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The History Of The Stasi
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Book Synopsis The History of the Stasi by : Jens Gieseke
Download or read book The History of the Stasi written by Jens Gieseke and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2014-01-30 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Stasi written by John O. Koehler and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2008-08-05 with total page 478 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this gripping narrative, John Koehler details the widespread activities of East Germany's Ministry for State Security, or "Stasi." The Stasi, which infiltrated every walk of East German life, suppressed political opposition, and caused the imprisonment of hundreds of thousands of citizens, proved to be one of the most powerful secret police and espionage services in the world. Koehler methodically reviews the Stasi's activities within East Germany and overseas, including its programs for internal repression, international espionage, terrorism and terrorist training, art theft, and special operations in Latin America and Africa. Koehler was both Berlin bureau chief of the Associated Press during the height of the Cold War and a U.S. Army Intelligence officer. His insider's account is based on primary sources, such as U.S. intelligence files, Stasi documents made available only to the author, and extensive interviews with victims of political oppression, former Stasi officers, and West German government officials. Drawing from these sources, Koehler recounts tales that rival the most outlandish Hollywood spy thriller and, at the same time, offers the definitive contribution to our understanding of this still largely unwritten aspect of the history of the Cold War and modern Germany.
Download or read book The Firm written by Gary Bruce and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-07-01 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on previously classified documents and on interviews with former secret police officers and ordinary citizens, The Firm is the first comprehensive history of East Germany's secret police, the Stasi, at the grassroots level. Focusing on Gransee and Perleberg, two East German districts located north of Berlin, Gary Bruce reveals how the Stasi monitored small-town East Germany. He paints an eminently human portrait of those involved with this repressive arm of the government, featuring interviews with former officers that uncover a wide array of personalities, from devoted ideologues to reluctant opportunists, most of whom talked frankly about East Germany's obsession with surveillance. Their paths after the collapse of Communism are gripping stories of resurrection and despair, of renewal and demise, of remorse and continued adherence to the movement. The book also sheds much light on the role of the informant, the Stasi's most important tool in these out-of-the-way areas. Providing on-the-ground empirical evidence of how the Stasi operated on a day-to-day basis with ordinary people, this remarkable volume offers an unparalleled picture of life in a totalitarian state.
Book Synopsis The Stasi Poetry Circle by : Philip Oltermann
Download or read book The Stasi Poetry Circle written by Philip Oltermann and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2022-02-15 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The extraordinary true story of the Stasi's poetry club: Stasiland and The Lives of Others crossed with Dead Poets Society.'A magnificent book . . . at once touching, exquisite, devastating and extraordinary.'PHILIPPE SANDS, author of East West Street and The Ratline'A vivid, funny, and imperturbable portrait of Soviet Russia's most loyal satellite.'NELL ZINKBerlin, 1982. Morale is at rock bottom in East Germany as the spectre of an all-out nuclear war looms. The Ministry for State Security is hunting for creative new weapons in the war against the class enemy - and their solution is stranger than fiction. Rather than guns, tanks, or bombs, the Stasi develop a programme to fight capitalism through rhyme and verse, winning the culture war through poetry - and the result is the most bizarre book club in history.Consisting of a small group of spies, soldiers and border guards - some WW2 veterans, others schoolboy recruits - the 'Working Group of Writing Chekists' met monthly until the Wall fell. In a classroom adorned with portraits of Lenin, they wrote their own poetry and were taught verse, metre, and rhetoric by East German poet Uwe Berger. The regime hoped that poetry would sharpen the Stasi's 'party sword' by affirming the spies' belief in the words of Marx and Lenin, as well as strengthening the socialist faith of their comrades. But as the agents became steeped in poetry, revelling in its imaginative ambiguity, the result was the opposite. Rather than entrenching State ideology, they began to question it - and following a radical role reversal, the GDR's secret weapon dramatically backfired.Weaving unseen archival material and exclusive interviews with surviving members, Philip Oltermann reveals the incredible hidden story of a unique experiment: weaponising poetry for politics. Both a gripping true story and a parable about creativity in a surveillance state, this is history writing at its finest.
