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Rise Against  

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Possibly the only truly relevant Punk Rock band in mainstream music, Rise Against formed in the summer of 1999 and hail from Illinois, USA. Their melodic yet raging punk rock has given them several gold records in their home country and several sold out tours around the world.

The band should stand as living proof to punk rock purists that commercial success is not, and has never been, the same thing as selling out. Yes, the band’s sound is far more accessible today than the visceral hardcore of their early years.

However, if they were to take a cursory listen to the lyrics of any random song of theirs, they would be shocked to find that they are still as intelligent, profound and straight up angry as they ever were and this even stretches to the bands biggest hits.

Take songs like “Help Is on the Way", “Savior”, "Make It Stop (September's Children)" and “Prayer Of The Refugee” for example. These are polarising songs about difficult, yet very topical subjects that don’t shy away from taking a defined stance.

However the combined Youtube hits for those videos are, astonishingly enough, around 86 Million. This is a band that manages to plug the It Gets Better project, PETA and Amnesty International while filling arenas in their home country and large theaters and concert halls around the world.

To have a fully-fledged rock band with a message as vital as theirs playing on such a large scale the world over is a blessing that we haven’t had since the days of The Clash. With a tour schedule like theirs, it’s only a matter of time before they play wherever you are, and there are few bands out their more likely to change your life than the one and only Rise Against.

Live reviews

Unable to go to the Foo Fighters concert at the beginning of the year, 2015 was off to a disappointing start for my partner and I when it came to seeing Rise Against. This only continued to worsen throughout the year as we headed Stateside for a month in July, where RA had a number of tour dates across the country and absolutely none of them lined up with our travel plans - we even had plans in Chicago which were FOUR DAYS after they had a hometown gig . Heartbreaking!

So when word dropped that they were doing their own headline show Down Under in December, the only option was to go! For the last 3 months I've been listening to them flat out in anticipation of Wednesday December 2. My partner had seen these guys once before at a festival, but this was to be the popping of my RA cherry and oh my, was it fantastic! The energy and the devotion from the band, atmosphere and the love from the crowd, it was such a stellar night!

The first half of the night took me back to the days of hitting local warehouse punk gigs in the suburbs before the lights and dazzle came in to full effect in the second half of the show. Opening with recent tracks, it was a trip through memory lane for long time fans who got a solid sampler of some of the best punk rock anthems of the last 15 years. The look of sheer awe on my partner's face as the final beats of Prayer of the Refugee rang out was a stand still moment in a room full of so much energy.

A unique and chilling rendition of Redgum's I Was Only 19 kicked off a truly incredible encore as Tim stood solo on the stage, a song choice capitalising on the values and genuine nature of both the band and the fans that filled the room. The fans chorused along to an Australian treasure and goosebumps continued to prickle across the room as Tim moved in to a tale of an old porch swing, before the room swayed and reflected on the words of Swing Life Away.

The rest of the band crashed back out the night was completed with high energy, fast beats, and loud screams of whoa-oh as Rise Against closed the night with Dancing For Rain and Saviour.

The overall atmosphere of the room summarised the band's performance spectacularly, the room having been alive with the promise and delivery of an incredible show by the boys from Chicago.

My only criticism - and no fault of the boys - is that of Margaret Court. With the demise of many of Melbourne's incredible live music venues, more and more shows have taken place in arenas, stadiums, halls, and now Margaret Court. Not the first time in recent months, I have found the sound quality to be disappointing, the riffs muffled, and vocals drowned out. I'm still unsure whether I just got 'used' to the quality, of it there was some improvement through the evening, but there is definitely a lot of room for improvement from the venue itself in regard to supporting bands deliver memorable shows.

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I was lucky enough to see rock band Rise Against live at Rock am Ring in 2010. They were loud, heavy, and fun.

They instantly launched into the hardest song that they could find and did not let up for anything until the end of the set. They did not build up, they did not wait, they just played hard, jamming, fast, fun music for everyone that was there to rock. The crowd loved it and cheered and head banged to their intense, hard music as hard as they could. It was an excellent experience.

Everyone loved the music and the band's intense nature, refusing to let up or to slow down. They kept going and going, getting louder and harder until it was impossible to get any louder or any harder. The audience really loved them and so did I. They actively engaged with us and made it a fun, engaging show to be a part of.

They refused to be outdone and rocked as hard as humanly possible, while we the audience tried our best to keep up. It was an amazing show and I highly recommend any one that is interested see a Rise Against show as soon as they can.

They completely messed up the sound mix for the first third of the show. To try and compensate for this, the singer had to try and sing harder and just ended up stuffing up the songs instead.

Luckily once the acoustic set started about a third of the way into the concert they fixed the mix and the rest of the concert was awesome.

I hope next time they play this doesn't happen. To quote one of my friends, he described the first part of the concert as 'terrible' and I would have to agree.

I was hoping they'd sing A Gentlemen's Coup or From Heads Unworthy but it didn't sound like they did, though if they did play it in the first third of the concert, I'm not sure I would have noticed as it really was that terrible you couldn't hear anything.

As usual, Rise Against were a great live act with excellent stage presence. However, they were let down by horrible sound. I'm not sure whether the sound technician was deaf, or had ear plugs AND ear muffs on, because the sound was far too loud. Vocals were drowned out and distorted, let alone the guitar tracks being just full of noise. Even the acoustic songs they played were completely trashed by distortion. If I was Rise Against, I would be terribly angry at their promoter/sound technician.

Anyway, the show itself was great. Tim had a great command of the audience, and stirred a positive buzz. Its hard to say much else about the show when the sound was so screwed - considering the music is mainly what you go to a gig for!

Being the last show on the national tour, by the time the boys hit Brisbane Tim’s voice was shot. We initially thought it was the sound system but sadly no. Despite this he busted his arse belting out a great mix of new and old.

The drumming , usually the glue of the Band was off tempo and tired with the usual frenetic double beats replaced by a more subdued almost offbeat rhythm.

Lead guitar lacked usual punch and often found himself mid stage nowhere near a mic when it was his turn to vocally support Tim requiring a quick sprint into position. Stayed for the acoustic set which showcased Tim wonderfully then off to the Ship Inn to lament an off night for a usually brilliant act

Such a fun night!

Nearly got caught in the mosh pit TWICE, bearing in mind I'm 5'2 and don't have a death wish we moved the heck away from there but the whole atmosphere was so amusing and bubbly. Even Tim (lead singer) said that he likes how this crowd can even crowd surf to their slow acoustic songs :D

The band was fantastic! The opening acts were so much better than I anticipated. The fans were hilarious and kind, the really tall guys would let us in front, two guys who didn't even know eachother wound up climbing on eachother's backs - if you're looking for a concert with great fans, atmosphere and music, go to a Rise Against concert you will not be disappointed!

First gig I've ever walked out on during the headliner. Being used to metal shows, where all the metalheads look out for eachother & mosh in the centre but leave the rest alone, this is not like that. I was in the 3rd from front row, when the band came on the front 7 rows became a crunch of people all pushing the people at the front into the fence, you had no choice but to be squashed into a pulp of people & couldn't see anything but bodies even when 6ft tall right at the front. Worst experience I've ever had at a concert, having been to 3 heavy metal concerts the same week. Stay further back or don't go atall, my experience really put me off & wasted my money.

Rise against was phenomenal live. This was the first concert I've gone to, where I left feeling completely satisfied. I didn't need anything else for the rest of the night. I had a smile on my face for the entire show. And it was so clear the band was happy to be there. There was one time where he paused his song when the words "all because of you" we're sang. He said something to the tone of "we are here, all because of you. Come on repeat it" and the entire venue was singing "all because of you." It was pretty magical. Great concert, one of the best I've seen in a while.

This was a first time Rise Against gig for me. I have been in Prague for 10 months and needed to get a Rock fix. Rise Against delivered.

The support acts were forgettable other than the novelty of Japanese band wearing wolf heads.

If you like your mainstream/skater punk hybrid with a tinge of politicism then Rise Against are for you. The sound is loud, the vocals in tune and the band are tight. They played with passion and energy and certainly made for an enjoyable night.

A very fun and exciting show. Saw them in The Fillmore Silver Spring and given how small the venue was, it was very packed and hot, but the energy was insanely high and was a great show the entire time.

The other two bands that played, letlive. and Killswitch Engage, made the night for me. I did not expect much of from those two groups, but the exceeded expectations and were very high energy as well.

Also, my favorite song was played early in the set which made me ecstatic.

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Past concerts

The Republik

Spark Arena

Rod Laver Arena

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Rise Against tour dates and tickets 2024-2025 near you

Want to see Rise Against in concert? Find information on all of Rise Against’s upcoming concerts, tour dates and ticket information for 2024-2025.

Rise Against is not due to play near your location currently - but they are scheduled to play 32 concerts across 4 countries in 2024-2025. View all concerts.

Next 3 concerts:

• Trois-Rivières, QC, Canada
• Eschwege, Germany

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• Los Angeles (LA) (78)
• Chicago (46)
• New York (NYC) (28)
• Denver (27)
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• Anti-Flag (108)
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RISE AGAINST

Special guests: the story so far & zsk.

Knapp ein Jahr nach dem Release von “Nowhere Generation” legen RISE AGAINST aus Chicago mit “Nowhere Generation 2” nach und setzen den kritischen Dialog zwischen sich, ihren Fans und der Welt fort. Die neue EP geht nahtlos den Pfad ihres Vorgängers weiter und schaut hinter die soziale, ökonomische, sowie politische Instabilität und Ungleichheit des modernen Zeitalters.

“Nowhere Generation 2” ist so bissig wie hoffnungsvoll und ein weiterer Beleg für die Resonanz einer Band, die nach wie vor dem Status Quo moderner Rockmusik trotzt.

Nach mittlerweile fünf Jahren können Fans von RISE AGAINST die Band endlich wieder live in deutschen Konzerthallen erleben.

Bleibe informiert mit unserem Newsletter.

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Metal, Hardcore, Indie, Rock

Rise Against touring Europe again: Check out photos from the Berlin show

One of the most iconic political punk bands Rise Against started their EU run with pop punk band The Story So Far and German punk act ZSK and our photojournalist took part on their show in Berlin.

Rise Against grows bigger and bigger with every show and every record – it is really hard not to like their music and this really was clear thing in the concert. The arena was packed with die-hard fans and energy was great. ZSK played insanely energetic show to their hometown crowd, proving to be the perfect opener for Rise Against .

