The Firm: The Inside Story of the Stasi by Gary Bruce (review)

Besides bringing the Communist regime in East Germany to an end, the largest political achievement of the civic movement of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) was the establishment of the Stasi archives under a Federal Commissioner (BStU). If the politicians in the East and West did not have to take anybody else into consideration, the files of the repression apparatus would have been safely stored away in the Federal Archives for a very long time. In the summer of 1990, however, East German protesters took to the streets as they had done during the peaceful revolution in the fall of 1989. This time they demanded access to "their files." The German politicians gave in to the pressure, reopened the otherwise already finished agreement on reunification, and appeased the protesters.

The opening of the Stasi files was a historical and political revolution. It showed that the files of the former secret police could be made transparent without risking another "night of long knives." Opening the files prevented the networks of Stasi informants and personnel from reorganizing within the framework of the democratic state and becoming a threat to the transition process. The opening revealed, in minutest detail, how a Soviet-bloc secret police service actually functioned. The disclosure of crucial evidence from the Stasi archives showed other countries in East and Central Europe how to deal with their difficult past. Today most of the former East bloc countries have followed suit, albeit to varying degrees.

Since the official establishment of the Stasi archives in 1991, access for researchers has resulted in a flood of publications about the Stasi. These publications cover almost every aspect of the feared secret police, from its surveillance of individuals opposing the regime to its role in the development of East German railways, agriculture, and uranium mining. The Stasi's activities have been scrutinized on every administrative level. Books have been written about the individual main departments of the ministry in Berlin, about the regional branches (Bezirksverwaltungen) of the state security, and about the local Stasi in the districts (Kreisdienststellen). The local Stasi counted 217 offices and covered the whole republic. No rural district was so remote or quiet that the Stasi did not need to know exactly what went on in the heads of the citizens there. The class enemy could strike at any time, and the German heirs of Feliks Dzerzhinskii needed to be on their toes everywhere and at all times. Several of these districts have had their Stasi histories written. For example, Greiz, Meiningen, and Eisenach are examined in Helmut Müller-Enbergs, Die Kreisdienststelle Greiz und ihr inoffizielles Netz (Erfurt, Germany: Landesbeauftragte des Freistaates Thüringen, 2011); Helmut Müller-Enbergs and Tom Pleiner, Die Kreisdienststelle Meiningen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes: Eine Handreichung zur regionalen Aufarbeitung (Berlin: BStU, 2012); and Helmut Müller-Enbergs, Die Kreisdienststelle Eisenach und ihr inoffizielles Netz (Erfurt, Germany: Landesbeauftragte des Freistaates Thüringen, 2010).

The Canadian historian Gary Bruce also looks closely at the Stasi at the local level. However, his objective is somewhat different from that of his German colleagues. Whereas German historians try to write local history, Bruce wants to understand how the mechanisms of repression worked in the "first workers and peasants' state on German soil." The Stasi, after all, were not just a machine with 91,000 employees who maintained constant surveillance. Bruce thus uses the two East German districts Gransee and Perleberg as case studies to make his work more tangible. Gransee was a small rural district in the Potsdam region near Berlin, and Perleberg was a typical province district with two middle-size towns, Wittenberge and Perleberg. The density of Stasi coverage in the districts was close to the GDR average. In the Perleberg district, one of every 66 citizens aged 18 to 65 was a Stasi informant. In Gransee the ratio was one of every 65.

The number of agents in the GDR was extremely high even compared to other Warsaw Pact countries, with...