Dark Territory is an excellent book on a topic that has not received much attention in either the scholarly or the popular press: the 1983 census boycott, the surprising decision by the Bundesverfassungsgericht to block the census, and then the bitter, full-length rerun of the boycott in 1987. Hannah's questions are what motivated the boycotts and what can we learn from studying them?

Hannah is a political geographer by trade, and he theorizes the importance of the boycotts at the intersection of space and politics. He rightly argues that the boycotts represent the first attempt to grapple with the central issues raised by the advent of the information age and the network society since the 1970s: the assertion by the West German state of its “epistemic sovereignty,” that is, the right to collect the information needed virtually to map its interior physical domain (and thus bring light to this otherwise “dark territory”); the growing importance of the virtual or statistical representations of individuals made possible by these new technologies; and the possibilities of new forms of “informational citizenship,” which will not simply contest the objectifying effect of such representations or “data doubles,” but which will also give rise to new, alternative forms of “representation”—in the epistemic, the political, and the institutional senses of the term.

The body of the narrative, however, is—intentionally—less theoretical and more empirically accessible, and it provides the most comprehensive account of the boycotts available in English or German. In the introduction, Hannah charts the postwar emergence of a political system that privileged institutional mechanisms of political representation and of a political culture that privileged order and state authority over participatory democracy. He uses this both to foreground the culture wars that he sees winding through the boycotts and giving them their political resonance and to explain the obsession with surveilling those spaces, both oppositional and alternative, whose mere existence was regarded as a direct challenge to a state conceived in such terms.

For Hannah, the key issue in the 1983 boycott was the significance of “the reductive representation of human life in statistical form” (p. 44) that was to be made possible by the census. More radical critics, such as Götz Aly and Karl-Heinz Roth, argued that the power of such representations was essentially fascist, an argument that they developed more fully in Die restlose Erfassung, though their arguments were only one facet of a broader critique of the ways in which statistical representations served to identify social marginality and thus render it subject to closer, more continuous control. While these radical critics called for the boycott of the notionally fascist census that there was no possibility of protesting from within the political system, the more liberal census critics, Hannah argues, did not see such a direct connection between the Nazi census and that of the Kohl administration and chose to challenge the census not in the streets, but in the courts.

To the utter astonishment of the political establishment, on April 13, 1983—two weeks before the enumeration was scheduled to begin, the Bundesverfassungsgericht issued a restraining order to block the census, and in December of that year the court issued a definitive ruling. In this ruling, the court argued that key provisions of the census law conflicted with the right to “informational self-determination” implicit in the constitutional commitment to human dignity, though it also affirmed in principle the right of the state to conduct a census of its citizens. In chapter two Hannah discusses the role of the federal and state privacy commissioners in this conflict, as well as the reasoning of the complainants, the administration, and the court itself. Here he argues that the boycott did, in fact, exert a substantial influence on the court and that it did so in a way that reflected a laudable openness to the power of public opinion that was often missing on the part of elected officials.

Chapter three does several interesting things. On the one hand, Hannah shows how the Kohl administration sought to gain greater public “acceptance” of a revised census law while denying that there was any constitutional basis on which to challenge a law that had been properly passed by the legislature—thereby denying in advance the legitimacy of, and the need for, any serious debate on the issue. At the same time, however, the administration sought to equate political protest against a reified, increasingly authoritarian conception of the “free democratic constitutional order” with terrorist violence by arguing that even terrorists began with small acts of criminality. In this ideological field, there was no conceptual room for civil disobedience, and Hannah ultimately agrees with Hoimar von Ditfurth that the rabidity with which the state sought to repress the 1987 boycott reflected a primal need on the part of those in power to demonstrate emphatically the primacy of authority and order over participatory rights. In this chapter Hannah also makes creative use of the Stasi files relating to the boycott—and I will not spoil the suspense by summarizing his findings here.

The final chapter recounts the ultimately successful efforts of state officials to take back their territory by deploying all of the weapons at their disposal to repress a boycott that they regarded as “an essentially criminal, unconstitutional enterprise” (p. 157). Here, Hannah focuses on the Berlin variant of the “hard boycott” strategy, that is, the strategy by which protesters were to accept the census forms from the enumerators, clip off the identifying code, and return the anonymized forms to central collection points, where a constantly growing running total would, the protesters believed, encourage those who opposed the census, but who feared the consequences, to join in in ever greater numbers until the entire census collapsed. On the one hand, Hannah agrees with those contemporary critics who argued that this strategy ultimately made it easier for officials to identify and pick off isolated protesters. On the other hand, however, Hannah argues—and in so doing he moves in the conclusion from a historical account of the boycotts to political theorizing about what we can learn from them—that such a strategy may well offer a model for contesting the collection and use of personal information in the age of the Internet. Hannah argues with a certain degree of plausibility that the central collection agency, by interposing itself as an anonymizing institution between the citizen and the information bureaucracy, represented an archetype of those companies that allow people to browse the Internet and send e-mail anonymously. He then goes on to suggest that such agencies might evolve into the institutional basis for the collection of personal information, for the active, participatory representation of these alternative forms of social knowledge, and, ultimately, for new forms of informational citizenship.

In the end, the book provides a crisp, sweeping account of the census boycotts, their place in the political culture of the 1980s, and their role in clarifying the political issues raised by the expansion of the surveillance state. It is unfortunate that the book, which was published in November 2010, did not gain greater publicity in advance of the May 2011 census, which was the first census since 1987 and which, in contrast to the 1980s, passed with barely a blip on the political radar. But this does not diminish its importance for thinking about the politics of information and surveillance in the twenty-first century.