Tara Tubb
"Mastering the Stasi Past: The Preservation of the Stasi Personnel Files"
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Abstract
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I will reconstruct the events that led to the preservation of the records of the East German Ministry for State Security (Stasi), and to the creation of the federal agency charged with making the documents available to the affected people, scholars, and the public at large, the BStU. Less than a year passed between the Stasi's efforts to shred its records in December 1989 and the creation of an agency to preserve and publicize them. How did that process unfold? To what extent has it promoted reconciliation and enabled the rehabilitation of compromised East Germans? Who supported and who opposed the preservation of the Stasi files? What was the role of citizens’ movements? To what extent was this a regional effort, and to what extent did activities in Berlin play a role? My work will provide complexity to our understanding of how activities by citizens’ movements shape our knowledge and understanding of the past. Additionally, by drawing on the idea that sites of memory are a way to create national identity as well as to come to terms with a violent past, my dissertation will illustrate how not only the Stasi, but also the institutions created to deal with the Stasi past, constitute sites of public memory.
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