Hello and welcome to The Looking Glass, WBGS' very own Academic Blog. This year we are planning to breathe new life into this amazing blog as the Academic Head Boy team for 2025- 2026! However, at the Looking Glass we need your help to catapult this blog into it's GOLDEN AGE. We need your articles, your essays, your opinions and your finest work to MAKE THE LOOKING GLASS GREAT AGAIN! If you have read something interesting or watched something that sparked a thought on social media - WRITE ABOUT IT! If you entered a competition, however big or small - WRITE ABOUT IT! If you are interested in a specific field, issue or period - WRITE ABOUT IT! If you have produced artwork, a piece of music or creative writing - WE WILL PUBLISH IT! Your creative skills have been called to action - now we must muster to create, discover and explore. You are the creative minds of the future. The Plato's, the Newtons, the Angelo's, the Nietzsche's. This is your calling. This is Y...
[Henry's essay was victorious in the school's History Essay Prize 2021, in the Sixth Form Category] HENRY PEART The Stasi - perhaps the greatest and most efficient secret police agency ever to have existed - spied on and tormented nearly the entire population of the German Democratic Republic (GDR, also "East Germany") from 1950-1990, and successfully kept an incredibly unpopular government in power for 40 years. However, the days of the police state (in Western Europe at least) are over, and so the questions that arise are those of how we rehabilitate those who have had their lives destroyed by the Stasi, and how we rehabilitate those torturers and the complex web of informants that made the police state a reality. Perhaps more importantly, how should we judge the Stasi through our modern lens of constant criticism of the past, and is the current German state doing enough to make up for historical state-sponsored horrors? This essay will provide a brief overview of t...