«Only sheep let themselves be counted»: Privacy, political culture, and the 1983/87 West German census boycotts

The 1983/87 census boycotts were one of the main events in West German domestic politics in the 1980s. However, neither they nor the decision of the Constitutional Court In the legal challenge to the planned census have received the scholarly attention they merit. Without denying that the boycott was shaped by the memory of Nazi rule, the article argues that the protests were much more directly influenced by the new information technologies and the expansion of state population surveillance, that is, the large-scale collection of personal information for social planning and security purposes. The Court's reasoning in the case built upon the analyses of the normalising, disciplinary effects of the new information technologies set out by both the protesters and the liberals who challenged the census in court, and it codified a new conception of informational privacy. The boycotts themselves represent one element of a distinct privacy-based social movement comparable in origins, aims and significance to the other social movements of the time, and they were motivated by the ideas of authenticity and Betroffenheit. The protesters, however, were not content simply to criticise the logic of bureaucratic domination they espied at work in the census and other large collections of personal information, and the Greens tried to invert this logic and develop an alternate approach that would use such statistical data to serve what they regarded as the real needs and interests of the individual.