Comment by walterbell
9 hours ago
Thanks for the pointer, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FS2oAOieECk
> Over the course of three years, I was able to research the archives left by East Germany's Stasi to look for visual memories of this notorious surveillance system and more recently I was invited to spend some weeks looking at the archive by the Czechoslovak StB. Illustrating with images I have found during my research, I would like to address the question why this material is still relevant – even 25 years after the fall of the Iron Curtain.
The birthday party with Stasi members dressed up as the individuals they spy on is really brutal, the costumes themselves were likely confiscated from their victims. Stereotypically confirming that "German sense of humor is not a laughing matter". There is always a brutally cynical undertone in their jokes.
Are you just taking internal jokes of a repressive regime as representative for a country?
British jokes can be deadly, too!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YeMnPyusuBE
Most of bureaucrats of any 20th century regime, first or second half the century, remained working within country's structures after the fall of the regime. If not for government officially, then at least in law, debt collection, or security industries. The general attitude hadn't changed only because the regime failed.