop from it a serum against future ones”.
