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David Childs & Richard Popplewell, The Stasi: The East German Intelligence and Security Service. London: Macmillan, 1996, xii + 253 pp., 40.00.
JUST AS WE KNOW FAR MORE about bankrupt firms than we do about those still running, so too shall we eventually know a great deal more about East Germany than we do about other countries that still exist. The collapse of the GDR and its dreaded security police in the Ministry for State Security-known in popular parlance as the Stasi-has given researchers and journalists an unprecedented opportunity to scrutinise the inner workings of a modern police state. Since 1989 both have been busy mining the archives, interviewing the key players, and reading the personal testimonials. All the while the German public awaits the latest weekly revelation about who was secretly working as an `unofficial collaborator' for the communist East.
Childs & Popplewell have given us a fine overview of the Stasi using the wealth of existing secondary literature on the subject that has appeared since 1989. Since they do not utilise the massive files now available for perusal in order to develop a deeper argument about the role and function of the Stasi in East Germany, their study is not the last word on the subject. Nor, I think, do they intend it to be. Instead, it is a historical handbook of the main structures, operations and contradictions of the most formidable secret police in the history of the world. Future scholars who...