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This chapter discusses that traditional espionage using human spies peaked in Germany in the years 1945-1961. It explains two goals in conducting espionage in East Germany: to provide warning of any attack on Western Europe by the Soviet army, and to use the DDR's (Deutsche Demokratische Republik) connections with the Soviet Union to penetrate the latter. It also discusses the large programmes of arrests carried out by the Stasi of large numbers of Western spies and anti-Communist resistance fighters. It explains that despite losing many of its sources, the CIA claims that it achieved great success in Germany that resulted from the number of their spies and the depth of their penetration of East Germany's ministries, factories, political parties, armed forces, and Western services. It adds that the open border in Berlin allowed the Western secret services to fully exploit flight from the SED regime and resistance to it.

The Epilogue tackles 1989 and its aftermath, mostly in terms of the manifold forms of the reassertion of private life in the 1990s. How and why private life has featured so prominently in post-1989 memory-making is the main focus of this final section. It dovetails with the book's overall aim, which is to investigate the changing meaning of the private sphere across a variety of fields, ranging from law to photography, religion to interior decoration, family life to memoir literature, and to point to the myriad ways that private life was articulated and staged by citizens living in communist society.

Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s Das Leben der Anderen shows surveillance by the Stasi as an integral part of the East German past. Yet surveillance is not solely achieved through sight, but more importantly through sophisticated methods of eavesdropping. Aural surveillance is the focus of this chapter, which uses Michel Foucault’s Panopticon as the basis for analyzing the power relations between observer and observed, and how the observed internalizes the system of oppression. This chapter explores the two functions of sound in the film: sound as a means of oppression, and at the same time as a vehicle to overcome it.

Turns to the counter‐measures to the open border in the fifties, adopted by East German authorities forced to walk a tightrope between repression and liberalization, either of which could accelerate flights to the West. The regime's inbuilt tendency to identify ideological factors and conspiracy theories as motives was coupled with a blind spot to the fundamental reasons driving away its citizenry. Instead, the apparatus was often blamed for the superficial handling of policy. Schemes in the early 1950s to recruit West Germans proved fanciful. More problematic was the drastic curtailment of legal travel to the Federal Republic in 1952, which petitions reveal to have caused considerable internal discontent, only partially defused by travel liberalization following the June 1953 uprising. Certain key groups such as the intelligentsia were bought off with privileges which antagonized other sections of the population. The author's research also reveals the importance of ‘legal’ defections on holiday visas in the mid‐1950s, and of the criminalization of Republikflucht in December 1957 in shifting the pattern of flights to Berlin as the easy outlet to the West. The chapter finishes by showing the police and Stasi's frantic efforts to seal off Greater Berlin with a human cordon in 1960, followed by the final decision in 1961 to resort to a physical wall.

Uses petitions to the Security section of the East German communist party to monitor the Wanderlust of East Germans seeking to take advantage of the travel reforms enacted in the wake of Ostpolitik in the early 1970s. The fact that only East Germans with western relatives could partake of these exceptions created a two‐tier mentality in the GDR, undermining egalitarian claims. The Stasi's involvement in vetting travellers is considered, and the paradox that ‘regime‐carriers' such as soldiers and teachers were least likely to be granted travel to the West, generating resentments against punishment for loyalty. The chapter then proceeds to the more serious step of applications to leave the country once and for all, and the Stasi's attempts to stifle what became a nascent civil rights movement in the 1980s. It concludes by considering the tensions which arose between emigration seekers and reformers who wanted to stay in the GDR to work from within—rifts which have left their mark in the historiography of East German dissidence.

This chapter introduces the challenges that theatre presented to those seeking to control it in the GDR. It argues that an inclusive approach is necessary in order to understand GDR theatre censorship, as a complex system of controls and rewards helped to constitute how theatrical processes worked. It relates this approach to theories of constitutive censorship, drawing particularly on the work of Pierre Bourdieu. The chapter goes on to explore the origins and implications of the GDR authorities' denial of censorship, showing how a euphemistic discourse evolved to describe the controls on culture. It introduces the key institutions involved in theatre censorship, explaining how the controls were rooted in theatres themselves. Stasi informers were just one part of this internal network. The final sections outline the source materials, methods, and structure of the book.

