A state of secrecy: Stasi informers and the culture of surveillance
Secret police agencies such as the East German Ministry for State Security kept enormous quantities of secrets about their own citizens, relying heavily on human forms of data collection in the form of informants. To date little is known about the complicated and conflicted lives of informers, who o...
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| Format: | Print Book |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Lincoln
Potomac Books, an imprint of the University of Nebraska Press
[2021]
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| In: | Year: 2021 |
| Online Access: |
Inhaltsverzeichnis (Verlag) |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Book acquisition: | Place book order |
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| Parallel Edition: | Electronic
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| Summary: | Secret police agencies such as the East German Ministry for State Security kept enormous quantities of secrets about their own citizens, relying heavily on human forms of data collection in the form of informants. To date little is known about the complicated and conflicted lives of informers, who often lived in a perpetual state of secrecy. This is the first study of its kind to explore this secret surveillance society, its arcane rituals, and the secret lives it fostered. Through a series of interlocking, in-depth case studies of informers in literature and the arts, A State of Secrecy seeks answers to the question of how the collusion of the East German intelligentsia with the Stasi was possible and sustainable. It draws on extensive original archive research conducted in the BStU (Stasi Records Agency), as well as eyewitness testimony, literature, and film, and uses a broad array of methods from biography and life writing, sociology, cultural studies, cultural and literary history to political science, surveillance, and intelligence studies. In teasing out the various kinds of entanglements of intellectuals with power during the Cold War, it presents a microhistory of the covert activities of those writers who colluded with the secret police. "A State of Secrecy: Stasi Informers and the Culture of Surveillance presents a series of five interlaced, in-depth biographical studies from across the spectrum of writers-turned-spies recruited by the Stasi" |
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| Item Description: | Quellen- und Literaturverzeichnis: Seite 255-265 |
| Physical Description: | xl, 275 Seiten, 22 Seiten Tafeln Illustrationen |
| ISBN: | 9781640123793 |