Getting access

On a bright June day in 2012, I headed to the Neues Deutschland building in East Berlin. My aim was to have a conversation with former Stasi members and sympathizers about their personal biographies and the way in which they understand the GDR and unified Germany. I was interested in the historiography of post-socialism, and wanted to learn more about the way in which the “losers” of the Wende reflected on their lives in the GDR, a state they had believed in, after its demise. During my initial quest for information, I soon found out that a group of former GDR cadres had united in a number of organizations, under the umbrella of the East German Board of Associations (Ostdeutsches Kuratorium von Verbänden, OKV). Quite unspectacularly, I had found their contact information on the internet, where they host regularly updated websites. Two of the organizations had immediately responded to my request for a meeting, and so it was that I trailed to Berlin to see their representatives.

In the course of the encounter, it turned out that my curiosity was met by theirs. A first meeting with two representatives of the OKV's general board (a former professor and a former Stasi officer) quickly turned into an interview apparently designed to assess my motives – most importantly, if I was not intending to publish a scandalous article in the popular press.