The Story so far

Rise Against

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“With the cost of creating content being close to zero, people can share an incredible amount of content” – Spotify CEO Daniel Ek shares his point of view on making music

It looks like creating content is essentially free. In this case, the content is music. It’s all quite affordable—going to the studio is essentially free, purchasing any equipment or software is essentially free, and mixing and mastering is essentially free! Who knew? Or at least that’s according to Daniel Ek, CEO of Spotify. Ek stated...

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Noora Louhimo of Battle Beast has posted a message in favour of LGBTQ+ Pride Month. Pride Month, which happens in June, is a time when the LGBT community—lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender—as well as allies and supporters unite to celebrate acceptance, diversity, love, and unabashed self-pride. View this post on Instagram A post shared by...

“Making sure everything lined up perfectly was our biggest challenge” – interview with Adam and the Metal Hawks

Today, we sit down with Adam and the Metal Hawks to dive into their creative process, challenges, and what lies ahead for them in the world of heavy metal. Their latest release is “Hurry Up And Wait” in August 2023: the album is a solid addition to any catalogue, so we couldn’t pass up the...

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Allen Key releases music video for “Death From Above” and emerges as a potential force in Brazilian metal

Allen Key has released an epic music video for “Death From Above“, confronting an imminent apocalypse in an apotheotic and incendiary way. It is one of the heaviest and darkest songs of the band’s catalog. “Death From Above” creates a vivid and disturbing portrait of despair in the face of an inevitable apocalyptic catastrophe, evoking...

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Biografie - Rise Against

Hardcore-ethos, punkrock-hymnen, auch mit major-deal nehmen rise against kein blatt vor den mund, live eine macht, rise against fan-report: bewertungen und rezensionen bewertungen für veranstaltungen, künstler und venues können unter einhaltung der teilnahmebedingungen grundsätzlich von jedem erstellt werden. eventim schlägt jedoch nur ticketkäufern vor, bewertungen für die von ihnen erworbenen veranstaltungen abzugeben., 376 bewertungen (ø 3,86), mega konzert.

Erst einmal…… verstehe das Gejammer hier von vielen nicht.Die Vorbands waren in unseren Augen okay, aber kein Muss. Jeder hat da seinen eigenen Geschmack. Rise Against hat in unseren Augen total abgeliefert, die Stimmung war der Wahnsinn und der Sänger hat auf seine Weise das Publikum total abgeholt. Wer die Moshpits nicht mag, der hat in unseren Augen dann auch einfach nichts auf einem Rock Konzert zu suchen. Man muss ja nicht mit machen aber sie gehören einfach dazu, denn auch davon lebt solch ein Konzert!Alles in allem war gerade ich total happy da ich Rise Against endlich mal live gesehen habe und sie seid Kindheit an höre!Selbst meine Frau war total begeistert und sie hat sie gerade mal 2 Wochen vorher angefangen zu hören ;)Bitte kommt wieder nach Deutschland!!!

Leider enttäuschend

Eines der schlechtesten, wenn nicht das schlechteste Konzert von Profis auf dem wir jemals waren. Sämtliche sonst zu schnell, kaum bis keine Interaktion mit dem Publikum. Der Sänger war ständig off und zu früh dran, sodass der Rhythmus ständig seltsam wurde. Einfach richtig enttäuschend..

Das war leider nichts...

Auf dem Konzert der Nowhere Generation Tour, wurde vom gleichnamigen Album (und vom Album Nowhere Generation II) gerade mal der Titelsong gespielt. Sonst nichts außer älteren Songs. Dann hätte man daraus auch eine "Best of"-Tour machen können. Die Akustik war, wie leider zu oft in der Festhalle, extrem kratzig, der Gesang nur sehr schwer zu hören, die Instrumente viel zu extrem. Ich hatte die Hoffnung diesbezüglich dort aufgegeben, aber tatsächlich war sie bei der Vorband ZSK sehr gut und auch Billy Talent haben sich eine Woche später echt klasse angehört. Dass es in der Menge mehrfach fast zu Schlägerein gekommen wäre und die Moshpits (wieso überhaupt so viele?) nicht mehr sehr kollegial waren, hat die Securitys leider auch nicht interessiert.

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Rise Against Tour History

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Rise against concert setlists & tour dates, alive & well: the metro residency tour, upcoming shows.

• Date and Venue Doors Scheduled
• Jun 30 2024 Festivoix 2024 Trois-Rivières, QC, Canada Add time  –  Scheduled: 10:00 PM Add time Add times 10:00 PM
• Jul 03 2024 Soif de Musique 2024 Cowansville, QC, Canada Add time  –  Scheduled: 9:20 PM Add time Add times 9:20 PM
• Jul 07 2024 Festival d'été de Québec 2024 Quebec City, QC, Canada Add time  –  Scheduled: 7:45 PM Add time Add times 7:45 PM
• Aug 13 2024 Budapest Park Budapest, Hungary Doors 6:00 PM  –  Start time: 8:00 PM (Est.) 6:00 PM 8:00 PM Estimated
• Aug 15 2024 FM4 Frequency Festival 2024 St. Pölten, Austria Add time Add time Add times
• Aug 18 2024 Pukkelpop 2024 Hasselt, Belgium Add time Add time Add times
• Aug 20 2024 O2 Ritz Manchester, England  –  Find tickets Add time Tickets Add time Add times
• Aug 21 2024 O2 Shepherd's Bush Empire London, England  –  Find tickets Add time Tickets Add time Add times
• Aug 23 2024 Riverside Aarburg 2024 Aarburg, Switzerland Add time Add time Add times
• Oct 11 2024 Aftershock 2024 Sacramento, CA, USA Add time Add time Add times
• Oct 14 2024 Fillmore Auditorium Denver, CO, USA  –  Find tickets Add time Tickets Add time Add times
• Oct 16 2024 The Pageant St. Louis, MO, USA  –  Find tickets Add time Tickets Add time Add times
• Oct 18 2024 The Salt Shed Chicago, IL, USA  –  Find tickets Add time Tickets Add time Add times
• Oct 19 2024 Royal Oak Music Theatre Royal Oak, MI, USA Add time Add time Add times
• Oct 20 2024 Agora Cleveland, OH, USA  –  Find tickets Add time Tickets Add time Add times
• Oct 22 2024 Brooklyn Paramount Brooklyn, NY, USA  –  Find tickets Add time Tickets Add time Add times
• Oct 23 2024 State Theatre Portland, ME, USA  –  Find tickets Add time Tickets Add time Add times
• Oct 24 2024 Roadrunner Boston, MA, USA Add time Add time Add times
• Oct 26 2024 Franklin Music Hall Philadelphia, PA, USA Add time Add time Add times
• Oct 27 2024 9:30 Club Washington, DC, USA  –  Find tickets Add time Tickets Add time Add times
• Oct 28 2024 9:30 Club Washington, DC, USA  –  Find tickets Add time Tickets Add time Add times
• Oct 30 2024 The National Richmond, VA, USA Add time Add time Add times
• Nov 01 2024 House of Blues Lake Buena Vista, FL, USA  –  Find tickets Add time Tickets Add time Add times
• Nov 02 2024 Jannus Live St. Petersburg, FL, USA Doors 7:00 PM  –  Start time: 9:00 PM (Est.) 7:00 PM 9:00 PM Estimated
• Nov 04 2024 The Eastern Atlanta, GA, USA  –  Find tickets Add time Tickets Add time Add times
• Nov 05 2024 Marathon Music Works Nashville, TN, USA  –  Find tickets Add time Tickets Add time Add times
• Nov 07 2024 Cain's Ballroom Tulsa, OK, USA Add time Add time Add times
• Nov 08 2024 House of Blues Dallas, TX, USA  –  Find tickets Add time Tickets Add time Add times
• Nov 09 2024 Stubb's Bar-B-Q Austin, TX, USA  –  Find tickets Add time Tickets Add time Add times
• Nov 11 2024 Revel Entertainment Center Albuquerque, NM, USA Add time Add time Add times
• Nov 13 2024 Revolution Concert House & Event Center Garden City, ID, USA  –  Find tickets Add time Tickets Add time Add times
• Nov 15 2024 Roseland Theater Portland, OR, USA Add time Add time Add times
• Nov 16 2024 Harbour Event & Convention Centre Vancouver, BC, Canada Add time Add time Add times
• Nov 17 2024 The Showbox SoDo Seattle, WA, USA Add time Add time Add times
• Nov 19 2024 The UC Theatre Taube Family Music Hall Berkeley, CA, USA  –  Find tickets Add time Tickets Add time Add times
• Nov 20 2024 House of Blues Anaheim, CA, USA  –  Find tickets Add time Tickets Add time Add times
• Nov 22 2024 The Sound Del Mar, CA, USA  –  Find tickets Add time Tickets Add time Add times

Rise Against at Sonic Temple 2024

• Re-Education (Through Labor)
• The Violence
• Help Is on the Way
• Nowhere Generation
• Prayer of the Refugee
• Swing Life Away
• Make It Stop (September's Children)
• Ready to Fall
• Give It All
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Rise Against at The Republik, Honolulu, HI, USA

• Audience of One
• The Good Left Undone
• Like the Angel
• Hero of War

Rise Against at Christchurch Town Hall, Christchurch, New Zealand

• I Don't Want to Be Here Anymore
• Behind Closed Doors

Rise Against at Spark Arena, Auckland, New Zealand

Rise against at rod laver arena, melbourne, australia, rise against at qudos bank arena, sydney, australia, rise against at brisbane entertainment centre, brisbane, australia, more from rise against.

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Most played songs

• Give It All ( 930 )
• Prayer of the Refugee ( 912 )
• Ready to Fall ( 848 )
• Re-Education (Through Labor) ( 782 )
• Savior ( 775 )

More Rise Against statistics

Adaen Global Affront Against Everything Amber Light Choices Audio Drones Awesome In Disguise Berri Txarrak Ty Brillhart Bro Hymns Buried Alike Chad Foster Cherry Jane Children of the Airwaves Clear The Coast Wolf Culture Dandelion Revenge Deadheat Denge The Disciples Dragged Under Easy Friday Night Alchemy Lancaster__ Harry Last Logo Here Lotrify Louis Nocera Vinny Mauro Tim McIlrath Midnight Circle Nipple Eat Anna Benjamin Noir Primary Weapon re:covery School of Rock Sour Scarlet Subscribe The Waikiki Doctors Walkitalkies Will Walton Zachary Jacoby

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Artists covered

Bad Brains Black Flag The Clash Creedence Clearwater Revival Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young Danzig Descendents DEVO face to face Final Exit Fugazi Guns N’ Roses Mildred J. Hill & Patty Hill Jawbreaker Journey MC5 Minor Threat Misfits Tom Morello No Use for a Name Pegboy Ramones Rancid Redgum Scream Sick of It All Bruce Springsteen Wire Youth of Today

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Gigs seen live by

9,169 people have seen Rise Against live.

