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The Stasi: Myth and Reality
Contemporary Review, May, 2004
The Stasi: Myth and Reality. Mike Dennis. Longman. [pounds sterling]19.99. xviii + 269 pages. ISBN 0-582-41422-9. The Stasi, the East German secret service, for which about one in every fifty East German adults worked as an officer or an informer in the 1980s, gave the Communist dictatorship a stability envied in other Soviet colonies.
No part of East German society was free of its influence and control. It was a very effective agent of a police state, far better than the Gestapo. Yet the Stasi was also institutionally weak because it was such an 'overbloated bureaucracy' and because it was linked to the Communist Party and through that link to the 'fundamental legitimacy deficit' of the East German state. After a brief history of the organisation, Prof. Dennis looks at the Stasi's role in government between 1971 and 1989, the value of its records, the image it projected as an efficient tool of repression, the difficulties of constantly coercing 13,000,000 people and the legacy of the organisation for a united Germany. 'The reputedly ultra-efficient Stasi ... was called upon to prop up an ultra-inefficient system of socialism' and was overwhelmed by 'its plethora of tasks and ... the general crisis of communism in the 1980s'. This is a perceptive work of historical analysis and will become indispensable for any understanding of European Communism. (T.B.)
COPYRIGHT 2004 Contemporary Review Company Ltd.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group
