Cold War Spy Stories from Eastern Europe

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.

"The essays in this collection provide insightful analyses as well as methodological inspiration for those researching Cold War history and the depiction of that history."-Vincent M. Gaine, European History Quarterly “This is indispensable reading for anyone interested in representations of espionage in the Cold War and beyond.”-Sara Jones, author of The Media of Testimony: Remembering the East German Stasi in the Berlin Republic “In these fascinating papers we see some of the insights gained from new literary readings of those [secret police] files, and new artistic representations of those classic Cold War figures: spies, secret police officers, and informers. A revelatory collection!”-Katherine Verdery, Julien J. Studley Distinguished Professor, Graduate Center, City University of New York “Using fascinating, specific examples that make observers and the observed come alive in the reader’s mind, Cold War Spy Stories from Eastern Europe reveals the dynamic power play among multiple parties who constituted the oppressive political web throughout Eastern Europe and the USSR during the Cold War.”-Susan Signe Morrison, professor of English at Texas State University “A great intervention by a team of experts equipped to deliver a much needed comparative perspective.”-Stephen Parker, author of Bertolt Brecht: A Literary Life  “Presenting a gallery of well-chosen portraits of secret agents who worked for communist East German, Romanian, and Soviet surveillance agencies, this book illuminates the tenuous relationship between memory, discourse, and politics, mediated by the extant secret archives and movies. The chapters document Cold War spies whose complex lives and morally questionable choices enhance our understanding of life under communist dictatorship.”-Lavinia Stan, professor of political science at St. Francis Xavier University, Nova Scotia

• List of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsIntroductionAlison Lewis, Valentina Glajar, and Corina L. PetrescuPart 1. Intelligence Officers and Informers1. The File Story of the Securitate Officer Samuel FeldValentina Glajar2. Man without a Face: The Autobiographical Self-Fashioning of Spymaster Markus WolfMary Beth Stein3. The Stasi’s Secret War on Books: Uwe Berger and the Cold War Spy as Informant and Book ReviewerAlison LewisPart 2. Targets4. Of Sources and Files: The Making of the Securitate Target Ana NovacCorina L. Petrescu5. Soviet Narratives of Subversion and Redemption during the Second Cold War and Beyond: The Case of Father Dmitrii DudkoJulie FedorPart 3. Secret East/West Operations6. Espionage and Intimacy: West Berlin Turkish Men in the Stasi’s EyesJennifer A. Miller7. Fleeing to the West: The 1978 Airplane Hijacking from Gdansk to West BerlinAxel HildebrandtPart 4. Spies on Screen8. Espionage and the Cold War in DEFA Films: Double Agents in For Eyes Only and Chiffriert an Chef-Ausfall Nr. 5Carol Anne Costabile-Heming9. Breaking Borders: Niklaus Schilling’s Critical Spy Drama Der Willi-Busch-ReportLisa Haegele10. Political Ambiguity in Recent Cold War Spy Stories on ScreenCheryl DueckContributorsIndex