Belbrass AJS12001 Koalaz MrBonnie darklight TheRealHapyMeal Pizunk86 NatTheKat Trashariah bullngopher Ryderbj6 Ltryon1997 indigo27 gregbo HexesandBrews duff61 Builderking25 josh191 rdeyesun 666macabre666 Mikey2002 BaseJawn Jacobbuzzsaw Smelly2by4 MrF33n3y irishbuckeye71 fb:23328567 TMS2787 mrAPE rcthemusicguy Stillmanra DylanStatic matt_10 rubberfire Mwarhola27 benblaut schellnino Daileyas dsj2p8 seanz79 freddywarfe NuMetalRiffs jjwsta alexmed2000 Generator8481 ExoticMagma Nerva_Caesar Iceborg vegasn2001 Stevenortlieb

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Rise Against Announces Summer U.S. Tour

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Rise Against announce North American tour dates

Rise Against have announced North American tour dates for this fall. Tickets go on sale on May 17. Rise Against released their album Nowhere Generation in 2021. Check out the dates below.

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RISE AGAINST ANNOUNCES THE “NOWHERE GENERATION SUMMER U.S. TOUR”

Coming To Tabernacle on Friday, August 06, 2021

  Tickets On Sale Now  At RiseAgainst.com

Fans of RISE AGAINST, you are about to be liberated from lockdown.  Today, the band – Tim McIlrath/vocals, guitar, Joe Principe/bass, Brandon Barnes/drums, and Zach Blair/guitars – announces the “Nowhere Generation Tour,” 17 live-and-in-person concerts taking place coast-to-coast, primarily in open-air amphitheaters

Produced by Live Nation, the tour kicks off on Friday, June 30 in New York at Rooftop at Pier 17, making stops in Atlanta, Dallas, Philadelphia, Southern California, and more, before wrapping on Tuesday, August 24 in Salt Lake City at The Complex Outdoor.

“A year without live music in a time when we needed it most has been trying for all of us,” said Rise Against’s Tim McIlrath. “Live music has been missing from all of our lives for far too long.  We can’t wait to fix that on the ‘Nowhere Generation Tour.’ It’s been a long year, and we have a lot to say about it…”

Rise Against’s “Nowhere Generation Tour” is in support of the band’s ninth album, Nowhere Generation , the band’s first new studio effort in four years, due out on June 4 (Loma Vista Records).  The album’s first single, the title track, is already Top 15 at Rock Radio, and has accumulated more than four-million global streams.   Nowhere Generation was recorded at The Blasting Room in Fort Collins, Colorado, under the tutelage of Jason Livermore, Andrew Berlin, Chris Beeble, and long-time producer/engineer Bill Stevenson (Black Flag, The Descendents).  The album fearlessly illustrates why Rise Against is one of music’s most resolute, politically, and socially conscious punk rock bands.  In a nutshell, the new album is blistering, defiant punk rock, with outspoken lyrics that shine a light on today’s political and economic instability, the exponential escalation of citizen disenfranchisement, the blatant sell-out of the Middle Class, and the inequitable achievement of The American Dream.

Confirmed 2021 dates for Rise Against’s “Nowhere Generation Tour” are as follows:

30        Rooftop at Pier 17, New York, NY

31        Stone Pony Summer Stage, Asbury Park, NJ

1         Skyline Stage at The Mann, Philadelphia, PA

3         MECU Pavilion, Baltimore, MD

4         Charlotte Metro Credit Union Amphitheatre, Charlotte, NC

6         Tabernacle, Atlanta, GA

7         St. Augustine Amphitheatre, St. Augustine, FL

9         Avondale Brewing Company, Birmingham, AL

10        The Fillmore, New Orleans, LA

12        Bayou Music Center, Houston, TX

13        Stubb’s Waller Creek Amphitheater, Austin, TX

15        South Side Ballroom, Dallas, TX

17        Arizona Federal Theatre, Phoenix, AZ

20        The Chelsea at The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas, Las Vegas, NV

21        Five Point Amphitheatre, Irvine, CA

22        Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, San Francisco, CA

24        The Complex Outdoor, Salt Lake City, UT

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• May 13, 2021

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August 18, 2021

Nowhere Generation Tour

Rise Against

Plus special guests Descendents, The Menzingers

7:00 PM / Doors Open @ 5:30 PM

Fans of RISE AGAINST, you are about to be liberated from lockdown. Today, the band - Tim McIlrath/vocals, guitar, Joe Principe/bass, Brandon Barnes/drums, and Zach Blair/guitars - announces the "Nowhere Generation Tour.” The tour makes a stop at the Vina Robles Amphitheatre on August 18 with special guests Descendents, The Menzingers. Tickets go on sale Thursday, June 10 at 10 a.m. PT via Ticketmaster.com .

Joining Rise Against on this summer’s now 20-stop run will be direct support Descendents, one of the L.A. south coast’s most outspoken major players in the hardcore punk scene, and Philadelphia's The Menzingers, whose strength as rough-and-tumble storytellers have turned out songs equally rooted in frenetic energy and lifelike detail.

“A year without live music in a time when we needed it most has been trying for all of us," said Rise Against's Tim McIlrath. "Live music has been missing from all of our lives for far too long. We can’t wait to fix that on the 'Nowhere Generation Tour.' It’s been a long year, and we have a lot to say about it…”

Rise Against's "Nowhere Generation Tour" is in support of the band's ninth album, Nowhere Generation , the band’s first new studio effort in four years, due out on June 4 (Loma Vista Records). The album’s first single, the title track, is already Top 15 at Rock Radio, and has accumulated more than four-million global streams. Nowhere Generation was recorded at The Blasting Room in Fort Collins, Colorado, under the tutelage of Jason Livermore, Andrew Berlin, Chris Beeble, and long-time producer/engineer Bill Stevenson (Black Flag, The Descendents). The album fearlessly illustrates why Rise Against is one of music's most resolute, politically, and socially conscious punk rock bands. In a nutshell, the new album is blistering, defiant punk rock, with outspoken lyrics that shine a light on today's political and economic instability, the exponential escalation of citizen disenfranchisement, the blatant sell-out of the Middle Class, and the inequitable achievement of The American Dream.

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• October 11, 2022

blink-182 Announce Reunion Tour- Turnstile, Wallows, Rise Against, Story So Far To Open

Photo Credit: Jack Bridgland

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Multi-platinum, award winning group  blink-182  have announced their biggest tour ever, a colossal global outing with Mark Hoppus, Tom DeLonge and Travis Barker reuniting for the first time in nearly 10 years. Openers include choice picks Turnstile, Wallows, Story so Far and Rise Against.

The band will also drop their new single “Edging” this Friday, October 14, marking the first time in a decade that Mark, Tom and Travis have been in the studio together.

The tour announcement also features multiple festival appearances in Latin America and the US, including Lollapalooza alongside co-headliners Billie Eilish & Drake and the 2023 edition of We Were Young with Green Day among others.

TICKETS:   Tickets go on sale starting Monday, October 17 at 10am local time on  blink182.com

BLINK-182 2023 TOUR DATES:

LATIN AMERICA

+With Support from Wallows

March 11 – Tijuana, MX – Imperial GNP (Festival)

March 14 – Lima, Peru – Estadio San Marcos+

March 17-19 – Buenos Aires, Argentina – Lollapalooza Argentina (Festival)

March 17-19 – Santiago, Chile – Lollapalooza Chile (Festival)

March 21-22 – Asuncion, Paraguay – Venue TBA

March 23-26 – Bogotá, Colombia – Estereo Picnic (Festival)

March 24-26 – São Paulo, Brazil – Lollapalooza Brasil (Festival)

March 28 – Mexico City, MX – Palacio de los Deportes+

April 1-2 – Monterrey, MX – Venue TBA

NORTH AMERICA

*With Support from Turnstile

May 4 – St. Paul, MN – Xcel Energy Center*

May 6 – Chicago, IL – United Center*

May 9 – Detroit, MI – Little Caesars Arena*

May 11 – Toronto, ON – Scotiabank Arena*

May 12 – Montreal, QC – Bell Centre*

May 16 – Cleveland, OH – Rocket Mortgage Fieldhouse*

May 17 – Pittsburgh, PA – PPG Paints Arena*

May 19 – New York, NY – Madison Square Garden*

May 20 – Belmont Park, NY – UBS Arena*

May 21 – Boston, MA – TD Garden*

May 23 – Washington, DC – Capital One Arena*

May 24 – Brooklyn, NY – Barclays Center*

May 26 – Baltimore, MD – Baltimore Arena*

May 27 – Hershey, PA – Hersheypark Stadium*

Jun 14 – Phoenix, AZ – Footprint Center*

Jun 16 – Los Angeles, CA – Banc of California Stadium*

Jun 20 – San Diego, CA – Pechanga Arena*

Jun 22 – San Jose, CA – SAP Center*

Jun 23 – Sacramento, CA – Golden 1 Center*

Jun 25 – Seattle, WA – Climate Pledge Arena*

Jun 27 – Vancouver, BC – Rogers Arena*

Jun 39 – Edmonton, AB – Rogers Place*

Jun 30 – Calgary, AB – Scotiabank Saddledome*

Jul 3 – Denver, CO – Ball Arena*

Jul 5 – Dallas, TX – American Airlines Center*

Jul 7 – Austin, TX – Moody Center*

Jul 8 – Houston, TX – Toyota Center*

Jul 10 – Tampa, FL – Amalie Arena*

Jul 11 – Ft. Lauderdale, FL – FLA Live Arena*

Jul 13 – Atlanta, GA – State Farm Arena*

Jul 14 – Charlotte, NC – Spectrum Center*

Jul 16 – Nashville, TN – Bridgestone Arena*

^With Support from The Story So Far

Sep 2 – Glasgow, UK – OVO Hydro ^

Sep 4 – Belfast, UK – SSE Arena ^

Sep 5 – Dublin, Ireland – 3Arena ^

Sep 8 – Antwerp, Belgium – Sportpaleis ^

Sep 9 – Cologne, Germany – Lanxess Arena ^

Sep 12 – Copenhagen, Denmark – Royal Arena ^

Sep 13 – Stockholm, Sweden – Avicii Arena ^

Sep 14 – Oslo, Norway – Spektrum ^

Sep 16 – Berlin, Germany – Mercedes-Benz Arena ^

Sep 17 – Hamburg, Germany – Barclays Arena ^

Sep 19 – Prague, Czech Republic – O2 Arena ^

Sep 20 – Vienna, Austria – Stadthalle ^

Oct 2– Lisbon, Portugal – Altice Arena ^

Oct 3 – Madrid, Spain – Wizink Centre ^

Oct 4 – Barcelona, Spain – Palau Sant Jordi ^

Oct 6 – Bologna, Italy – Unipol Arena ^

Oct 8 – Amsterdam, Netherlands – Ziggo Dome ^

Oct 9 – Paris, France – Accor Arena ^

Oct 11 – London, UK – The O2 ^

Oct 14 – Birmingham, UK – Utilita Arena ^

Oct 15 – Manchester, UK – AO Arena ^

Oct 21 – Las Vegas, NV – When We Were Young Festival

BLINK-182 2024 TOUR DATES:

AUSTRALIA/NEW ZEALAND

!With Support from Rise Against

Feb 9 – Perth, Western Australia – RAC Arena!

