This one will be a brief review. The brevity has nothing to do with my enjoyment of the book, but rather, because I'm strapped for time yet need to get this thought or two out of my head, and there's no notebook handy

This was simply fascinating. Living in (West) Berlin for (6) 8 years, even with all the security briefings and warnings about the Stasi, I had no clue as to the depths to which their operatives descended to do their bidding. Reads like a novel, but carries all the putrescence of a 40-year-old state system that began decaying the moment it was born.

As always, thanks to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for providing me with a free ARC. Neither my rating nor my review were influenced by the provision of the ARC.

I was drawn to this for the simple reason, that I, like many others, wanted to know what happened after the fall of the Berlin Wall, which, if you can believe it, was the result of a slip of the tongue and a shrug of the shoulders.

Having read about the years of the dictatorship and other books wherein survivors tell their own personal stories, I was interested to hear how the 90000 odd members of the Stasi washed up. Curiously, that the fact that of the 90000 members, 182 were charges, 87 convicted and 1 sentenced to prison! Surely these stats were wrong! But no, having weathered the initial storm, the Stasi were still there, albeit under another name, another identity, working for another government, working for themselves, shielded by strict privacy laws which prevented the world from knowing who they actually were or are.

Hope, a former FBI agent, obviously had greater access to information and people than the average author, so the stories of survivors and the information garnered was eye-opening to say the least.

It is as we draw ever further away from post-war East Germany that Hope draws upon what he deems are the similarities between the Stasi and some of today's politically active groups, with what he terms the "decomposition of the individual" wherein social media now becomes the anonymous bogeyman to espouse ideas once shunned and to attack those who dare to speak out.

It is interesting reading for those interested.

This book follows what happened next to Stasi officers from East Germany after the Berlin Wall came down and Germany was unified with this investigation being carried out by a former FBI agent who had served sime time in Europe. There are brief portraits of Stasi officers and how they managed to integrate back into society generally without any punishment for crimes they allegedly committed. It mentions how those imprisoned in East Germany have tried to bring Stasi officers to justice. It mentions how there are associations of former Stasi officers trying to stop this and presenting an alternative viewpoint on East Germany.

It was really interesting and used specific life stories to show how the Stasi maintained control. The book at points tries to make the point subtly I feel that all forms of socialism are wrong and countries such as America don't illegally spy on its citizens at all. Those sections where political opinion was given are not very convincing at all.

If you are familiar with the work of Anna Funder, “Stasiland”, you must have known how the communist dictatorship was sustained for 40 years through the help of the Stasi — Ministerium für Staatsicherheit (Ministry for State Security), an organisation that conducted massive surveillance throughout the GDR by employing 91,000 full-time employees and hundreds of thousands of IM — Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter (unofficial collaborator) as well as foreign intelligence through its agency HvA (Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung). In Anna Funder’s book, we could read the personal stories of people she interviewed about their experiences becoming the victims of the Stasi and several other former Stasi officers who are still proud of their surveillance methods. In a rather similar tone to Anna Funder, Ralph Hope brings out the knowledge he has obtained both during his time serving as an FBI agent and through his private investigation about the Stasi activities in a unified Germany.

Unlike in other former communist countries in Central and Eastern Europe, Germany dealt with its communist past differently. Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED), the Marxist-Leninist party which governed the GDR was not outlawed after the country’s demise. Instead, it was renamed into the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) and then merged with several other left-wing political parties in Germany to form Die Linke (The Left), which is currently one of the most prominent political parties in Germany besides the Christian Democratic Union and Social Democrats. Many of the formers SED officials and Stasi officers became members of The Left and are still politically active in today’s Germany. They campaigned their ideas and stroke for historical revisionism of the GDR communist dictatorship, something which becomes the central concern of this book. Interestingly, the way the European privacy law (GDPR) protected our former Stasi agents from getting exposed publicly makes me question the rightfulness of enacting this law with regards to this unique circumstance.

The centrally-planned economic model of the GDR was hardly sustainable to ensure the state could run effectively. Hard currency was brought into the GDR through various means, sometimes unethical. In today’s North Korea, there is still the infamous Room 39 which brings between $500 million and $1 billion per year to the country through illegal activities such as counterfeiting $100 bills, selling drugs, and conducting international insurance fraud in many parts of the world. In the GDR, there existed a secret commercial entreprise under the Stasi called Kommerzielle Koordinierung or KoKo. KoKo under the leadership of Alexander Schalck-Golodkowski brought foreign currencies to the GDR by providing illegal arms to insurgencies in Iran, selling the blood of GDR citizens to Western countries plagued by HIV, selling antiques to the West after procuring them from GDR citizens’ houses forcefully, “selling” East German political prisoners to West Germany, and other more illicit means. Many of this money somehow went missing along with “the grey men” themselves after German reunification, and it was getting harder to track them as more years passed.

The former Stasi agents also actively campaigned in the revisionism of the GDR history and ensured that the history of the GDR dictatorship treated differently from the Nazi dictatorship which is widely condemned after World War II. The methods include putting up political and direct pressure on the running of the Berlin-Hohenschönhausen Memorial which used to be the complex housing thousands of Stasi prisoners. It does not stop at that, they also put up influences on the production of the 2006 film “The Lives of Others” which depicts a sympathizing Stasi agent who is troubled by how his actions influenced his victims, something that Ralph Hope argues have undermined the effects of GDR dictatorship in its citizens.

However, it remains confusing to me to what extent the Stasi really influenced the daily life in the former GDR. Some of the East Germans interviewed by Mary Fulbrook in her book “The People’s State” described their lives before 1989 as ein ganz normales Leben — a perfectly normal life. To me, it seems like the Stasi conducted total surveillance, but it only affected negatively people who held the potential to threaten the security of the state. Among 17 million former East German citizens, only around 3 million attempted to check their Stasi files. The remaining files remained not accessed, as though many Germans wish to move on towards their futures without having to remember the red-stained communist past.

Ralph Hope’s research is highly intriguing, but it focuses too much on the Stasi’s legacies in the former GDR and unified Germany. Many missing details beg for a further question about how much truth is contained in this book. This is understandable given his background as a former FBI agent. After all, he provides a disclaimer that this work is not research in history as he was not trained as a historian. To me, it gives more of a similar vibe to read Anna Funder’s work. Anyone interested in the history of former East Germany will enjoy this book.

This is interesting in its treatment of the Stasi, their files, and the way they acted and are still acting to control any attempt to be held culpable for their actions in former East Germany, or even named or identified. These elements were well-handled, as well as the lack of appetite for such identification or even processing remaining Stasi files today. Where this book lost me, however, was the equation of 'antifa' and anti-fascism with the Stasi and the former USSR. There's a telling moment at the end of the book where, in fact, the author sees a former Stasi member is to speak at an antifa protest, and if he had limited his argument to this link and the potential for further camouflage of old Stasi in this movement I would find that convincing. However, rather than treating this as a single, if indicative case, or an issue limited to Germany, or due to the permeable and horizontal structure of anti-fascism generally, he argues that the 'far left' is a real threat to contemporary society (not only in Germany), and as dangerous as the current issue posed by the far right. This is considerably less convincing, or evidenced.