Cold War Spy Stories from Eastern Europe

During the Cold War, stories of espionage became popular on both sides of the Iron Curtain, capturing the imagination of readers and filmgoers alike as secret police quietly engaged in surveillance under the shroud of impenetrable secrecy. And curiously, in the post–Cold War period there are no signs of this enthusiasm diminishing.

The opening of secret police archives in many Eastern European countries has provided the opportunity to excavate and narrate for the first time forgotten spy stories. Cold War Spy Stories from Eastern Europe brings together a wide range of accounts compiled from the East German Stasi, the Romanian Securitate, and the Ukrainian KGB files. The stories are a complex amalgam of fact and fiction, history and imagination, past and present. These stories of collusion and complicity, betrayal and treason, right and wrong, and good and evil cast suprising new light on the question of Cold War certainties and divides.

Valentina Glajar is a professor of German and an honorary professor of international studies at Texas State University, San Marcos. She is the coeditor of Herta Müller: Politics and Aesthetics (Nebraska, 2013) and co-translator of Herta Müller’s novel Traveling on One Leg. Alison Lewis is a professor of German at the University of Melbourne. She is the author of several books, including one in German about love and gender in literature during Germany’s reunification and a book in German about the Stasi’s infiltration of the literary underground. Corina L. Petrescu is an associate professor of German at the University of Mississippi. She is the author of Against All Odds: Subversive Spaces in National Socialist Germany. Glajar, Lewis, and Petrescu recently coedited Secret Police Files from the Eastern Bloc: Between Surveillance and Life Writing.