Secret Police Files and the Life Stories of Stasi Informers

BEFORE THEY WERE DECLASSIFIED UNDER LUSTRATION LEGISLATION in the early nineties, the secret police files of Stasi informers (or Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter) employed by the domestic branch of the East German secret police in the Ministry for State Security (Ministerium für Staatssicherheit) represented top-secret narratives that were never intended to become public documents. Once unmoored from these original contexts, the files have become a public good, used to tell stories about the communist past and individuals’ entanglement with authority. Security files are a rich archive about power and the secret life of power. And because Cold War surveillance needed humans, rather than technology, to execute it, the Stasi archive is a powerful source of information about human lives— the secret lives of “enemies of the state” under surveillance as well as of those who performed the surveillance. To turn this information into stories, secret police files must first be made intelligible, and this involves acknowledging their narrative character.

According to Paul Ricoeur, life stories, whether historical or fictional, “become more intelligible when what one applies to them are the narrative models or plots borrowed from history or fiction.” With careful interpretation, therefore, the secret police dossiers of Stasi informants can be repurposed to offer up valuable insights into the secret lives of the regime's collaborators. This chapter argues for the usefulness of reading the Stasi files and their emplotment of lives in terms of life writing. As will be demonstrated in three case studies, the files of informers offer detailed and complex backstories of individuals’ entanglements with the secret police—stories that sometimes accompanied their public and private lives like an insistent shadow and sometimes ran at odds with them. Each of these file stories has its own beginning, middle, and ending, some resulting in a relatively stable, enduring relationship between the informant and the Ministry for State Security and some ending in tears, with a falling-out or a gradual parting of ways, usually prompted by the emergence of irreconcilable ideological differences between informer and the Stasi. These stories of secret entanglements can help shed light on the role the Stasi played in structuring ordinary East German lives as well as on informers’ motivations.