A State of Secrecy (Potomac Books), by Alison Lewis

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A State of Secrecy by Alison Lewis

With the fall of the Soviet Bloc in 1989, East Germany’s secret police, the Stasi, became notorious throughout the world. Exceeding the Gestapo in scope, the Stasi recruited one informer for every 120 citizens and kept meticulous files based on their reports.

Alison Lewis is a German studies professor at the University of Melbourne who studied in East Germany in 1986, three years before the unimagined rapid collapse of the so-called German Democratic Republic. Lewis has a feel for the country’s limited but not impoverished economy, the pervasive anxiety facing anyone not prepared to stay within the party line. She focuses her research on a handful of writers and artists who became informers.

Their motivations were varied. For some, true belief in the system mingled with memories of an orphaned or deprived childhood in postwar Germany. They sought authority figures who took interest in them, and some of their Stasi masters were astute psychologists. Occasionally, something like friendship seemed to emerge between the pages of their files. Others were opportunistic, using their Stasi connections as leverage with publishers and theaters. However, sometimes when the Stasi tried to punish an unruly informant by blocking publication of their novel or production of their play, they were overruled by other authorities.

Unruliness was certainly a problem, at least among the sampling in A State of Secrecy. Some informers came to regret their decision to spy for the Stasi, either ethically or because of the complexity of living a double life. Some had no apparent qualms about turning in dissidents while others tried to avoid reporting anything at all. Like most good narratives of human behavior, A State of Secrecy tells a complicated story.