The Blank Cover Sheets
1987 · Machine-Readable Census Form · Work 719 of 1,871
A laundry basket filled to the brim with unfilled machine-readable sheets on the landing of an old tenement stairwell in West Berlin in May 1987, the basket of woven pale wicker standing on worn linoleum before a brown apartment door, the sheets in portrait format thirty by twenty-two centimetres, white paper with pale grids of small boxes and short black timing marks along one margin, seen obliquely from above so that mainly paper edges and faint ruled grids show, on top an unused sharpened pencil, a hand in a knitted green pullover sleeve laying one more sheet onto the pile, wooden banisters, a doormat, cream painted walls, dull daylight from a stairwell window.
- What it was used for
- The survey forms of the West German census with the reference date 25 May 1987. Der Tagesspiegel gives about 600,000 counters for some 25 million households; the forms came from the local survey office and completion was compulsory. According to the taz account about 77,000 questionnaires were handed in blank on census day. The article "Volkszählung 87, die letzte" in vorgänge no. 91 of 1988 records that 95 per cent of the distributed forms had come back, that the boycott side, confident in public, had doubts in private - "Nur noch 5% verweigerte Bögen!" - and that in October, 5 months after the reference date, some 3 million forms were still outstanding. In Berlin 40,000 counters were conscripted where about 20,000 were needed.
- What was new
- There is nothing new about a blank form itself. What was new was its legal weight: 1987 was the first count held under the rules the Federal Constitutional Court had imposed in 1983, so refusal breached an amended statute. How costly it could become depended on the instrument: vorgänge mentions expected coercive-penalty notices of about 500 marks and a fine of up to 10,000 DM under the statistics act cited in boycott literature, while Der Tagesspiegel gives a nationwide ceiling of 2,000 marks for the coercive penalty. The barb is in the accounts. The office won the number - its president Egon Hölder put non-participation below 1 per cent according to Der Tagesspiegel - and lost the money: the census cost about 1 billion marks against the 545 million planned, says the taz, the advertising alone 46 million according to Der Tagesspiegel.