Download or read book The Stasi written by Mike Dennis and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-07-30 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Stasiland written by Anna Funder and published by Odyssey Editions. This book was released on 2015-10-29 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stasiland tells true stories of people who heroically resisted the communist dictatorship of East Germany, and of people who worked for its secret police, the Stasi. Internationally hailed as a classic, it is ‘fascinating, entertaining, hilarious, horrifying and very important’ (Tom Hanks) and ‘a heartbreaking, beautifully written book.’ (Claire Tomalin). East Germany was one of the most intrusive surveillance states of all time. One in 7 people spied on their friends, family and colleagues. In ‘the most humane and sensitive way’ (J.M. Coetzee) Funder tells the true stories of four people who had the extraordinary courage to refuse to collaborate with the Stasi, and the price they paid. She meets Miriam Weber, who was imprisoned at 16 after scaling the Berlin Wall. She drinks with the legendary “Mik Jegger” of the Eastern Bloc who was ‘disappeared’. And she finds former Stasi men who defend their regime long past its demise, and yearn for the second coming of Communism. Stasiland won the Samuel Johnson Prize for best non-fiction published in English in 2004. It was a finalist for the Guardian First Book Award, the W.H. Heinemann Award, the Index Freedom of Expression Awards, The Age Book of the Year Awards, the Queensland Premier’s Literary Award and the Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature (Innovation in Writing). It is read in schools and universities in many countries, and has been adapted for CD and the stage by The National Theatre, London.
Download or read book Stasi written by John Christian Schmeidel and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2007-09-12 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a fascinating new examination of one of the most feared and efficient secret services the world has ever known, the Stasi. The East German Stasi was a jewel among the communist secret services, the most trusted by its Russian mother organization the KGB, and even more efficient. In its attempt at ‘total coverage’ of civil society, the Ministry for State Security came close to realizing the totalitarian ideal of a political police force. Based on research in archival files unlocked just after the fall of the Berlin Wall and available to few German and Western readers, this volume details the Communist Party’s attempt to control all aspects of East German civil society, and sets out what is known of the regime’s support for international terrorism in the 1970s and 1980s. STASI will be of much interest to students of intelligence studies, German politics and international relations.
Download or read book The Grey Men written by Ralph Hope and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-05-06 with total page 389 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ‘Fascinating and powerful.’ Sunday Times What do you do with a hundred thousand idle spies? By 1990 the Berlin Wall had fallen and the East German state security service folded. For forty years, they had amassed more than a billion pages in manila files detailing the lives of their citizens. Almost a hundred thousand Stasi employees, many of them experienced officers with access to highly personal information, found themselves unemployed overnight. This is the story of what they did next. Former FBI agent Ralph Hope uses present-day sources and access to Stasi records to track and expose ex-officers working everywhere from the Russian energy sector to the police and even the government department tasked with prosecuting Stasi crimes. He examines why the key players have never been called to account and, in doing so, asks if we have really learned from the past at all. He highlights a man who continued to fight the Stasi for thirty years after the Wall fell, and reveals a truth that many today don’t want spoken. The Grey Men comes as an urgent warning from the past at a time when governments the world over are building an unprecedented network of surveillance over their citizens. Ultimately, this is a book about the present.
Download or read book The Stasi written by David Childs and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-07-27 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Stasi were among the most successful security and intelligence services in the Cold War. Behind the Berlin Wall, colleagues, friends, husbands and wives, informed on each other. Stasi chief, General Mielke, prided himself on this situation. Under Marcus Wolf, Stasi agents were spectacularly successful in gaining entry into the West German Establishment and NATO. Some remain undiscovered. Now, for the first time in English, two British experts reveal how the Stasi operated. Based on a wealth of sources, including interviews with former Stasi officers and their victims, the book tells a fascinating yet frightening story of unbridled power, misguided idealism, treachery, widespread opportunism and lonely courage.
Download or read book God's Spies written by Elisabeth Braw and published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. This book was released on 2019-09-17 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The real-life cloak-and-dagger story of how East Germany’s notorious spy agency infiltrated churches here and abroad East Germany only existed for a short forty years, but in that time, the country’s secret police, the Stasi, developed a highly successful “church department” that—using persuasion rather than threats—managed to recruit an extraordinary stable of clergy spies. Pastors, professors, seminary students, and even bishops spied on colleagues, other Christians, and anyone else they could report about to their handlers in the Stasi. Thanks to its pastor spies, the Church Department (official name: Department XX/4) knew exactly what was happening and being planned in the country’s predominantly Lutheran churches. Yet ultimately it failed in its mission: despite knowing virtually everything about East German Christians, the Stasi couldn’t prevent the church-led protests that erupted in 1989 and brought down the Berlin Wall.
