Abstract
Glajar, Valentina, Alison Lewis and Corina L. Petrescu (eds.). 2016. Secret Police Files from the Eastern Bloc – Between Surveillance and Life Writing. Rochester, NY: Camden House, Boydell and Brewer. 237 pp.
Highlights
After the fall of the Socialist regimes in East-Central Europe, one important phase of the aftermath of Socialism was the opening of the state archives containing the secret-police files of that era
Lavinia Stan has calculated that the East-German or GDR Stasi archives alone are estimated to cover around 180 kilometers, if the papers in it were to be laid one after another
Rather than on the victims of surveillance, the chapters or independent articles included in it aim at reading the personal files of recruited informants, not of the persons they reported on. This way the records are analyzed not as sources, but as life writings, or as what the editors phrase in their Introduction as “hostile, un-authorized biographies” (9)
Summary
After the fall of the Socialist regimes in East-Central Europe, one important phase of the aftermath of Socialism was the opening of the state archives containing the secret-police files of that era. Secret Police Files from the Eastern Bloc – Between Surveillance and Life Writing, edited by Valentina Glajar, Alison Lewis and Corina L.
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