Jens Gieseke

The History of the Stasi: East Germany's Secret Police, 1945-1990 Jens Gieseke

Marc Notes: Originally published under title: Mielke-Konzern. Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2001.; Includes bibliographical references and index. Publisher Marketing: ""Gieseke treats... many issues with careful and lucid analysis, confining himself to the known facts. He rejects the hyperbolic in favor of more mundane explanations. The truth is bad enough... Essential."" . Choice ""The book is an exceptional achievement in every respect: it offers a calm, detached, factual and well balanced socio-historical analysis of the MfS (Ministry for Security) that covers all aspects." ." Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung ""[This book] provides an excellent introduction to the chronology, structure, and activities of the MfS."" . Kritika. Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History The East German Ministry for State Security stood for Stalinist oppression and all-encompassing surveillance. The "shield and sword of the party," it secured the rule of the Communist Party for more than forty years, and by the 1980s it had become the largest secret-police apparatus in the world, per capita. Jens Gieseke tells the story of the Stasi, a feared secret-police force and a highly professional intelligence service. He inquires into the mechanisms of dictatorship and the day-to-day effects of surveillance and suspicion. Masterful and thorough at once, he takes the reader through this dark chapter of German postwar history, supplying key information on perpetrators, informers, and victims. In an assessment of post-communist memory politics, he critically discusses the consequences of opening the files and the outcomes of the Stasi debate in reunified Germany. A major guide for research on communist secret-police forces, this book is considered the standard reference work on the Stasi and has already been translated into a number of Eastern European languages. Jens Gieseke is head of the "Communism and Society" research department at the Centre for Contemporary History in Potsdam, Germany. He previously worked for fifteen years in the research division of the Federal Commissioner for the Stasi Records in Berlin. He co-edited "Staatssicherheit und Gesellschaft" (Gottingen, 2007); "Handbuch der kommunistischen Geheimdienste in Osteuropa" (Gottingen, 2008); and" Die Geschichte der SED" (Berlin, 2011)." Review Citations:

Choice 10/01/2014 pg. 335 (EAN 9781782382546, Hardcover)

Contributor Bio:  Burnett, David David Burnett lives in Columbia South Carolina, with his wife and their blue-eyed cat, Bonnie. The Reunion, his first novel, is set in nearby Charleston. The Handfasting is his second novel. While most of the events in the story take place in New York City, psychologically, the story is set in the rural South of the 1970's. David enjoys traveling, photography, baking bread, and the Carolina beaches. He has photographed subjects as varied as prehistoric ruins on the islands of Scotland, star trails, sea gulls, and a Native American powwow. David and his wife have traveled widely in the United States and the United Kingdom. During one trip to Scotland, they visited Crathes Castle, the ancestral home of the Burnett family near Aberdeen. David has graduate degrees in psychology and education and previously was Director of Research for the South Carolina Department of Education. He and his wife have two daughters.