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The East German Ministry of State Security, popularly known as the Stasi, was one of the largest and most intrusive secret police systems in world history. So extensive was the system of surveillance and control that in any given year throughout the 1970s and 1980s, about one in fifty of the 13 million East German adults were working for the Stasi either as an officer or as an informer. Drawing on original sources from the Stasi archives and the recollections of contemporary witnesses, The Stasi: Myth and Reality reveals the intricacies of the relationship between the Stasi enforcers, its agents and its targets/victims, and demonstrates how far the Stasi octopus extended its tentacles into people's lives and all spheres of society. The origins and developments of this vast system of repression are examined, as well as the motivation of the informers and the ways in which they penetrated the niches of East German society. The final chapters assess the ministry's failure to help overcome the GDR's inherent structural defects and demonstrate how the Stasi's bureaucratic procedures contributed to the implosion of the Communist system at the end of the 1980's.

When the Iron Curtain finally lifted, one of the many surprises was the revelation that over 59,000 Vietnamese were employed in GDR factories, by far the largest contingent of foreign workers in the country. Why their number had escalated from a mere 1,500 at the beginning of the 1980s and the kind of lives they had led in the niches of their hostels was terra incognita for most East Germans. Drawing on pioneer research by Eva Kolinsky and on a series of interviews that she conducted with Vietnamese living in Berlin and Eastern Germany as well as on numerous archival sources, this article will try to fill in some of the gaps. One key finding is that economic necessity and inefficiencies inherent in the command economy, rather than proletarian internationalism and solidarity with opponents of imperialism, drove the GDR into the large-scale mobilisation of foreign labour. An examination of Vietnamese behavioural patterns further reveals that traditional interpretations of Vietnamese passivity and vulnerability to officialdom need to be qualified. Despite the elaborate framework of state controls and surveillance so typical of the authoritarian GDR, the Vietnamese circumvented many restrictions on their mobility and private entrepreneurial activities, asserted their demands at work in the face of opposition from factory managers, and fostered their own social and ethnic links in the hostels and other social niches. As Eva Kolinsky has shown in her many studies of foreigners in Germany, such embryonic networks were crucial in helping them to cope with the dramatic social and economic changes and xenophobic outbursts after the collapse of state socialism. (German Politics / FUB)