Book Synopsis Seduced by Secrets by : Kristie Macrakis
Download or read book Seduced by Secrets written by Kristie Macrakis and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2008-03-17 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More fascinating than fiction, Seduced by Secrets takes the reader inside the real world of one of the most effective and feared spy agencies in history. The book reveals, for the first time, the secret technical methods and sources of the Stasi (East German Ministry for State Security) as it stole secrets from abroad and developed gadgets at home, employing universal, highly guarded techniques often used by other spy and security agencies. Seduced by Secrets draws on secret files from the Stasi archives, including CIA-acquired material, interviews and friendships, court documents, and unusual visits to spy sites, including "breaking into" a prison, to demonstrate that the Stasi overestimated the power of secrets to solve problems and created an insular spy culture more intent on securing its power than protecting national security. It recreates the Stasi's secret world of technology through biographies of agents, defectors, and officers and by visualizing James Bond-like techniques and gadgets. In this highly original book, Kristie Macrakis adds a new dimension to our understanding of the East German Ministry for State Security by bringing the topic into the realm of espionage history and exiting the political domain.
Download or read book Security Empire written by Molly Pucci and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2020-01-01 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A compelling examination of the establishment of the secret police in Communist Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Eastern Germany This book examines the history of early secret police forces in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany in the aftermath of the Second World War. Molly Pucci delves into the ways their origins diverged from the original Soviet model based on differing interpretations of communism and local histories. She also illuminates the difference between veteran agents who fought in foreign wars and younger, more radical agents who combatted "enemies of communism" in the Stalinist terror in Eastern Europe.
Book Synopsis The People's State by : Mary Fulbrook
Download or read book The People's State written by Mary Fulbrook and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2008-12-02 with total page 470 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What was life really like for East Germans, effectively imprisoned behind the Iron Curtain? The headline stories of Cold War spies and surveillance by the secret police, of political repression and corruption, do not tell the whole story. After the unification of Germany in 1990 many East Germans remembered their lives as interesting, varied, and full of educational, career, and leisure opportunities: in many ways “perfectly ordinary lives.” Using the rich resources of the newly-opened GDR archives, Mary Fulbrook investigates these conflicting narratives. She explores the transformation of East German society from the ruins of Hitler's Third Reich to a modernizing industrial state. She examines changing conceptions of normality within an authoritarian political system, and provides extraordinary insights into the ways in which individuals perceived their rights and actively sought to shape their own lives. Replacing the simplistic black-and-white concept of “totalitarianism” by the notion of a “participatory dictatorship,” this book seeks to reinstate the East German people as actors in their own history.
Book Synopsis The History of the Stasi by : Antonella Colonna Vilasi
Download or read book The History of the Stasi written by Antonella Colonna Vilasi and published by AuthorHouse. This book was released on 2015-03-09 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The “Stasi” meant to East Germany, and historically means to the entire world, four decades of repression and prosecution carried out in the name of justice, which only ended in 1989. The word relates to the special secret police agency that was founded on February 8, 1950, by its first executive, Wilhelm Zaisser, and took the complete name of “Ministerium für StaatSichereit” or MfS (Ministry for State Security), which Stasi is the abbreviated form resulting from its phonetic contraction. It was formally dependent on the government, but actually referred to the intelligence of the SED Central Committee. The very purpose of the Stasi was to endorse and impose the power of the SED by catching and destroying any dissident man or woman who tried to escape, plot, and work against the party or, simply, was differently thinking. Every little suspect could turn to the evidence of a crime against the government, either being real or nonexisting; any single attempt of rebellion should be prevented not to turn to real uprising. The way to make it possible was the careful monitoring of the population with the utmost secrecy to the purpose of collecting as much information as possible about individuals.
Book Synopsis The Fall of the GDR by : David Childs
Download or read book The Fall of the GDR written by David Childs and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-07-30 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book charts the dramatic months leading to one of the most profound changes of the 20th century, the opening of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the restoration of German unity in 1990. The author analyses the nature of Communist rule in the GDR over 40 years, its few strengths and its many weaknesses, and the myths which grew up around it. This book places the GDR in its international setting as the proud ally of the Soviet Union in the Warsaw Pact. It examines the reactions abroad to the unfolding revolution. The text is based on a wide variety of written sources and many interviews with leading Communist figures, such as Krenz and Modrow, and with their opponents and successors, and former Stasi officers and the dissidents they tried to crush. It greatly benefits from the author's decades of involvement with East Germany, including personal friendships there, before 1989 and his eye-witness accounts of many of the events during Die Wende. It should be of interest not only to students of German politics, contemporary history and the Cold War, but to all who are curious about the momentous times through which we have lived.
Book Synopsis Stasi Decorations and Memorabilia by : Ralph Pickard
Download or read book Stasi Decorations and Memorabilia written by Ralph Pickard and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Book Synopsis Modernism, Imperialism and the Historical Sense by : Paul Stasi
Download or read book Modernism, Imperialism and the Historical Sense written by Paul Stasi and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-07-30 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a re-reading of canonical modernism, connecting it to imperialism without conflating it with imperialist practices.