Feb 11 – Adelaide, South Australia – Entertainment Centre!

Feb 13 – Melbourne, Victoria – Rod Laver Arena!

Feb 16 – Sydney, New South Wales – Qudos Bank Arena!

Feb 19 – Brisbane, Queensland – Entertainment Centre!

Feb 23 – Auckland, NZ – Spark Arena!

Feb 26 – Christchurch, NZ – Christchurch Arena!

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Piecing Together the Secrets of the Stasi

By Burkhard Bilger

Listen to this article.

The man who stopped Salomea Genin on the street in West Berlin, on that August morning in 1961, smiled as if he knew her. He was a “rather handsome gentleman,” she recalls, though he would have been hard to pick out in a crowd. He brought her greetings from East Berlin, from a woman whom Genin had met on a recent visit there—a secretary in one of the Arab embassies. He wondered if Genin would like to join him for coffee the next day. Genin was quite sure that she had never seen the man before in her life. Given her history, there was a good chance that he was an East German spy. She agreed to the meeting without hesitation.

Genin longed to live in East Berlin. She was born in Berlin in 1932, before the city was divided, but was forced to flee with her family at the age of six. The Genins were Jewish. One night in 1937, a boarder who was living with Salomea and her two sisters and her mother—her parents were divorced—denounced them to the local police. Salomea’s sister Franziska was sleeping with an Aryan, the boarder said, in violation of race ordinances. Franziska left for Australia two weeks later, but the rest of the family had to stay back. Salomea’s father had been imprisoned at Buchenwald as an arbeitsscheuer Jude —an indolent Jew—after being hospitalized with syphilis. When he was finally released, after the Jewish community helped Salomea’s mother pay a hundred marks in bail, he escaped to Shanghai. The rest of the family made their way to Melbourne in May of 1939, four months before the war began.

Salomea was a solitary, rootless child. Her mother had never shown much interest in her—she only got pregnant with Salomea to try to save her marriage, she later admitted—and her mother’s boyfriend showed even less. When Salomea was eleven, she was shipped off to a boarding school for seven months. It wasn’t until the following year, when her sister Renia let her tag along to a Communist-youth-group meeting, that Salomea began to feel at home. The Party was antifascist, pro-union, and radically egalitarian. Its meetings were fired with optimism and a fierce sense of belonging—everything Salomea had been missing at home. Soon, she was handing out leaflets and selling copies of Youth Voice in downtown Melbourne, reading Lenin (“Marx is too complicated,” she was told), and giving speeches on the steps of the Commonwealth Bank.

“Genin is a security risk,” the Australian Security Intelligence Organization concluded in 1951. It was the first entry in what grew to be a voluminous file. Later reports would describe her as an “unscrupulous and a fanatical Communist” and her mother and her as “a couple of mean, contemptible witches.” Genin was working as a secretary at a government-owned aircraft factory, the first report noted, but that could be easily remedied: “Her dismissal should not entail great administrative difficulties.” Three years later, having been sacked from a succession of jobs, Genin came to a dramatic conclusion. She had been to East Berlin a few years earlier, for the World Festival of Youth and Students for Peace, and had been exhilarated by the stirring rhetoric she’d heard. This was where she belonged, she thought: at the forefront of the Communist struggle, fighting to keep her birthplace free from fascism. On April 15, 1954, she boarded the passenger ship Otranto in Melbourne and returned to the country that had nearly killed her.

Or so she hoped. When Genin arrived in West Berlin and applied for residency in the German Democratic Republic her request was ignored. The East Germans thought she might be a Western spy—“They didn’t believe all my enthusiasm,” Genin recalls. The West Germans thought she was spying for the East. Each side sent agents to follow her. “At 10.00 a.m. surveillance was interrupted because two suspicious persons, presumably counter-observers, were in the vicinity,” the East German Staatssicherheitsdienst, or Stasi, reported on December 18, 1954. Genin was twenty-two years old, her file noted. She had “a stocky, powerful build, conspicuously strong haunches, a full round face, long nose, and dark blond hair.” She wore secondhand clothes, could seem shy and unsettled, and rarely made eye contact. Yet she had a “pronounced sex drive” and was “not averse to men.” All of this seems, in retrospect, unremarkable for a woman in her early twenties, alone in a foreign country and well aware that she might be under surveillance. But it worried the Stasi. They gave her the code name Stomper.

Genin spent the next seven years trying to gain their trust. “The way I’m built, the higher the barrier, the more I’m convinced that I belong there,” she says. She moved to London for three years and joined the British Communist Party. She returned to West Berlin and wrote articles for the Democratic German Report , a socialist newsletter published by John Peet, a former Reuters bureau chief who had defected to East Germany from the United Kingdom. Finally, in 1961, after having coffee with the rather handsome gentleman who’d stopped her on the street, Genin got her wish: she became a Stasi informant, and later a citizen of the G.D.R.

The agent’s report after the meeting left one question unanswered, though even some of the Stasi must have asked it: Why would anyone want to move to East Germany?

Dictatorships depend on the willing. They can’t rule by compulsion alone. People support them to gain power or advance their careers, because they like giving orders or take comfort in receiving them. They act on their prejudice or pocketbook, religious beliefs or political ideals at first, then on their fear. They may not realize what they’re supporting until it’s too late. In 1953, less than a year before Genin came to Germany , more than a million East Germans took part in strikes and demonstrations across the country. They were protesting low wages and inhuman production quotas, fuel shortages and rising food prices. Within days, Soviet forces had crushed the uprising, marching on more than fifty cities and arresting some fifteen thousand protesters. In East Berlin, Soviet tanks charged into unarmed crowds and troops fired on civilians.

Genin didn’t believe any of it. Those stories were just capitalist lies, she thought. Like the American socialists who admired Stalin in the nineteen-thirties, or the Russians who support the war in Ukraine today, she accepted the government’s version of events. The Army wasn’t attacking innocent civilians in Berlin; it was protecting them from totalitarianism. The workers’ uprising was really a fascist coup. By 1954, when Genin arrived in West Berlin, more than thirty thousand East Germans were fleeing across the border into the West each month. According to Genin, this was another example of the West bleeding the East dry—luring its citizens with false hopes of wealth and ease. When the Wall went up across Berlin, seven years later, she was all for it. The East Germans had to protect themselves from bad influences, she thought. The Wall wasn’t meant to keep them in; it was meant to keep their enemies out.

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When Genin finally moved to East Berlin, on May 16, 1963, her first thought was “Home at last.” She stayed in a dormitory for eight weeks, while her paperwork was processed. Then the Stasi found her an apartment in the Treptow district—a fifth-floor walkup with a sink for a bathtub and a coal-fired stove for heat—and a job as a typist at an electronics factory. They kept their distance for the first year, as she settled in. Then, one day, a man in a gray suit came to her door and rang the bell. “He said, ‘Hello, I’m from State Security,’ ” she recalled last September, when I visited her in Germany. “And I breathed a sigh of relief and let him in.”

We were sitting in her small, sunlit apartment in Berlin’s Mitte district, once the heart of East Berlin, now home to art galleries, an Apple store, and a purveyor of Swedish electric cars. Genin is ninety-one—no longer the stocky, hard-charging Stomper of her Stasi file but remarkably clear-minded for her age. She has thick gray hair, a blunt nose, and eyes that peer skeptically through oversized glasses. She speaks English with a mild accent—her bright Australian vowels cross-grained by grumbly German consonants—and tells stories with methodical precision, ticking off names and dates like items in a safe-deposit box. “There is only one way to live with my life,” she said. “And that’s to be open about the facts.” In 2009, she published an autobiography entitled “ Ich Folgte den Falschen Göttern ” (“I Followed the Wrong Gods”).

East Germans all seem to know a few stories like Genin’s. They tell them about their neighbors and co-workers and best friend’s cousins. They watch “ The Lives of Others ”—the 2006 film about a Stasi agent who spies on a playwright and his girlfriend—and shake their heads, saying, “They should have made it about my Tante Hilda.” The sheer number and surreal specificity of Stasi stories are proof of the agency’s insidious reach, of how deeply it infiltrated every corner of East German society. But they also show how thoroughly its secrets were later exposed. In January, 1992, the newly unified German government made almost the entire archive of Stasi reports available to the public: a hundred and eleven kilometres of files, divided into some nine thousand index headings, covering half a century of surveillance. It was the most radical release of state secrets in history: WikiLeaks on a vast scale.

The Stasi files offer an astonishingly granular picture of life in a dictatorship—how ordinary people act under suspicious eyes. Nearly three hundred thousand East Germans were working for the Stasi by the time the Wall fell, in 1989, including some two hundred thousand inoffizielle Mitarbeiter , or unofficial collaborators, like Genin. In a population of sixteen million, that was one spy for every fifty to sixty people. In the years since the files were made public, their revelations have derailed political campaigns, tarnished artistic legacies, and exonerated countless citizens who were wrongly accused or imprisoned. Yet some of the files that the Stasi most wanted to hide were never released. In the weeks before the Wall fell, agents destroyed as many documents as they could. Many were pulped, shredded, or burned, and lost forever. But between forty and fifty-five million pages were just torn up, and later stuffed in paper sacks.

The Germans have spent the past thirty years piecing them back together. The work is done by hand at Stasi Central, in Berlin, the former headquarters of the State Security Service, and is often touted as a symbol of the country’s unwavering commitment to transparency. Yet progress has been excruciatingly slow. Creating the files took hundreds of thousands of spies and informants, but reconstructing them has been left to only a dozen or so archival workers—jigsaw puzzlers of a sort. In the decades since the Wall fell, they’ve reassembled less than five per cent of the torn pages. At this pace, finishing the job will take more than six hundred years.

