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The Stasi
The East German Ministry of State Security, popularly known as the Stasi, was one of the largest and most intrusive secret police systems in world history. So extensive was the system of surveillance and control that in any given year throughout the 1970s and 1980s, about one in fifty of the 13 million East German adults were working for the Stasi either as an officer or as an informer. Drawing on original sources from the Stasi archives and the recollections of contemporary witnesses, The Stasi: Myth and Reality reveals the intricacies of the relationship between the Stasi enforcers, its agents and its targets/victims, and demonstrates how far the Stasi octopus extended its tentacles into people’s lives and all spheres of society. The origins and developments of this vast system of repression are examined, as well as the motivation of the informers and the ways in which they penetrated the niches of East German society. The final chapters assess the ministry’s failure to help overcome the GDR’s inherent structural defects and demonstrate how the Stasi’s bureaucratic procedures contributed to the implosion of the Communist system at the end of the 1980’s.
After the GDR
This volume represents the efforts of fifteen scholars from Europe and North America to work through the complex and sometimes compromising past and the current struggles that together define eastern German identity, society, and politics ten years after unification. Their papers offer an exemplary illustration of the variety of disciplinary methods and new source materials on which established and younger scholars can draw today to further differentiated understanding of the old GDR and the young Länder. In a volume that will interest students of German history, cultural studies and comparative politics, the authors show how utopian ideals quickly degenerated into a dictatorship that provo...
East German Foreign Intelligence
This edited book examines the East German foreign intelligence service (Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung, or HVA) as a historical problem, covering politics, scientific-technical and military intelligence and counterintelligence. The contributors broaden the conventional view of East German foreign intelligence as driven by the inter-German conflict to include its targeting of the United States, northern European and Scandinavian countries, highlighting areas that have previously received scant attention, like scientific-technical and military intelligence. The CIA’s underestimation of the HVA was a major intelligence failure. As a result, East German intelligence served as a stealth weapon aga...
Don't Need No Thought Control
The fall of the Berlin Wall is typically understood as the culmination of political-economic trends that fatally weakened the East German state. Meanwhile, comparatively little attention has been paid to the cultural dimension of these dramatic events, particularly the role played by Western mass media and consumer culture. With a focus on the 1970s and 1980s, Don’t Need No Thought Control explores the dynamic interplay of popular unrest, intensifying economic crises, and cultural policies under Erich Honecker. It shows how the widespread influence of (and public demands for) Western cultural products forced GDR leaders into a series of grudging accommodations that undermined state power to a hitherto underappreciated extent.
Cold Wars
A new interpretation of the Cold War from the perspective of the smaller and middle powers in Asia, the Middle East and Europe.
Bringing Culture to the Masses
This text explores how cultural life in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) was strictly controlled by the ruling party, the SED, through attempts to dictate the way people spent their free time. It shows how people's cultural life in the GDR developed a dynamic of its own.
Nationalism and Populism
Nationalism was declared to be dead too early. A postnational age was announced, and liberalism claimed to have been victorious by the end of the Cold War. At the same time postnational order was proclaimed in which transnational alliances like the European Union were supposed to become more important in international relations. But we witnessed the rise a strong nationalism during the early 21st century instead, and right wing parties are able to gain more and more votes in elections that are often characterized by nationalist agendas. This volume shows how nationalist dreams and fears alike determine politics in an age that was supposed to witness a rather peaceful coexistence by those who...
Radical Right Populism in Germany
This book provides a comprehensive analysis of radical right populism in Germany. It gives an overview of historical developments of the phenomenon and its current appearance. It examines three of the main far-right organizations in Germany: the radical right populist party AfD (Alternative for Germany), Pegida (Patriotic Europeans against the Islamification of the Occident), and the Identitarian Movement. The book investigates the positions of these groups as expressed in programmes, publications, and statements of party leaders and movement activists. It explores their history, ideologies, strategies, and their main activists and representatives, as well as the overlap between the groups. ...
Sport under Communism
Based on original Stasi and Communist Party archival sources, this book uncovers why East Germany was for two decades running one of the most successful nations in the Summer and Winter Olympics, exploring how the central elite sports system was beset by internal tensions and disputes.
