Abstract
Reviewed by: Vincent M. Gaine, King’s College London, UK
Cold War, spies, intelligence gathering: these are evocative terms for historians and storytellers alike, the stuff of historical documentation and popular entertainment. In their introduction to Cold War Spy Stories from Eastern Europe, the editors posit that the Cold War ‘surely belonged to the spy’ (5) and this premise sets the tone for the essays that follow. Across the four sections, the writers offer material for scholars from various fields, offering accounts drawn from archival material as well as insightful analyses of dramatizations.
‘Part I: Intelligence Officers and Informers’ provides various ‘file stories’. Valentina Glajar’s ‘The File Story of Securitate Officer Samuel Feld’ highlights the multiple voices in file stories: Feld himself, his rivals and subsequent investigators in the Romanian Securitate create a ‘multilayered and polyphonic’ (31) biography from which the researcher can deduce a picture of the subject and also the socio-political situation at the time(s) of writing. Glajar includes copies of original documents, drawing attention to the ink colours used by investigators. These details place the file story within the everyday activities of intelligence gathering, while accepting the limitations of the available data. Similarly, Mary Beth Stein’s ‘Man Without A Face’ acknowledges that the ‘roughly one hundred pages’ from the East German Stasi archives are but a fragment of the full volume once recorded about Stasi director Markus Wolf. Stein addresses this limitation by focusing her study on the self-construction of Wolf ‘as a protagonist in the world’ (73), tracing the tension between Wolf’s personal humanity and the expediency of his time(s), as well as comparisons Wolf made between his own work and those of fiction, including John Le Carré and Ian Fleming. A similar topic appears in Alison Lewis’s ‘The Stasi’s Secret War on Books’, which discusses the role of literary critics in promoting state ideology. These ‘informer-reviewers’ (99) serve as a fascinating example of the relationship between political and creative culture, as Lewis demonstrates that the power of censorship operates in pervasive and unexpected ways.
The subject but not the methodology is reversed in ‘Part II: Targets’. Corina L. Petrescu’s ‘Of Sources and Files’ develops file stories with her analysis of the Securitate’s ‘target identity’ (138, original emphasis), i.e. how the secret police assembled information to justify surveillance. Petrescu’s meta-historical analysis constructs the figure of Ana Novac from the Securitate files, the incompleteness of file stories itself an indicator of the precariousness of life in Eastern Europe. Julie Fedor’s ‘Soviet Narratives of Subversion and Redemption During the Second Cold War and Beyond: The Case of Father Dmitrii Dudko’ also addresses precariousness, both in terms of individuals and their presentation by the state. Fedor highlights that KGB denunciations of dissidents and recantations from those dissidents have a recognizable style ‘that is ripe for historical and literary interpretation’ (163), as Dudko and figures like him bridge ‘the gulf between the Soviet and the Russian eras and [anchor] new visions of the Russian national identity’ (186). These analyses of targets are useful studies of Cold War history as well as insights into how nations present individuals and the state as a whole.
‘Part III: Secret East/West Operations’ discusses the association of romance with espionage, found in both historical records and spy fiction. Jennifer A. Miller’s ‘Espionage and Intimacy’, a study of Turkish men in East Berlin, highlights borders and the irony of Turkish men immigrating from West to East Germany for ‘greater social autonomy and acceptance’ (198). Miller demonstrates that the social relationships of these men ‘recast traditional narratives of restrictive Cold War Berlin’ (206) and also intertwined with geopolitics (211). Similarly, Axel Hildebrandt’s ‘Fleeing to the West: The 1978 Airplane Hijacking from Gdansk to West Berlin’ demonstrates how a romance became an international incident and a major media event (229). Hildebrandt studies the multiple narratives, paying particular attention to the ‘factual’ and fictional accounts of the 1978 hijacking as well as the surrounding events (230–1, 235, 236–7, 244–5), including the attempts by both US and GDR authorities to control the future narrative (240–1). Through this critical les, Hildebrandt emphasizes the ongoing process and self-reflection of history (246–8).
‘Part IV: Spies on Screen’ provides studies of European as well as Hollywood productions. Carole Anne Costabile-Heming’s ‘Espionage and the Cold War in DEFA Films’ discusses films produced by the GDR’s state-owned studio as propaganda, demonstrating that the spy genre provided a simple good versus evil framework, which when combined with ‘facts and truth’ gave films produced by DEFA ‘a documentary air’ (257). Costabile-Heming argues that these films are ‘unapologetic about their positive portrayals of the Stasi’ (271) as an agency focused on foreign intelligence rather than the domestic surveillance of German citizens (260). Costabile-Heming combines analysis of character and camera work (265, 267), and the films’ incorporation of news footage to justify ‘high levels of vigilance’ (269). On the other hand, Lisa Haegele’s ‘Breaking Borders’ argues that the spy films of Niklaus Schilling offer ‘critical portrayals of contemporary German society and politics’ (279). Haegele contrasts Schilling’s work with other contributions to the genre, especially James Bond, drawing particular attention to Schilling’s visual and auditory grammar, which highlights and subverts the conventions of the spy thriller so as to critique West German politics of the late 1970s. Finally, through the lens of ‘liquid surveillance’ (309), Cheryl Dueck’s ‘Political Ambiguity in Recent Cold War Spy Stories on Screen’ discusses three twenty-first century texts that look back on the Cold War, arguing that these texts mobilize contemporary concerns around surveillance. Dueck draws attention to the ‘Rapidly flowing images’ (310) of Westen (2013), Deutschland 83 (2015) and Bridge of Spies (2015), images that emphasize anxiety over surveillance, regardless of who is performing it (319).
Overall, 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. Highly recommended.