Secrecy classifications reveal official uncertainty, not just hidden truths.

Evidence

Documents were sometimes marked geheim because of the magnitude of a problem, at other times because officials could not agree on a shared sense of what the problems were. Rather than secreted truths about the state, they point to sites of unease, anticipatory warnings of emergent movement among subject populations (what Raymond Williams might even include as “structures of feeling”) of resentments that may not yet have had a name. As Frederick Barth once observed, secrets do more than sanctify—they invoke deeper secrets of their own. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 168

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the declared reading purpose on epistemic anxieties and colonial commonsense—this repositions secrecy as a symptom of epistemic unease rather than a vector of hidden truth.
• DEFINE: Introduces the interpretive frame for ‘geheim’ classification as sites of unease, not covert knowledge.