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.

The Stasi: Myth and Reality

History

Dennis, Mike

LaPorte, Norman

Americas

Routledge

Oxford, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Frankfurt/M., New York, Wien.

The German Communist Party in Saxony, 1924-1933: Factionalism, Fratricide and Political Failure

Europe

Peter Lang Publishing

State and Minorities in Communist East Germany (Monographs in German History, 33)

Based on interviews and the voluminous materials in the archives of the SED, the Stasi and central and regional authorities, this volume focuses on several contrasting minorities (Jehovah’s Witnesses, Jews, ‘guest’ workers from Vietnam and Mozambique, football fans, punks, and skinheads) and their interaction with state and party bodies during Erich Honecker’s rule over the communist system. It explores how they were able to resist persecution and surveillance by instruments of the state, thus illustrating the limits on the power of the East German dictatorship and shedding light on the notion of authority as social practice.

Berghahn Books

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.

The Stasi: Myth and Reality (Themes In Modern German History)

Based on interviews and the voluminous materials in the archives of the SED, the Stasi and central and regional authorities, this volume focuses on several contrasting minorities (Jehovah’s Witnesses, Jews, ‘guest’ workers from Vietnam and Mozambique, football fans, punks, and skinheads) and their interaction with state and party bodies during Erich Honecker’s rule over the communist system. It explores how they were able to resist persecution and surveillance by instruments of the state, thus illustrating the limits on the power of the East German dictatorship and shedding light on the notion of authority as social practice.

Using newly available documentation, this book addresses the enduring themes in the historiography of the German communist party (KPD). Central to the study is the question to what extent could Moscow dominate the German communist party and movement. By emphasising the specific Saxon context, the KPD’s political development is detailed as in fact a tale of two parties: the centralised leadership and organisational structures and the predominantly local influences governing the membership’s political orientations. The KPD leadership’s drive to create a monolithic Stalinist party in the face of diverse local conditions ultimately burnt out the party’s most active members, with devastating impact on political campaigning - above all during the rise of the Nazis. The intensity of the factional feud among ordinary members is explained in terms of how local communists resisted (or supported) the leadership’s relatively moderate or sectarian tactics depending on the conditions they experienced at first hand. The book’s treatment of political campaigning focuses on the local level, detailing how the leadership’s often unrealistic and contradictory objectives limited the KPD’s wider influence on the regional political system.

Peter Lang AG, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften

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Books by LaPorte, Norman

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The Stasi: Myth and Reality

The German Communist Party in Saxony, 1924-1933: Factionalism, Fratricide and Political Failure

State and Minorities in Communist East Germany (Monographs in German History, 33)

The Stasi: Myth and Reality (Themes In Modern German History)

State and Minorities in Communist East Germany (Monographs in German History, 33)

The German Communist Party in Saxony, 1924-1933: Factionalism, Fratricide and Political Failure