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German Writers and the Politics of Culture pp 3–24Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

The East German Ministry of State Security and East German Society during the Honecker Era, 1971–1989

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Part of the book series: New Perspectives in German Studies ((NPG))

Abstract

The East German Ministry of State Security enjoys a reasonably well-founded reputation as an omniscient and omnipresent agent of domination. Not only did its army of officers and agents impose on GDR society a system of surveillance unprecedented in its comprehensiveness, but its telephone tappers and spies were able to penetrate the innermost secrets of West Germany’s political and social institutions. One chancellor, Willy Brandt, resigned as a result of the Stasi’s penetration of his office, and another, Helmut Kohl, has suffered severe damage to his reputation after the discovery of Stasi recordings of telephone conversations concerning nefarious financial dealings within the ranks of the CDU. An examination of the files which the MfS kept on writers, peace activists, environmentalists, athletes, academics, skinheads and punks, as well as on its own spies, testifies to the ministry’s paranoiac hunt for suspected ‘hostile-negative forces’ and to its bureaucratic zeal for the gathering of data. The surviving archival materials, if arranged end-to-end, would stretch for about 178 kilometres. By the late 1980s, over 91,000 full-time MfS officials and about 175,000 unofficial collaborators (Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter — IMs), that is, about one in fifty East German adults, as well as several thousand West German citizens, were contributing to this mountain of paper.

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Notes

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Authors
  1. Mike Dennis
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Leeds, UK

    Paul Cooke (Lecturer in German Studies) (Lecturer in German Studies)

  2. School of Modern Languages, University of Liverpool, UK

    Andrew Plowman (Teaches German language, literature and film) (Teaches German language, literature and film)

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© 2003 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited

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Dennis, M. (2003). The East German Ministry of State Security and East German Society during the Honecker Era, 1971–1989. In: Cooke, P., Plowman, A. (eds) German Writers and the Politics of Culture. New Perspectives in German Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403938756_1

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