Last fall, the Stasi archive launched a new effort to automate the project, in the hope that the latest scanners and artificial-intelligence programs could accelerate the process. The files have never seemed more relevant. One in five Germans now supports the far-right party Alternative für Deutschland , and authoritarian parties have been on the rise across Europe. Yet the archive has always faced opposition from two sides: politicians threatened by what its files might contain, and former East Germans who say that the files offer only a narrow, twisted view of their history—one that the West has been all too eager to promote. The Stasi files are like an endless police blotter: a meticulous, bewilderingly detailed account of an entire society’s deceptions and betrayals.

Stasi Central sits on the desolate outskirts of eastern Berlin. From the ground, it has the dingy, dispirited look of an abandoned factory: dozens of prefabricated concrete buildings hunkered around a courtyard, with their backs to the city. From the sky, it looks like a hedge maze. In 1950, when the Stasi first moved into a former finance office here, the German Democratic Republic had just been founded. Three years later, it was in a state of fear. During the workers’ uprising, protesters nearly seized the government’s headquarters, in Berlin, before the Soviet Army intervened. Afterward, when some fifteen hundred protesters had been served with lengthy prison sentences, the ruling Socialist Unity Party resolved never to be caught off guard again. It needed an early-warning system—a way to know what East Germans were thinking before those thoughts coalesced into action. The Stasi had been focussing on foreign agents and other threats from abroad. The real danger was at home.

Nothing was too trivial for the Stasi’s scrutiny. One facility in Berlin was devoted solely to steaming open and reading several thousand private letters a day. Another was full of engineers devising fiendishly miniaturized surveillance devices: pinhole cameras that could hide behind a buttonhole; pea-size microphones inserted into fountain pens, table legs, or fake sugar cubes. To spy on a private residence, an agent might set up in the apartment next door, drill a hole through the wall, and slip in a flexible tube with an eyepiece on one end and a lens on the other. To take surveillance pictures at night, the agent might trigger an array of infrared flashes, concealed inside a car door, when the target walked by. So few places were safe from Stasi eyes and ears that some people are said to have saved their most sensitive conversations for Ping-Pong games in the city parks. When the Stasi found out, it was later rumored, they hung microphones from the trees.

On the evening of January 15, 1990, two months after the Wall fell, more than ten thousand protesters gathered outside the main gate of Stasi Central, carrying bricks and shouting, “If you don’t let us in, we’ll wall you in!” It was a long time coming. Most Stasi offices elsewhere in the country had been seized a few weeks earlier. The East German parliament had officially ended the rule of the Socialist Unity Party on the first of December, and the politburo had resigned two days later. By then, in the city of Erfurt, three hours southwest of Berlin, there were reports of smoke billowing above the local Stasi headquarters. Were the agents burning files? Within a day, activists from a group called Women for Change had rallied citizens to occupy the building; other citizens’ groups across East Germany followed suit. The takeovers were swift and mostly by the book. The activists worked with local police and brought in newly deputized state prosecutors to secure the files. They wanted to be as clear and lawful as their predecessors had been treacherous.

Stasi Central was a more daunting target. The compound had as many as seven thousand employees and a record of ruthless brutality. It was a place of immense, forbidding power. “Nobody expected to be killed immediately, but it was intimidating,” David Gill, the head of the citizens’ committee that was formed after the complex was seized, told me. The agents at Stasi Central were soaking pages and turning them to pulp, so there was no telltale smoke above the facility. Still, Gill said, “everyone knew.” When I asked him why they waited two months to save the files, he said, “That’s a question that I often ask myself.”

Gill and I were standing at the heart of the compound. Across the courtyard stood the hulking administrative building once ruled over by Erich Mielke, the agency’s shadowy chairman. On the first night of the protests in 1990, some Stasi workers opened the gate eventually, but they diverted the crowd to a nearby cultural building. Mielke’s offices weren’t occupied until the following night, when Gill joined the protesters.

“It still smells and looks the same,” he said, as we stepped into the lobby. When he and the others first rushed in, he recalled, he looked around at all the oak panelling and the banal middle manager’s desk in Mielke’s office and thought, Was für ein Spießbürger! What a philistine. How could this place have filled them with such fear? “But, compared with the rest of East Germany, this was luxury,” he said.

Gill is now the German consul-general of New York, a seasoned diplomat with plump cheeks, impish eyes, and a calm, knowing manner. After reunification, he earned a law degree and served as chief of staff for Joachim Gauck, the President of Germany from 2012 to 2017. But in 1990 he was just a former plumber who was studying to be a Protestant minister like his father. He joined the citizens’ committee by chance, after talking to a fellow-protester who took him to meet the leaders of the occupation, and was soon elected to be its president. He was one of the few committee members with any political experience. After tenth grade, he had attended a parochial school not recognized by the state, where the curriculum wasn’t dictated by Marxist-Leninist principles. “I was unideologized,” he told me. “We had a student parliament, so I was used to debating and giving speeches—nothing you would have learned in regular school.”

After the Wall fell, a group of opposition leaders and East German politicians formed the Central Round Table, moderated by clergy, to oversee the transition to a new government. The citizens’ committee, meanwhile, was put in charge of deciding what to do about the Stasi and their files. There is a photograph of Gill at a press conference not long after Stasi Central was taken. His shirt is rumpled and his sleeves rolled up; his hair nearly covers his eyes. He leans over his microphone with a look of vexed intensity, as if preparing to cut off some thickheaded questioner. Even in the giddy months of the Peaceful Revolution, as it was called, the Stasi files were a point of bitter dispute. One faction of the citizens’ committee wanted to preserve them; the other wanted to destroy them. East Germans feared that the records could still be used against them. West Germans worried that the files would expose some of their own intelligence agents. Only the Stasi knew what was in the files, and they warned that the information could destroy all of East German society. “They said, ‘These files are social dynamite—the whole country will blow up,’ ” Gill told me. “ ‘People will be killing their neighbors because they worked for the Stasi.’ ”

Those in favor of destruction were in the majority at first, Roland Jahn, an East German dissident who went on to direct the Stasi archive, told me. “Many West Germans, including Helmut Kohl, were also of the opinion that these files are poison,” he said. At a minimum, the records of the foreign-intelligence service should be destroyed, the Stasi insisted. The Round Table and the citizens’ committee eventually consented. But the information wasn’t entirely lost. The C.I.A. later admitted that it had a microfilm of the foreign service’s central index system—obtained through a K.G.B. agent, some said. The index, code-named Rosenholz, listed more than a hundred and fifty thousand Stasi operatives and other persons of interest in West Germany, and nearly sixty thousand spying operations. But the specifics behind it were gone.

“That was one of our biggest mistakes,” Gill told me. “We shouldn’t have followed the fearmongers.” Stasi espionage in the West was often used against citizens in the East, he explained: “They wanted to inform themselves about the East German opposition via their West German supporters, and to know when people planned to escape.” Still, Gill and the others drew the line at destroying the rest of the files. They knew how quickly a country could forget its past. After the Second World War, the Allies tried to “de-Nazify” the West German population, insisting that former Nazi Party members compile lengthy dossiers to prove their innocence or their contrition. But most of the evidence was buried or whitewashed: fewer than seven thousand West Germans were convicted of crimes that they had committed as Party members. Twenty years later, during the student protests of the late sixties, the West German government and military were found to be riddled with former Nazis. “I think this is deep-seated in the culture—the idea that our history teaches us something,” Dagmar Hovestädt, the former head of research and outreach for the Stasi archive, told me. “We messed up twice—once horrifically. Never again should that happen.”

Days before East Germany’s first free elections, in March of 1990, word spread that Wolfgang Schnur, a longtime civil-rights lawyer and the leading candidate for Prime Minister, had been a Stasi informant. The news was hard for most East Germans to believe, but activists in the port city of Rostock, where Schnur practiced law, had uncovered thousands of pages of Stasi files on him. Schnur had not only worked as an informant; he had infiltrated the Protestant Church. “He was a mole,” Gill said. “And that changed the discussion.” When the new parliament was elected, one of its first acts was to preserve the files. From then on, every civil servant and member of government was to be screened for possible involvement with the Stasi. A year and a half later, the files were opened to the general public: anyone could now see his own Stasi file .

“We let the darkness out into the light,” Hovestädt said. In addition to the hundred and eleven kilometres of files, there were more than two million photographs and slides, more than twenty thousand audio recordings, nearly three thousand videos and films, and forty-six million index cards. It was too much for one archive to hold. Materials that were intact were shelved at Stasi Central and twelve regional archives. Half the torn pages were also stored in the regional archives; the rest were tossed in the “copper kettle”—a basement room at Stasi Central which had been lined with copper, to block radio transmissions. There were sixteen thousand sacks in all—roughly five hundred million bits of paper. The question now was what to do with them.

Dieter Tietze stood in an empty office and stared at some scraps of paper on a table. He and the other puzzlers are housed in a restricted area on the third floor of the Stasi archive, behind beige doors that run down the hall in identical rows. Like most of his colleagues, Tietze prefers to work alone. “I need peace to do this well,” he told me. Sometimes, he said, he concentrates so hard that he goes home with a headache at the end of the day. Yet he loves his job. It’s a combination of gaming and detective work. “You have to have fun doing it,” he said. “I have found many things that have made my eyes go wide.”

Puzzlers are a peculiar breed. They care more about pattern than content, composition than meaning. The shapes they arrange could be pieces of a tattered Rembrandt or a lost Gospel, but the whole matters less than the connection of its parts. Tietze is sixty-five and has been working in the archive for half his life. Short and round, with thick fingers and a bald head stubbled with gray, he moves with a stiff-jointed deliberation, never taking his eyes off the pieces. He transferred to this job three and a half years ago, for health reasons—most archival work requires too much filing and walking around—and has found that it suits him. He has a patient mind and an eye for shape and line. “The room may look chaotic, but developing a theme takes a while,” he said. “You think the corner is missing, and then you see, Oh, it’s there! It’s an ‘Aha!’ experience.”

The scraps on the table had been pulled from a brown paper sack the size of a large trash can. They were of varying colors, weaves, and thicknesses; some were printed on one side, others on both. Stasi agents probably tried to destroy files that were especially incriminating, but they didn’t have time to be too selective; they often just cleared the pages off their desks. Some documents were shredded, but the machines jammed one by one—they weren’t meant for mass destruction. Other documents were ripped into small pieces in order to be pulped, but that took too long. Eventually, the agents just tore pages in half or in quarters and threw them into whatever containers they could find, sometimes mixed with candy wrappers, apple cores, and other garbage. It was exhausting. The agents’ hands cramped and fingers swelled and skin got covered in paper cuts, and, in their haste, they left an inadvertent record of their work. Each sack was like a miniature archeological site: the scraps were layered inside like potsherds. If Tietze lifted them out in careful handfuls, a few strata at a time, the adjacent pieces often fit together.

