THIS INTRODUCTORY COMMENT IN THE FOREWORD TO JANA DÖHRING'S Stasiratte (Stasi Rat, 2012) underscores the Janus-faced nature of memory. Nowhere has this been more evident than in the confrontations that East Germans have had with their secret police (Stasi) files. More than twenty-five years after the dissolution of the oppressive regime that ruled the German Democratic Republic for forty years, the legacy of the Stasi files continues to impact personal biographies in myriad ways. The peculiarity of the Stasi remains a source of fascination, and the Academy Award–winning film Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others, 2006) made the surveillance activities of the East German secret police a household concept for millions of international viewers. Writers were the first to thematize the Stasi openly in the immediate post-Wall years: Reiner Kunze (1990), Erich Loest (1991), Christa Wolf (1993), Gunter Kunert (1997), and Jurgen Fuchs (1999) all incorporated aspects of their own Stasi files into their essays and fictional works. By bringing these “secret” documents into the public sphere, these writers were attempting to reclaim their biographies, for the Stasi's characterizations of them represent a biased interpretation of their biographies. The Stasi intentionally manipulated information in order to make these cultural figures conform to a specific category—namely, dissident behavior that was viewed as harmful to the state—in a practice that Alison Lewis has proposed resulted in the creation of hostile biographies of others. Most critical attention has been paid to victims of the Stasi, when they have chosen to publish the information contained in their files. Former Stasi employees and Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter (unofficial informants, or IMs) have also made their side of the story public. Notable cases here too have involved writers, such as Christa Wolf and Sascha Anderson.