Secret Police Files from the Eastern Bloc: Between Surveillance and Life Writing ed. by Valentina Glajar, Alison Lewis, and Corina L. Petrescu (review)

When the Berlin Wall fell, the Stasi had about 180,000 informers, Romania's Securitate had 144,289, and Hungary's State Protection Authority had 7,203. They were spies. Many of them were even writers of some sort, playing their part in producing secret police dossiers, which are now part of archives that welcome curious researchers, former victims, and collaborators to peruse them. Indeed, it is a fascinating and chilling experience—the opening of a secret police file, the reading of which requires patience to understand the cryptic language employed. Interpreting such a file is a difficult task for a researcher, who, having found something similar to a time capsule, assumes the task of deciphering the message, explaining the purpose of the objects found in it, and writing the story of how it was put together, all with very few tools to guide them. The book in question adds to the tools available to help read such archival dossiers, but not only that.

What can the files that the secret police agents and their informers helped produce tell us about the times when they could decide the fate of a human being, one's promotion or demotion, incarceration or prison release, right to travel abroad, and even death? How should we treat these "witnesses" of a rather recent gruesome past now, thirty years after the abrupt collapse of the regimes that made their production possible? Can these files ever deliver justice if they were created in conditions of violence, human rights violations, suspicion, discrimination, and oppression? What role can they have in understanding a nation's tumultuous history and how civilians were involved in the human rights violations of their governments? Secret Police Files from the Eastern Bloc tackles these questions, offering the reader an impressive, well-documented account of what it was like to live under surveillance under communism in the German Democratic Republic, Romania, and Hungary, where there was extensive collaboration with the communist regimes.

Divided in three equally insightful parts, this edited volume sheds light on how these files can be read to illuminate the times and conditions in which they were produced: as "file stories" that serve as models for narrating biographies of those targeted by the police (Part I); as a means for perpetrators and victims alike to revisit their past and discern the truth, in juxtaposition with the memories that both may have of the events narrated in these files (Part II); and as the basis for aesthetic and artistic productions aimed at helping readers learn about history (Part III).

How do we go about writing a biographical narrative of a person depicted in one of these files? Such a narrative is based on documents that were written decades earlier, with goals far different than the one the researcher may have in mind. If we are to treat such files as life writing accounts, what are the implications of doing so? What do these files tell us about collaboration and the intricate dynamics in which the secret police's targets often fell into by acquiescing to be recruited? The first three chapters authored by Alison Lewis, Valentina Glajar, and Corina L. Petrescu, respectively, deliver convincing responses to these very questions by taking as case studies the files of several German and Romanian writers whose lives were intimately affected by being under the surveillance of their countries' secret police. The lives of German writers Paul Wiens, Sascha Anderson, and Wien's daughter Maja Wiens are under the magnifying glass in Lewis's chapter, and as the author argues, the files on these individuals shed light on these writers' habitus and identity, as defined by their at times fluctuating relation to the secret police. As these files show, collaboration with the Stasi police was not always a straightforward endeavor or a transactional process...