Whether the suitcase from the production of the class enemy was simply delivered with a delay or was ordered in dire need can no longer be said today.

The only thing that is clear is that it came too late to save its users from being punished by life.

Shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the GDR state security service received the American-made "Diplomat 1" mobile lie detector, for which the SED state, which was chronically short of foreign exchange, shelled out 30,000 Deutschmarks.

A good thirty years later, the device is in the “Lying Detection Laboratory”, one of eight departments of an “Office for the Whole Truth”, which has now opened its doors in the German Hygiene Museum in Dresden.

The exhibition “Fake.

The Whole Truth”, which could hardly be more up-to-date:

The Russian war in Ukraine and conspiracy stories about Corona and vaccinations take up another department, namely that of “finding and securing the truth”.

But the show also wants to look at the big picture, and that is nothing less than asking what the truth is and why don't we just stick with it forever.

Stephen Locke

Correspondent for Saxony and Thuringia based in Dresden.

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The short answer is that such a life would be pretty dull.

Who would want to spoil the evening for the proud hobby chef and his guests with the honest answer to the question "Did it taste good?", who would want to risk their relationship with an infidel confession or spoil the children (and themselves) with the truth about Santa Claus?

This exhibition is made for a longer answer, or rather: answers.

And it starts in the "Department for Lie Education and Applied Pinocchio Research" with the little ones with the sentence "You shouldn't lie!", which can be justified either educationally, academically or religiously, but often comes across as threatening and not only with growing older meets reality, in which lies are told that the beams bend.

Domination in everyday life is administration

The idea of ​​wanting to ascertain the truth and banish lies almost ex officio seems to have been made for an audience that increasingly distrusts “those up there”, i.e. those in government.

In any case, an office in Germany is one of the most common points of contact that people have with the authorities in their life, and which they regard with a certain reverence, even if it is mostly annoying.

"Because in everyday life, rule is primarily: administration," Max Weber wrote more than a hundred years ago.

And it is not without reason that the term "official" is synonymous with established, credible and confirmed.

Offices and authorities showed "a great tendency to persevere with little inclination to change their principles," says the curator of the show, the philosopher Daniel Tyradellis.

“That makes them reliable and helps with orientation.