Acknowledgements
This monograph is the outcome of the literary strand of the research project “Knowing the Secret Police: Secrecy and Knowledge in East German Society”, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council [AH/R005915/1], led by principal investigator Dr Anselma Gallinat, together with Dr Joanne Sayner and Professor Sara Jones as co-investigators, from 2018 to 2022. We are grateful to the AHRC for their generous support of our research and enabling the open access publication of our book. We extend our sincere thanks to the entire project team—Dr Anselma Gallinat, Dr Joanne Sayner, Dr Grit Wesser, and Dr Alexander Brown—for their intellectual contributions, collaborative spirit, and commitment throughout the life of the project. We would also like to thank the project advisory board, especially Professor Alison Lewis for her advice on the literary strand, and our project partners in Germany—the Federal Agency for Civic Education (Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, BpB) in Bonn and the Magdeburg branch of the Federal Agency for the Stasi Records (Stasi-Unterlagen-Archiv, now Bundesarchiv)—for their collaboration and support. This project was carried out under the shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic, which presented considerable challenges to fieldwork, archival access, and collaboration. We are thankful to all those who showed flexibility, generosity, and patience during this time.
We are especially grateful to our interview partners Uwe Kolbe, Ekkehard Maaß, Christa Moog, Gabriele Stötzer, Bernd Wagner, and Bettina Wegner for sharing their experiences with us and granting us permission to access their Stasi files. We would like to thank Inge Heym for taking time to talk to us and allowing us to use the Stasi files kept on her and her husband Stefan Heym, as well as her literary agent Sebastian Ritscher for supporting our endeavours. We are grateful to the late Gerhard Wolf and to Reiner Kunze and his late wife Elisabeth Kunze for their permission to access their files. Our thanks also go to Lutz Rathenow for allowing us to consult his papers housed at the Federal Foundation for the Study of the Communist Dictatorship in Germany (Bundesstiftung zur Aufarbeitung der SED-Diktatur). We are indebted to all of the archivists and archival staff who facilitated access to crucial materials, and would like to extend particular thanks to Stephan Bachtejeff-Mentzel and Raphaela Schröder at the Stasi Records Agency, and Matthias Buchholz and Sylvia Griwan at the Bundesstiftung Aufarbeitung. We are grateful to Bernd Hiepe and Gabriele Stötzer for allowing us to use the image on the cover of this book and to the Bundesstiftung Aufarbeitung for permission to reproduce the image of Ralf-Günter Krolkiewicz’s original manuscript, ‘Der Dissident’.
None of this work would have been possible without the support of the professional services staff in the College of Arts and Law and School of Languages, Cultures, Art History, and Music at the University of Birmingham. We also wish to thank the DAAD Cambridge Research Hub for German Studies, the Schröder Fund at the University of Cambridge, and the Institute for German and European Studies in Birmingham for supporting a workshop that enabled key discussions and planning for this volume. We are deeply grateful to Jim Walker and the Camden House production team, and to the anonymous reviewers for their feedback on our manuscript.