This study proposed to look at the post-1990 activities of former GDR elites from a very different angle than that usually adopted in German public and academic discourse. My goal was to take their own accounts seriously; instead of looking at the former Stasi milieu as an expression of political revanchism, I attempted to identify the reasons why the activists think what they think, and why they do what they do. My entry point was an engagement with their life stories, and with their ways of remembering the GDR.

In the first part of this book these personal accounts were therefore put into the context of German and GDR history. The goal was not to contribute to historiography as such: GDR history has already been covered by a burgeoning corpus of new studies that became possible after the opening of the GDR archives. Rather, the goal was to explore the subjectivity of the activists, and to disclose the anchor points in history that have shaped their worldviews. This part was informed by my oral history fieldwork, in addition to the materials that OKV members published on their views and activities in the GDR and after. The focus was on individuals, but these individuals appeared as a coherent age cohort, as representatives of a specific German generation; and their activities within the various OKV groups allowed me to view them as a post-socialist collective.