Tietze pulled two scraps off the table and laid them alongside each other. Their torn edges matched, but not the typed words along the tear. He shook his head and tried another pair. Same problem. “Sometimes you say, ‘ Wunderbar! I can do this quickly,’ ” he said. “Other times, you work on the same pieces for ten or twelve days.” Tietze spoke in a low, muttering Berlin dialect. He was born and raised in the city but considers himself neither East German nor West German. In 1961, his father stood on the border just before the Wall went up and debated which side to be on. He chose the East. When the Wall came down, nearly thirty years later, Tietze watched on TV. “I couldn’t have imagined it,” he told me. “The next day, I went to work but nobody was there. Everyone was in West Berlin.”

In the years since, the reconstructed files have helped trace an alternate history of Germany. They span all four decades of the G.D.R., Hovestädt says, and cover everything from the Stasi’s investigation of a Nazi war criminal to agents’ infiltration of East and West German peace movements. They describe the persecution of prominent dissidents like Robert Havemann and Stefan Heym, and doping practices among East German athletes. They report on the activities of the West German terrorist Silke Maier-Witt, a member of the Baader-Meinhof gang who went into hiding in East Germany, and on an informant known as Schäfer, who infiltrated dissident groups in the G.D.R. The extent of Stasi spying came as a shock to Tietze at first, though he had lived in its midst most of his life. Yet he radiates no sense of impassioned purpose. He just comes to the office day after day, like the Stasi before him, and methodically reassembles what they destroyed.

As we talked, Tietze laid the matching halves of a page on a plastic mat crosshatched with graph lines. The page was from the Stasi division in charge of surveillance devices. Tietze is careful not to divulge information from the reconstructed pages to anyone, not even his family. A document might mention someone whom the Stasi spied on, and he has no right to that information. “These files are contaminated,” Dagmar Hovestädt told me. “They were compiled with constant violations of human rights. Nobody ever gave consent.” When the files were opened to the public, careful limits were put on how they could be accessed. People can request to see what the Stasi wrote about them, but not about anyone else. Every name in the file has to be redacted, save for the reader’s own and those of Stasi agents. The only exceptions are public figures, people who have consented to have their files released, and those who have been dead for more than thirty years. “The moral point is this: the Stasi don’t get to decide what we read,” Hovestädt said. “We decide.”

Tietze joined the torn halves with a thin strip of clear archival tape—the word Mittag came together along the tear—then flipped the page over and taped the other side. Working steadily like this for a year, he could piece together two or three thousand pages. All told, the puzzlers at the archive have reconstructed more than 1.7 million pages—both an astonishing feat and an undeniable failure. More than fifteen thousand sacks of torn files remain. In 1995, when the project was launched, it had a team of about fifty puzzlers. By 2006, the number had dwindled to a handful, as members retired or were reassigned to other agencies. It was clear, by then, that reconstructing files by hand was a fool’s errand. What was needed was a puzzling machine.

Bertram Nickolay, a Berlin-based engineer and expert in machine vision, remembers hearing about the puzzlers when the project began. He thought of his friend Jürgen Fuchs, an East German writer and dissident. Fuchs was arrested for “anti-state agitation” in 1976 and imprisoned for nine months at the infamous Hohenschönhausen compound, in Berlin. He had been trained as a social psychologist, and later wrote a detailed account of the Stasi methods in his book “ Vernehmungsprotokolle ” (“Interrogation Records”). Political prisoners like Fuchs were strip-searched, isolated, and kept awake for days at a time. Some were locked in rubber cells, outdoor cages, or basement lockers so damp that their skin began to rot. The end goal for Stasi interrogators, Fuchs wrote, was the “disintegration of the soul.”

When Fuchs was finally released, in 1977, after international protests, he was deported to West Berlin, where Nickolay first met him. But the threats on Fuchs’s life continued. In 1986, a bomb exploded by his front door as he was about to walk his daughter to school. (They were both unscathed but could have been killed if the timing were different.) When Fuchs died, in 1999, of a rare blood cancer, some East Germans suspected that the Stasi had deliberately exposed him to radiation while he was in prison. Two other dissidents from the same era, Rudolph Bahro and Gerulf Pannach, had also been imprisoned by the Stasi and died of rare cancers. Nickolay wondered if the Stasi archive had records of the plot against Fuchs. Could they be among the documents that were torn apart before the Wall fell?

“There were reports on television about a small team manually reconstructing the files,” Nickolay told me. “So I thought, This is a very interesting field for machine vision.” At the time, Nickolay was a lead engineer at a member institute of the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, the German technology giant that helped invent the MP3. With the right scanner and software, he reckoned, a computer could identify the fragments of a page and piece them together digitally. The human puzzlers at the archive could work only with documents torn into fewer than eight parts. They lifted out the biggest scraps and left the small ones behind—often more than half the contents of a sack. A computer could do better, Nickolay believed. It could reconstruct pages from even the smallest fragments, and search for images of missing pieces from other sacks. You just had to scan the fragments and save the images in a database.

The reality proved more frustrating. It took five years for the Stasi archive just to respond to Nickolay’s proposal. By 2003, the Fraunhofer team had performed a feasibility study and created a prototype program, later dubbed the e-Puzzler, that could reconstruct pages torn into as many as ten pieces. But it was another three years before the project was funded—a delay that Nickolay blames on a change in government. Then the team’s industrial partner, a subsidiary of Lufthansa, which had been tasked with designing the scanner for the project, dropped out. Scanning was supposed to be the easy part—even some home offices had high-resolution scanners by then. But the pieces had to be scanned on both sides simultaneously, with extreme precision. For images to fit together, their color and texture had to match perfectly, their edges align to within a pixel’s width. “Normal scanners can’t do that,” Nickolay said. “And, when we looked around, we realized that no scanner in the world could.”

The Fraunhofer team eventually found a scanner that could be retrofitted to do the job. But it couldn’t handle large batches of material. By 2014, the team had reassembled only twenty-three sacks of documents. It was an impressive achievement in its way—the e-Puzzler could now reconstruct pages torn into more than a hundred pieces—but the team had expected to reconstruct four hundred sacks. After the project came to a halt, in 2014, Fraunhofer declared it “successfully completed.” Others disagree. As a Stasi archivist put it, “Fifteen thousand bags, twenty-three reconstructed—you can’t call that a success.”

One afternoon, not long after I visited the Stasi archive, I went to see the successor to the e-Puzzler. Nickolay retired from Fraunhofer in 2022. He now works with a company called MusterFabrik Berlin, which is housed in an old piano factory in the Mitte district. He turned seventy-one this year but seems to have lost little of his drive. His pale features flushed pink as he led me past rows of computer workstations, and stray strands of his white hair dropped across his forehead. In the past five years, he said, MusterFabrik has used its scanner and a newly designed puzzler program to help reconstruct fragments of a Roman mural, documents from a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires which was destroyed by a bomb in 1994, and the papers of the polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. But its most ambitious project, the one likeliest to serve as a model for reconstructing the Stasi files, is in Cologne.

Fifteen years ago, the city’s municipal archive suddenly, catastrophically, collapsed, after excavations for a new subway undermined it. Ninety per cent of the building’s archival contents were buried beneath the rubble, including medieval manuscripts more than a thousand years old. The remains were covered in dirt and soaked and misshapen by groundwater. Unlike the Stasi documents, they hadn’t been ripped in half or into quarters and dropped into sacks one layer at a time. They were strewn, willy-nilly, among the building’s remains. The site wasn’t an archeological dig. It was an enormous pit with soggy puzzle pieces thrown into it.

More than three million fragments were eventually sifted from the rubble. A new archive was built, and for the past three years the city has been reconstructing the remains with MusterFabrik’s help. The fragments are scanned and saved on a server in the archive’s computer center, where the puzzling software leafs through them continuously, looking for matches. Jan Schneider, MusterFabrik’s head of project development, pulled up a sample of the Cologne database on his laptop and projected it on an oversized screen. It showed a constellation of more than a hundred thousand fragments, clustered like grains of sand in a Tibetan mandala. He sorted the fragments by size and color, then zoomed in on a few pieces. They were from a three-hundred-year-old manuscript, handwritten in Latin—you could see bits of flowing script on the pieces. It can take years for all the pieces of a page to be scanned, Schneider explained, since the remains are so scattered. But when the last piece is found the program combines it with the rest and sends the completed page to the archivists for review. He hit a key on his laptop. As we watched, a few scraps drifted loose from the mass of fragments onscreen and came together in a neat rectangle.

With a single scanner and a team of eight workers, the archive in Cologne has pieced together tens of thousands of fragments in the past two and a half years. Yet the scanner and software were never really the problem at the Stasi archive. The original e-Puzzler was already better than people at reconstructing files. It just wasn’t much faster. The fragments still had to be lifted from a sack, picked apart, unfolded, and flattened on the glass to be properly scanned. If the average worker needs five minutes to place and scan fifty fragments, scanning every scrap in the Stasi archive will take close to a million hours.

New technology could eventually speed up the process. Last year, students from universities in Germany, Switzerland, and the United States deciphered part of an ancient Roman scroll from a villa in Herculaneum. It had been burned by the heat from Mt. Vesuvius—the same blast that destroyed Pompeii. Using a CT scanner and an artificial-intelligence program, the students virtually unwrapped the scroll and traced the remnants of ink in the papyrus. A similar method could theoretically be used to digitally unfold the Stasi fragments. But for now the work still has to be done manually. No mechanical press or roller, no clever prosthesis can do it with the necessary accuracy. “We need a robot hand that doesn’t exist,” Schneider said.

As long as there are torn files left in sacks, Hovestädt says, the Stasi archive will piece them back together. In September, the archive put out a call for proposals to relaunch the digital reconstruction project. MusterFabrik was among the companies that were subsequently invited to present a proposal in person. The winner has yet to be chosen. Nickolay once believed that the fifteen thousand sacks could be reassembled in ten or twenty years, given the proper funding and personnel. He now doubts that the government has the stomach for it. “I think they never really wanted this project,” he told me. “We will let ourselves be surprised.”

It has been thirty-five years since the Wall fell. Are the files still worth reconstructing? Most of the leaders from that era have died, and the time of shocking revelations may be over. Screening the files of public servants was an act of “political hygiene,” David Gill told me, and opening the archive to the public brought justice for millions of East Germans. But how much can a country learn from its darkest history alone?

