A01=Alison Lewis
Author_Alison Lewis
Biographical Study
Biography
BStU
Category=NHTW
Cold War
Cold War Studies
Collaborator
Communism
Culture War
Dissidence
East German Ministry for State Security
East Germany
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eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
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eq_non-fiction
Espionage
Europe
European History
European Studies
German History
German Studies
Germany
Helga M. Novak
History
Informant
Literature
Maja Wiens
Paul Gratzik
Paul Wiens
Plays
Poetry
Prose
Provocateur
Sascha Anderson
Secret Agent
Secret Police
Stasi Records Agency
Surveillance
Surveillance Society
Twentieth Century History
Undercover Police
Writing Community
Product details
- ISBN 9781640123793
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 01 Oct 2021
- Publisher: Potomac Books Inc
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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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 modes 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, sociology, cultural studies, and literary history to political science and surveillance and intelligence studies. In teasing out the various kinds of entanglements of intellectuals with power during the Cold War, Lewis presents a microhistory of the covert activities of those writers who colluded with the secret police.
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, sociology, cultural studies, and literary history to political science and surveillance and intelligence studies. In teasing out the various kinds of entanglements of intellectuals with power during the Cold War, Lewis presents a microhistory of the covert activities of those writers who colluded with the secret police.
Alison Lewis is a professor of German in the School of Languages and Linguistics at the University of Melbourne. She is the author or editor of numerous books, including Secret Police Files from the Eastern Bloc: Between Surveillance and Life Writing and Cold War Spy Stories from Eastern Europe (Potomac Books, 2019).
