Book Reviews 133
Glaeser, Andreas Political Epistemics: The Secret Police, the Opposition, and the End of East German Socialism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. 640 pp. ISBN: 978-022-6297- 94-1. Language: English.
The secret police archive of the former German Democratic Republic contains fifty miles of documents and 1.5 million photographs.1 How did an institution so steeped in information on the population of East Germany fail to foresee the political and social events leading to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989? How is it possible that a regime that collected so much intelligence on its citizens was incapable of understanding them? In Political Epistemics, Andreas Glaeser brings the eye of a sociologist to the relationship between knowledge and power in East Germany in the 1980s. Glaeser’s analytic framework—based on interviews with former Stasi mem- bers, informers, and dissidents—is a welcome addition to the extensive histo- riography on the communist secret police in East Germany.2 The focus of the book is what he terms “political epistemics”: “the ways in which [the party- state] produced and certified knowledge about itself” (xvii). Glaeser approaches this topic with a methodology derived from the sociology of understanding (xxix), the study of how historical actors perceived their world as evident in their language, emotions, and spaces of activity. In the first part of the book, a section heavy with sociological terminology, Glaeser examines the role of ideology in the communist state and surveys the academic literature on the sociology of understanding. In the second part, he explores the relationship between the East German secret police—the Stasi— and the peace and civil rights movement in Germany from 1979 to 1989. He compares the Stasi and the dissident movement as institutions, asking who joined them, how they distributed authority, and how they communicated internally. These considerations lead him to one main question: how open was each institution to new information and political ideas?
1 BStU (Die Behörde des Bundesbeauftragten für die Stasi-Unterlagen) website, www.bstu .bund.de. 2 Some excellent studies on Stasi personnel and operative methods include Karl Wilhelm Frick, Die ddr-Staatssicherheit (Köln: Verlag Wissenschaft und Politik, 1982) and Jens Gieseke, Die hauptamtlichen Mitarbeit der Staatssicherheit: Personalstruktur und Lebenswelt 1950- 1989/90. On the relationship between the Stasi and East German society see Staatssicherheit und Gesellschaft: Studien zum Herrschaftsalltag in der ddr, herausgegeben von Jens Gieseke, (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007).
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Glaeser argues that the Stasi was a closed institution. Stasi agents had simi- lar social backgrounds, worldviews, and a common belief in socialism. Authority in the Stasi was unquestioned and largely reserved for Erich Mielke, the autocratic head of the institution. Internal Stasi documents were written in static, formulaic language. By the 1980s, Glaeser concludes, the ideology and institutional practices of socialism were rigid, fixed in myopic, circular reason- ing that was passed on from generation to generation. Stasi officials, ensconced in the tenants of Marxism, were blind to the possibility of an alternative order. The Stasi could therefore be saturated in knowledge about the opposition and still fail to understand it. The dissident movement, in contrast, was open to new ideas and new ways of thinking. Members came to the movement from a variety of backgrounds and brought a diversity of social experiences with them. Internal networks and authority were based on friendship and intimate relationships. Dissidents reformulated old ideas and explored new ones in their illegal periodicals. As Glaeser mentions, by spreading rumors, sowing suspicions, and instigating infighting, the Stasi attempted to break up these networks by targeting pre- cisely the traits that made the movement possible—friendship, trust, and soli- darity. It is difficult to believe however, as Glaeser contends, that the Stasi was entirely unsuccessful in these attempts. In this account, the world of the Stasi and the world of the dissidents were binary opposites. But, as Glaeser shows, this was not the whole story. In fact, 180,000 members of society were informers, sandwiched between the dissi- dents, to whom they were friends, colleagues, and intimates, and the Stasi, with whom they had a regular working relationship (516). Informers facilitated the flow of information between these two institutions. Glaeser only discusses informers briefly, to show how Stasi agents ignored the new material that they presented. And yet, these informers also suggest that a large part of the popula- tion stood somewhere between the seemingly polarized worlds of the Stasi and the dissidents, and were continually shuttled from one to the other. In Political Epistemics, Andreas Glaeser raises important questions about the last years of socialism in East Central Europe. And yet, his answer—that the Stasi was motivated by a rigid ideological belief in Marxism—does not fully clarify what he observes. It does not, for example, explain how the Stasi was able to identify and target the informal and personal networks that held the dissident movement together. And it does not explore how both the Stasi and the dissidents worked around the official system in the period of “socialist legality,” taking advantage of legal ambiguities to pursue their goals, and ulti- mately pushing against the same rules from opposite sides. The challenge for future researchers may be to view the interactions between the Stasi and the
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