The last time I saw Salomea Genin, she brought out three bulging ring binders and plopped them onto a coffee table in front of me. She was just a minor operative, she said—the smallest of cogs in the Stasi machine—yet her handlers had written more than five hundred pages about her. “Only about fifty pages are of interest,” she said, waving a hand at the binders. Yet the edges of many pages were feathered with yellow place markers, the margins filled with her spidery script. Here and there, the paragraphs were flecked with redactions, but Genin didn’t mind. She remembered most of the people she had spied on, so she just scribbled their names above the black marks.

After her Stasi handler’s first visit in East Berlin, in 1964, the two of them met in her apartment every two weeks. “It wasn’t a question of talking about anything suspicious,” she said. “He just wanted to know everything about everyone.” At first, Genin told him about her friends and neighbors and co-workers at the electronics factory. Then her assignments grew more involved. She took a job as a reporter at the state radio station and informed on the journalists there. She later became an interpreter and a tour guide for the Ministry of Culture, where she was often assigned to visiting foreign dignitaries. Genin never married, but she had two sons after moving to East Germany, and her handler would sometimes talk to them when they came home from school. “I just told them that he was from State Security,” she said. “He was a pleasant man.”

As Genin’s standing with the Stasi improved, so did her life style. In 1966, she left her cold-water flat in Treptow for her first apartment in Mitte. “It was the latest of the late,” she told me. “It had a shower, built-in cupboards, and central heating.” She got a new Trabant after only five years on the waiting list—most people waited for a decade or more—and often travelled abroad. At first, she attributed these perks to her Jewish ancestry: as a Verfolgte des Nazi Regimes —a former target of the Nazi regime—she was at the front of the line for housing, early retirement, and other privileges. But she later learned that working for the Stasi had probably improved her status. “They gave it to me because I had been an informant,” she said. “I’m sure that I had half a dozen guardian angels looking after me.”

What Genin doesn’t say, and might not know, is how much harm was done by her duplicity. How many lives were destroyed by her seemingly innocuous words to her handler? The Stasi acted in the shadows, undermining lives from within. They blocked promotions and cut off academic studies. They ransacked apartments, planted pornography, and kept scraps of clothing for search dogs to sniff. They threatened families, questioned neighbors, and refused travel visas to people with dying loved ones abroad. If you were deemed especially suspect, you could be interrogated, deported, or imprisoned for months without trial.

More than once, Genin told me, she came close to seeing the Stasi for what they were. In 1964, she recalled, she was denounced at a Party meeting for speaking critically of the government. Afterward, she was demoted from reporter to translator at the radio station and forced to read out a public confession. “I just stood there and vomited in myself,” she told me. In 1976, when she was studying philosophy at Humboldt University, she almost failed a class for noting that some East German workers seemed just as alienated as their capitalist counterparts. Yet she returned to the fold again and again.

“You have to understand, this was my family,” she told me. “I had lived for this wonderful cause all my life, from the age of twelve. The Party was my Mummy and the Stasi were my Daddy.” I asked if she ever saw the Stasi apprehend someone based on the information she’d given. She shook her head. “If I’d seen that, I would have woken up to myself,” she said. “But I didn’t. I was simply an informant, and they wrote down what I told them.”

As a Stasi informant, Genin learned to blind herself to the reality around her. But even ordinary East Germans had to do the same. From the moment they started school, their actions were freighted with political consequence. Kindergartners sang Marxist-Leninist anthems. Teen-agers signed petitions denouncing the Prague Spring. Adults voted in every election, though only Socialist Unity Party candidates were on the ballot. Everyone marched in parades and hung flags from their porches, even if their friends or relatives were in a Stasi prison.

“Nobody was just a rebel or conformist,” Roland Jahn, the former dissident, wrote in his 2014 book, “ Wir Angepassten ” (“We Who Adapted”). Living in the G.D.R. was an unending Eiertanz —like dancing on a floor covered with eggs. The cost of dissent was so great, the fear so deep and unconscious, that people learned to unsee the Wall itself. “I can’t remember ever having a serious, detailed conversation about it,” Jahn wrote. “Not about the Wall, or the order to fire at those who tried to cross it, or those who died doing so. Not in the family, not among friends. Only occasionally, when the Wall appeared on West German television, would we turn to one another and shake our heads. Wasn’t it terrible that this existed? As if all of this was happening to other people and we weren’t held captive by the Wall ourselves.”

The new Germany would have blind spots of its own: panhandlers camped outside Mercedes showrooms, drug users passed out on subway platforms. On the eve of reunification, Helmut Kohl promised East Germans an economic future of blühende Landschaften —blossoming landscapes. But the West didn’t merge with the East so much as colonize it, dismantling its industries and cultural institutions, and drawing away many of its best young workers. In areas that were hardest hit, like Saxony-Anhalt, a sense of Ostalgie has taken hold—a nostalgia for the East. The economy was more equitable under the G.D.R., some say, communities more tightly woven, women more empowered. (Ninety per cent of women were employed in East Germany, versus only sixty per cent in West Germany.) Like the MAGA movement in the U.S., far-right groups like Alternative für Deutschland have recently flipped the script of liberal triumphalism. When lockdowns and mandatory Covid testing were imposed during the pandemic, they said it was like living under the Stasi.

The Stasi files offer a startling corrective to such accounts—like cataract surgery on a societal scale. “That’s why this archive is so important,” Elmar Kramer, a spokesperson at the archive, told me. “There was no freedom of the press in the G.D.R., no freedom of speech. There was a shoot-at-will order at the Wall. You can see it right there.” Yet the files, in their way, give an equally distorted view of German life. Once they were released, every moment was seen through the lens of a surveillance camera, every decision through a prism of complicity and betrayal. If government support for reconstructing the files has flagged, it may be because the story they tell is too black-and-white. With one stroke, the files divided East Germany in two—into victims and collaborators, when almost everyone had been a little of both.

“Stasi, Stasi, Stasi, always about the Stasi,” the historian Rainer Eckert, a former East German dissident and the author of the 2023 book “ Umkämpfte Vergangenheit ” (“Embattled Past”), told me. “About thirty million lived in East Germany at one time or another, and only a fraction worked with the Stasi. People say, ‘Where is my life in all this?’ ” Eckert was arrested and interrogated by the Stasi, accused of espionage, and fired from jobs and academic positions. Roland Jahn was expelled from university, sentenced to twenty-two months in prison (of which he served six), and then deported to West Germany. Yet neither man feels as if the dictatorship defined his life. “There were rules, yes, and there was the deadly Wall, but there was also freedom,” Jahn wrote in his autobiography. “And if you concentrated on that—on the small successes in everyday life—then life in the G.D.R. was bearable. How else could you come to terms with your self-image? How else could you live?”

No archive can truly capture a nation’s lived experience, no matter how many documents it contains. The Stasi files are like a history of the United States told through the annals of the F.B.I. and the C.I.A.: a succession of wiretaps, interrogations, political coups, and misinformation—an America as real as it is unrecognizable. And yet that dark, disorienting perspective is what makes the files essential. They’re the version of our history that we can’t admit to ourselves.

After the Arab Spring, in 2011, delegations from Tunisia and Egypt visited the Stasi archive, hoping to learn how they might contend with their own authoritarian pasts. But few countries have followed Germany’s example. Revolutionaries tend to keep a government’s secrets even after they’ve overthrown it. When the Soviet Union broke apart, in 1991, activists called for the release of the K.G.B. archives, but the Yeltsin government demurred. Seven years later, when Vladimir Putin became Prime Minister, there were few public records that could expose his role in Soviet repression, no surveillance transcripts or torture records to temper nostalgia for the Communist era. It came as no surprise, when the Russian Army invaded Ukraine two years ago, that archives were among its primary targets. More than five hundred libraries have been damaged or demolished, and military police have seized or destroyed K.G.B. records, Ukrainian archives, and books on Ukrainian resistance and independence movements. If you want to erase a country, start by erasing its memory.

More than three million people have seen their Stasi files since the archive opened, in 1992, and some thirty thousand new requests were submitted last year. “If you tell the employment bureau, ‘I lost my pension because the Stasi wouldn’t let me work like I wanted to’—well, anyone can say that,” Elmar Kramer told me. “But if you can find a document in the archive that says ‘So-and-So must be fired,’ that’s proof. It’s in black-and-white with a stamp on it.”

Those stories, more than any tale of double agents or government duplicity, are the heart of the Stasi files. They’re a reminder that “perfectly normal, decent people are capable of this,” as Dagmar Hovestädt put it. “By pretending that they’re evil, we forgo the lesson. We forget how close we are to being captured in the same situation.” The Stasi operated the largest intelligence network in the world, per capita, yet the people they spied on still outnumbered them more than fifty to one. Had East Germans rebelled en masse, nothing could have saved the system. “Dictatorships need the middle to function, and the vast majority of people are in the middle,” Hovestädt said. “They don’t stick up their heads.”

Salomea Genin did admit to her own complicity eventually, but her awakening was slow to come. She was waiting to watch the West German news on television one night, in the fall of 1982, when an ad came on for a documentary series on the rise of Hitler. Genin had always wondered how so many Germans could claim that they didn’t know what the Nazis were doing to their Jewish neighbors. How could they have been so schizophrenic? Now it struck her that she was no different. “My whole life, I had thought about this sentence of George Santayana’s, that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it,” she told me. “And suddenly I realized that it applied to me, too. That this socialism was not what it claimed to be. That it was, in fact, a police state—and, what’s more, I had helped to make it so.”

She fell into a “deep, dark hole” after that, she said. “I didn’t want to live.” Yet it was another seven years before she resigned from the Socialist Unity Party. By then, her sons had left East Germany to live in West Berlin, but Genin stayed where she was. “All my life, I’d been looking for a place to call my home,” she said. “And I finally had it.” Six months later, that country was gone. ♦

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By Zach Helfand

By Zadie Smith

Paris 2024 Olympic Marathon selection dramas, why Jessica Stenson gets the nod over Lisa Weightman

Sport Paris 2024 Olympic Marathon selection dramas, why Jessica Stenson gets the nod over Lisa Weightman

Selecting a marathon team is an unenviable task at the best of times — an issue that has reared its head in a big way for Australia's women's team ahead of the Paris Olympics.

Athletics Australia named Sinéad Diver, Genevieve Gregson and Jessica Stenson to its women's team after weeks of controversy and recriminations.

With six athletes all running under the qualification standard, Athletics Australia has had to make some tough calls, breaking the hearts of three athletes while fulfilling the dreams of three others.

Realistically, nobody was ever going to be happy.

Yet the debate in Australia has reached near-poisonous levels, with former Olympians wading in with their opinions and families being left "heartbroken".

Here's how it's come to this.

What are the Olympic qualification requirements?

