Documents were sometimes marked geheim because of the magnitude of a problem, at other times because officials could not agree on a shared sense of what the problems were. Rather than secreted truths about the state, they point to sites of unease, anticipatory warnings of emergent movement among subject populations (what Raymond Williams might even include as “structures of feeling”) of resentments that may not yet have had a name.

Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ E…, loc. 168