Books that deal with The Stasi

February 6, 2012 1:09 PM

Can Anyone recommend any Book/s that deal with The Stasi/Secret Police in the DDR or East Europe

Have just watched "The Lives of Others" and thought it was a superb film. It left me wanting to find out more as regards the Stasi/Secret Police in Eastern Europe during the height of communism, can anyone recommend and other films/book that can give me a better insight into this shady area.

posted by maxmix to media & arts (6 answers total)

Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall
posted by laukf at 1:12 PM on February 6, 2012 [3 favorites]

An Icelandic murder mystery that leads back to the history of communist students from around Europe being sent to East Germany for indoctrination: The Draining Lake by Arnaldur Indridason.
posted by matildaben at 1:34 PM on February 6, 2012

Timothy Garton Ash's memoir The File
posted by sagwalla at 1:58 PM on February 6, 2012

The Firm: The Inside Story of the Stasi (Oxford Oral History Series) is really excellent.
posted by bigbigdog at 2:07 PM on February 6, 2012

I did a term paper on propaganda of the GDR for a German history course a couple years ago. A lot of the best sources are predictably only in german. Stasiland is good. Building the East German Myth by Alan Nothangle and The East German Leadership and Division of Germany by Spilker Dirk are both good sources of information that I used, although both are stuffy at times.

By far the most interesting resource was the Calvin German Propaganda Archive: http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/
posted by WhitenoisE at 4:32 PM on February 6, 2012

Seconding Stasiland. It's a good read.
posted by rhymer at 8:21 AM on February 7, 2012