One club towered above all others in the final decade of East German football. Berliner FC Dynamo (BFC), the team sponsored by the secret police (Stasi), won the league title for ten straight seasons between 1979 and 1988, often in highly controversial circumstances. BFC’s success triggered unprecedented nationwide protests. This essay examines these protests, situating BFC’s hegemony in the complex web of domestic club rivalries and the transnational framework of Cold War sport. The BFC problem symbolized a deep popular disillusionment with “existing socialism” and ultimately prefaced the demise of Communist rule in 1989.

A monolithic intentionality, the unity and the purity of the party (and ideally of the whole population), was the best way to move socialism forward on its inevitable path to communism. This chapter describes the organizational principles understood by the party as assuring central control, the principles of democratic centralism and central planning. Socialist consciousness, the Marxist-Leninist way of differentiating and integrating the world, also needed to be produced substantively the vast propaganda apparatus of the party conducted a politics of education. Since the party assumed that the class enemy would aim at interfering with this task, the smooth operation of the propaganda apparatus needed to be safeguarded against “sabotage” and the “soddening” influence of the class-enemies' attempts to interfere in the party's project. The party state employed a politics of disablement and disarticulation, trying to prevent the GDR's populations from having access to certain ideas or people. Furthermore, this chapter discusses the Stasi and the ways in which it figured into the party's project of creating a monolithic intentionality.

This chapter provides an understanding of how particular understandings become stabilized, are maintained, and decay among a particular set of people. It investigates the structure and dynamics of the authority networks in which these people operate. It explores the principles according to which officers in socialist East Germany learned to ascribe authority over their political understandings to others and describes how the structure of their networks of authority was influenced by the organizational cultures and structures of Stasi. The open border between both parts of Germany, together with West Germany's refusal to recognize an independent GDR citizenship, implies that those people who felt socialism to be insufferable could leave the country without many of the more traumatic consequences that refugee status usually entails. Furthermore, this chapter analyzes the discursive cultures that characterize these networks because the very precondition for understandings to be recognized is that they are allowed to emerge and develop in interaction.

This chapter describes and analyzes the means used by the secret police to control the formation of dissident groups and their activities in socialist East Germany. It interprets these efforts of the Stasi as a particular form of politics undertaken with the intention to prevent, hinder, or undo the formation of party-critical institutions. These efforts were oriented and directed by the party state's political understandings about how dissident activities come about. This chapter is devoted to the exploration of “PID/PUT/'opposition'” theory and its institutionalization in rules and regulations as well as in actual practices. It shows how this theory acquired credibility among party officials and Stasi officers within the international context in which it was developed and the first cases to which it was applied. Analyzing the relationship between the Stasi's guidance officers and their informants leads to the question of how socialism produces knowledge about itself and how this knowledge informs actions to maintain its institutional order, that is, in the language of political epistemology, to engage in self-politics.

German figure skater and Olympic darling Katarina Witt is the focus of this chapter. Witt was trained at an early age as a figure skater in the then East German sporting program. As a successful athlete, Witt was afforded a lifestyle significantly better than the average East German citizen and was able to travel and enjoy Western culture in ways her fellow East Germans could not. However, her sport stardom also left her under the control of the East German government and a target of the Stasi. After the fall of the Berlin War, Witt was able to successfully travel and compete around the world, gaining greater recognition around the world, and representing a new united Germany.

Looking at East Germany (or the German Democratic Republic, GDR), Oliver Bange points out how intelligence gathering and analysis under dictatorship is hindered by mirror-imaging the adversary’s intentions, and thereby misdirecting an expensive intelligence effort to futile ends, while consuming precious, limited material and human means. Namely, the GDR, convinced that it had built a truly socialist society whose only threat lay in external states, led the ruling decision-makers to chronically underestimate the possibility of dissent within their own society. As a result, intelligence efforts were expended on collecting information about “counterrevolution” initiatives from the West—a misguided anxiety, as détente-minded politicians on the other side of the Iron Curtain had long deserted the cause of liberating those under Communist rule. The East German regime, here as elsewhere, undermined its own security through a lack of self-questioning and subordination to doctrine.

