“In 1981 there was a plan to carry out a census in the FRG and in West Berlin. And there was a deep-seated distrust of state data collection due to the Nazi era. The census was postponed to 1983, when every FRG citizen was obliged to fill out questionnaires. It struck me that the questions had little to do with the reality of my life. For example, it asked, “How far is your commute to work? What mode of transport do you use to get there?” So, I could show off: getting to work took me somewhere between zero minutes and eight hours, depending on whether I was working at home or giving a concert in New York. Transportation involved walking, biking, trams, subways, buses, planes, and boats. Everything was correct, but also confusing in its thoroughness. My thought at the time was to give as much information as possible in order for my responses to be illegible. The fact that in the GDR the Stasi wrote down and collected every banality of its citizens did not ultimately save the GDR state – on the contrary. Today, large corporations on the Internet are in the process of collecting as much data as possible from potential consumers, but history suggests that even that will fail in the long term.

Revolutions always start with stupid questions and humor.”

– Die Tödliche Doris co-founder WOLFGANG MÜLLER, interviewed by Victoria Camblin in “A Science of Misunderstanding.”

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