Full Description
The East German Ministry for State Security stood for Stalinist oppression and all-encompassing surveillance. The "shield and sword of the party," it secured the rule of the Communist Party for more than forty years, and by the 1980s it had become the largest secret-police apparatus in the world, per capita. Jens Gieseke tells the story of the Stasi, a feared secret-police force and a highly professional intelligence service. He inquires into the mechanisms of dictatorship and the day-to-day effects of surveillance and suspicion. Masterful and thorough at once, he takes the reader through this dark chapter of German postwar history, supplying key information on perpetrators, informers, and victims. In an assessment of post-communist memory politics, he critically discusses the consequences of opening the files and the outcomes of the Stasi debate in reunified Germany. A major guide for research on communist secret-police forces, this book is considered the standard reference work on the Stasi and has already been translated into a number of Eastern European languages.
Contents
Preface Preface to the 2011 edition Introduction: Ten Years and Ten Days Chapter 1. Antifascism - Stalinism - Cold Civil War: Origins and Influences, 1945 to 1956 Chapter 2. The Safest GDR in the World - The Driving Forces of Stasi Growth Chapter 3. The Unofficial Collaborator - A New Type of Informer Chapter 4. Blanket Surveillance? State Security in East German Society Chapter 5. Resistance - Opposition - Persecution Chapter 6. Wolf and Co. - MfS Operations Abroad Chapter 7. Final Crisis and Collapse, 1989-90 Chapter 8. Legacy - Aufarbeitung - Culture of Memory: The Second Life of the Stasi Notes Select Bibliography
