Well researched and engagingly written . . . provides the reader with a wealth of sources and personal accounts of secret police influence, intervention, and collusion. . . A fascinating account of personal reflection, blackmail, and bribery taken from the existing files of East Germany, Hungary and Romania. JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY HISTORY The volume eloquently ... Read moreexamines and contextualises the secret police files past and present, and offers ways of reading and problematising them. . . . [This book] is a much welcome contribution for historians, political scientists, life writing and Eastern European studies scholars. LIFE WRITING [Ioana Luca] Overall the volume provides an interesting, creative and productive insight into aspects of the legacy of the socialist regimes as well as the Secret Police archives . . . It will be of interest to scholars working in history and on history writing, to regional experts, social scientists as well as literary and media scholars. CONTEMPORARY CENTRAL & EASTERN EUROPE [T]he essays indicate the complex ways in which surveillance, collaboration and victimhood come to colonize the bodies and minds of all involved. . . . Th[e] collection . . . is instructive and thought-provoking, and certainly worth a read. JOURNAL OF EUROPEAN STUDIES [Sarah Colvin] [This book] will not resolve the legal and ethical challenges facing post-communist states. It does, however, invite us to rethink how we read secret police files, and offers several creative ways to do so. It deserves a wide readership among scholars of the GDR and other communist regimes. GERMAN QUARTERLY [This] book is . . . an exercise in repurposing this huge body of material, in putting it to good and sometimes surprising use in starting the process of democratizing and absorbing it into contemporary histories and stories. Without being prescriptive, it suggests three distinct but equally productive approaches. SEMINAR [Brigid Haines] This assured and compelling volume offers differentiated readings of file stories, while also raising important questions about how this difficult past continues to be remembered, or forgotten, today. EUROPEAN HISTORY QUARTERLY [Dierdre Byrnes] Takes the reader [on] a journey into the everyday life of the darkest days of East-Central Europe. Although addressing mainly scholarly audiences, this book also discusses issues of [wider] interest. HUNGARIAN CULTURAL STUDIES Show Less