National bodies are allowed to select as many as three runners in their marathon squad, as long as they all have achieved a time under the qualification standard within the allotted period — in this case by running a time of 2 hours, 26 minutes and 50 seconds between November 6, 2022, to May 5, 2024.

Incredibly, six Australian women all ran under that time: Diver, Gregson, Lisa Weightman, Isobel Batt-Doyle, Stenson and Eloise Wellings.

Objectively, the fairest way would be to select the three fastest runners to the squad.

But in marathon running, that's not always so straightforward.

After all, the very best runners only race two or three times a year — and not always against each other.

Simply put, there are too many variables on the road.

For example, a women's only race will overall be slower than a race in which men start at the same time, the men in the field essentially pace-making the women to a faster time (the women's only marathon world record is 2:16:16 — set by Peres Jepchirchir in London this year, with the fastest ever Tigst Assefa's 2:11:53 from Berlin in September last year).

Then there are weather conditions, the difficulty of the course, and the level of competition.

It makes selection something of a poisoned chalice.

Which Australians were selected?

Athletics Australia has named Diver, Gregson and Stenson as the three-woman squad to compete at the Games of the 33rd Olympiad. 

However, it caused quite a stir, with Weightman — who ran the third-fastest time in the qualification period — particularly aggrieved .

Had Weightman been selected, she would have become the first Australian athletics competitor to compete in five Olympics.

"I am of course disappointed by the decision given that I fought hard and fair to gain my qualification time," Weightman said in a statement.

"However, what I am most disappointed about is AA's own internal systems and procedures that have allowed this outcome and which, unless corrected, will negatively impact future Australian athletes and their legitimate claims to represent Australia."

Weightman's good friend and fellow Olympian Sally Pearson said she was "shocked" at the decision and described Athletics Australia as being "in crisis" in a column on news.com.au.

"This is about so much more than her [Weightman's] omission from the team," Pearson wrote.

"I'm disappointed with the national selection panel, but I'm more shocked at the integrity of Athletics Australia and how this has become a total farce."

The bitterness also blew over into social media.

Her husband, Lachlan McArthur, asked Stenson to take down an old photo of her standing with Weightman with her son after a race that was on her Twitter/X profile.

After Stenson changed her X cover photo, McArthur wrote: "Thank you @JessTrengove for taking down the photo. It is much appreciated. We have a heartbroken family here".

He then deleted his account.

So who was fastest?

Diver has the fastest time of an Australian woman in that period, her 2:21.34 on the flat Valencia course in December 2022 booking the 47-year-old Ireland-born runner her spot at a second-straight Olympics following her appearance in the Tokyo Games of 2021 .

It will make Diver, from the Irish-speaking Gaeltacht region of west County Mayo, Australia's oldest-ever athletics competitor at an Olympics, a record she already holds from Tokyo.

After Diver, things get very tight — the next four women's best times in the last 18 months can be split by only 58 seconds, or less than 1 per cent of their overall race time.

In fact, the times of Gregson (2:23:08), Weightman (2:23:15) and Batt-Doyle (2:23:27) are less than 30 seconds apart.

Given Gregson and Batt-Doyle both ran their times in the same race, that is a reasonable tie-breaker between the pair.

Crucially, one of Weightman's five marathons over the qualification period was also at that 2023 Valencia marathon, when she finished behind both Gregson and Batt-Doyle with a time of 2:24:18.

The same goes for Wellings, whose 2:25:47 was mighty impressive, but slower than Gregson, Batt-Doyle and Weightman under identical conditions at the 2023 Valencia event.

Weightman vs Stenson

The third-fastest Australian qualifier was Weightman, who ran 2:23:15 in Osaka in February last year — one of five marathons she ran in the qualification period, all of which she ran under the standard.

Those five marathons were five of the six fastest times she has ever run — it's hard to argue that the 45-year-old was anything other than in the best shape of her career.

Stenson, the 2022 Commonwealth Games champion, only ran two marathons in the qualification period, opening with a ninth-place finish at the 2022 New York Marathon in a hugely credible 2:27:27, before powering to a personal best time of 2:24:01 on the super-flat roads of Daegu, South Korea.

There was a good reason for Stenson's lack of activity though — the pregnancy and birth of her second child, which came just six months before her Daegu run.

One of Weightman's husband's arguments was that Weightman had beaten Stenson in a head-to-head seven times out of eight.

However, thanks to her 2022 Commonwealth Games victory, in terms of big events, Stenson perhaps has the edge.

Weightman says she appealed the decision to the National Sports Tribunal (NST), which returned the nomination decision to Athletics Australia.

In a statement printed by news.com.au, Stenson said: "The NST was critical of AA's handling of this nomination decision including its failure to properly understand or apply its own nomination criteria.

"Notwithstanding the NST's recommendation for AA to convene a new and independent selection committee to re-determine the matter (i.e. to avoid the risk of potential bias), AA's original selection committee simply re-affirmed its original decision."

What did Athletics Australia say?

In a statement last Thursday, Athletics Australia president Jane Flemming said that she understood the process was "distressing for athletes who miss selection" and that it was a "difficult task" made harder by the "unprecedented" depth in Australian distance running.

"Athletics Australia acknowledges the difficult task of Olympic nomination and selection where there are more athletes qualified than positions available," Flemming's statement read.

"The depth in women's marathon in Australia is to be applauded and is unprecedented and in previous years, selection has been much more straightforward.

"As an Olympian, I have seen decades of Olympic teams selected and it is not unusual for there to be debate over decisions of a selection panel … an appeals process exists for this reason.

"We understand this can be distressing for athletes who miss selection and these matters are often highly charged, however the independent body of selectors is made up of industry experts, who understand Athletics Australia's nomination policy and the nuances of the sport."

She wrote that Athletics Australia supported the selection panel and was "satisfied" that the policy was followed when nominating athletes for Paris.

"To date, some media and social media commentary regarding this selection has been baseless, unfounded and damaging to the sport and individuals involved," she wrote.

"Any allegations that Athletics Australia or Athletics Australia's selection panel has not acted with integrity is also defamatory, and simply not true.

"Our deepest sympathy goes to those athletes that have not been selected for Paris. 

"Athletes have trained for countless hours and dedicated their lives to this point, but with only three spots available, selectors rely on the selection criteria, which includes a combination of metrics and discretion, given that each marathon and the conditions in which they are raced are all different."

Gregson's heartbreak

Incidentally, Gregson has had her own history of selection battles with Athletics Australia.

In 2012, Gregson, then known by her maiden name, LaCaze, ran the qualification time for the 3,000m steeplechase for the London 2012 Games, two days after an Athletics Australia deadline — a deadline she said was impossible due to her college commitments in the United States.

Despite Athletics Australia's high-performance manager Eric Hollingsworth saying she should not compete, she was eventually allowed to do so.

She competed in the steeplechase in the next two Games, as well as in the 5,000m in Rio.

Gregson's steeplechasing career would end in heartache though, as the then-31-year-old ruptured her right Achilles tendon over the final water jump of the race in Tokyo.

After recovering, Gregson made the step up to marathon and nailed a superb time of 2:23:08 in Valencia, in December last year to put herself in contention.

What about countries that have loads of qualifiers?

Australia might have had a rough decision to make, but spare a thought for those in the east African powerhouse nations of Ethiopia and Kenya.

Ethiopia had an incredible 98 women run under the qualifying time of 2:26:50 during the qualification period, while Kenya had 66.

It was similar in the men's field: Ethiopia had 62 reach the qualifying standard of 2:08:10, while Kenya had 72.

With countries limited to just three entries, that's a lot of runners who have the potential to feel hard done by — especially given some of the odd choices that have been made in the past.

This year was no exception, with the Kenyan selection raising eyebrows for both squads.

Much of the consternation surrounded the inclusion of former world record holder Brigid Kosgei, who takes her spot alongside defending champion Peres Jepchirchir and Hellen Obiri.

Interestingly, only one of those three — Jepchirchir, who will be aiming to become the first woman to defend her Olympic marathon crown — recorded one of the three fastest times run by a Kenyan woman during the qualification period.

Obiri's fastest time during the period was the 55th fastest run by a Kenyan over the time period — albeit on a tough course at New York in 2022, and she did also claim back-to-back Boston titles in April — while Kosegi ran the ninth fastest time in a rapid London field in April , but fell off the back of the lead pack in doing so.

Kosgei has been in relatively poor form of late, only winning one of her last five marathons — and that was against weak opposition in Abu Dhabi.

Whereas her direct opponents for that third spot, Lokedi and Rosemary Wanjiru finished second in Boston and Tokyo respectively and can both feel incredibly hard done by.

But even they didn't record the fastest time by a Kenyan during the qualifying period — that was Ruth Chepngetich, who ran 2:15:37 in Chicago last October.

The Ethiopian team features world record holder Tigst Assefa, defending world champion Amane Beriso Shankule (who recorded the first and second fastest times of Ethiopian women this year), and Megertu Alemu, who ran the seventh-fastest time in coming fourth at London.

Eliud Kipchoge going for three in a row

On the men's side, Timothy Kiplagat also missed out on selection in favour of two-time defending champion Eliud Kipchoge — despite running the second-fastest time of 2024 in Tokyo.

Kipchoge would arguably have been a no-brainer in any case.

The distance-running legend could become the first person to win three gold medals in the Olympic marathon, and still ran the third-fastest time during the qualification period, winning Berlin in 2:02:42.

It also sets up the thrilling prospect of one final head-to-head with Ethiopian great Kenenisa Bekele, who earned his spot in the Ethiopia team after finishing second in London. 

The sight of two of long-distance running's greatest ever going at it once more on the biggest stage is one of the great stories of the Games. 

That being said, on either side of winning in Berlin, Kipchoge ran the two worst marathons of his career — finishing sixth in Boston in 2023 in what was his slowest ever time, and recording his lowest-ever marathon finishing position by coming 10th in Tokyo. 

His worst career performances have tended to be in hilly marathons — he's never run New York and his best result in Boston was that sixth place in 2023.

With the Paris course including a whopping 436m of elevation gain over the 42km, perhaps the authorities should have looked to results at New York and Boston, with 246 and 248m of elevation respectively as a better guide to performance.

Australia's men's marathon team didn't have the same degree of controversy as the women's.

Oceania record holder Brett Robinson and two-time Olympian Patrick Tiernan both booked their spots by running under the 2:08:10 qualifying time.

However, Liam Adams, who expected to qualify for the 80-man field on his ranking points after running 2:08:39 on the Gold Coast, has not been named.

Adams said he "was in complete shock" when he discovered the spots he thought he was placed in had been given to "universality places" .

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