“The statistics office on Beimler Strasse counts everything, knows everything. How many shoes I buy a year (2.3). How many books I read a year (3.2). And how many pupils graduate with straight as every year (6.347).

But there is one thing they don’t count, maybe because even bureaucratics find it painful, and that’s suicides. If you call Beimler Strasse to ask how many people between the Elbe and the Oder, between the Baltic Sea and the Ore mountains, despair drove to their death, our numbers oracle is silent. But it may just note your name for the State Security. Those grey men who ensure safety in our land, and happiness. In 1977, our country stopped counting suicides. “Self murderers”, they called them. But suicide has nothing to do with murder. It knows no bloodlust, no heated passion, it knows only death, the death of all hope.

When we stopped counting, only one country in Europe drove more people to their death: Hungary. We came next, the land of “real existing socialism”.

Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Meudon, 1957

“My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world and exiles me from it.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

With trading debris all around him, a broker reads a newspaper in the New York Stock Exchange after closing, 1957

Either the memory of past bliss is the anguish of to-day; or the agonies which are have their origins in ecstasies which might have been.

David Bowie, 1973, East Berlin

Your first thought upon awakening be: ‘Atom’. For you should not begin your day with the illusion that what surrounds you is a stable world. Already to-morrow it can be ‘something that only has been’: for we, you, and I and our fellow men are ‘more mortal’ and 'more temporal’ than all who, until yesterday, had been considered mortal.

— Günther Anders, from “Commandments in the Atomic Age"