Metadata has jumped from the specialist vernacular of the archivist and programmer to public discourse in the wake of the Snowden revelations. Yet the precise nature and import of this seemingly technical artifact remains dimly understood. This chapter will undertake a cold war archaeology of metadata, from analogue information gathered by the East German Stasi to the born digital data accessed by the NSA and GCHQ. Metadata is a key cipher for the contemporary technocultural condition, and the chapter offers a case study of broader shifts in techne (the constitutive relationship between the human and technology) and in labouring practices as afforded by our data-infused digital environment. The chapter provides a concise history of metadata as highly structured data for the information discovery of data objects. Changing surveillance practices reflect the increasingly fine granularity of the digital human to the extent that now we can be considered as data objects. The degree to which this manifests an ontological shift is addressed in relation to philosophical debates about materiality and the nonhuman. It also illustrates a changing ecosystem for new kinds of informational politics. The chapter concludes by reconceptualising the persistent generation of born-digital metadata via Simondon.

This chapter examines how race in America was depicted in East Germany by focusing on the life of African American cartoonist and journalist Oliver Wendell Harrington. Harrington, who used his caricatures and writings to fight racism and colonialism worldwide, sought political asylum in East Berlin in November 1961 after his good friend and fellow writer, Richard Wright, died in Paris. When he criticized GDR cultural policies restricting expression and travel by artists and intellectuals, the Stasi (the East German secret service) began to spy on him, and used informants to monitor his activities. The chapter looks at Harrington’s contact with African Americans who were members of the Communist Party of the United States, upon their visit to East Germany. It also considers his insights into the perspective of the African American left and the GDR’s views on race, the African American civil rights movement, and the African national liberation struggle.

This chapter examines the repression and violence in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). It discusses the support of Soviet Union forces to the German communist dictatorship and the establishment of the State Security Service or Stasi. It also analyses how East Germans were involved with, were affected by, and challenged or helped to sustain, these structures of power and forces of repression. This chapter also highlights the self-representations of many East Germans that sought to stress that GDR was not all about repression and terror and describes the life courses of the Free German Youth (FDJ) generation.

What stories are told, and ultimately tellable, has consequences for our ability to imagine the world otherwise. This chapter examines in-depth a particular story told 25 years in retrospect by an East German dissident about a book that he had hidden from the Stasi and that ultimately disappeared. After the wall opened, the narrator reads his Stasi file. Most remarkable to him was what was not there: there was no mention of the stolen book. The narrator invites me, his listener, into a world of intrigue where the stakes are high. Despite not knowing how the book disappeared, it is clear that with its discovery, he could have been jailed for years. The story hinges on a moment in which the narrator was not present and requires a leap from both teller and audience. Ultimately, it delivers its punch from a contemplation of what did not happen, an alternative imagined (yet once fully possible) future that would have followed on the heels of any official reporting of the hidden book. The story conveys much about the dissident, even while it offers insight into a world beyond any one individual

After establishing the main arguments and stakes of the overall project, the introduction lays out the evolving power structures of Communist East Germany to explain who was responsible for the destruction of the University Church and why. Rejecting the common monolithic explanation that only SED party secretary Walter Ulbricht and local power player Paul Fröhlich destroyed the intact Gothic church, it reveals that a much larger mechanism of compliance and even enthusiasm was necessary to bring about this act of cultural barbarism, from city authorities, the university, and urban planners whose often banal motives (the desire for modern facilities, the dream of building the modern city, etc.) played just as important a role. After looking to Stasi collaboration and the grayness in individual biographies, it identifies the engaged public, the diverse populace that opposed the demolition with great verve to the end.