Big Bruder Watching

The Firm

Ulrich Mühe in ‘The Lives of Others’ (2006)

Hagen Keller / Sony Pictures Classics

The Inside Story of the Stasi

by Gary Bruce

Oxford, 264 pp., $34.95

Stalin’s observation that the death of one man is a tragedy but the death of a million is a statistic helps explain why some of the finest portraits of 20th-century totalitarianism have been miniatures. Ivan Denisovich’s “day without a dark cloud” and the hunt for the Jewish schoolboys in Louis Malle’s Au revoir les enfants illuminate horrors that stretch far beyond one outpost of the Gulag or a stagnant Vichy town. The decision by the Canadian historian Gary Bruce to focus his new history of the East German secret police, the Stasi (Staatssicherheit), on Perleberg and Gransee, two out-of-the-way districts in communism’s distaff Germany, might have promised something of the same. But that’s not what his book delivers.

Instead, Bruce takes advantage of the fact that an unusually high proportion of the Stasi archives were left untouched in the backwaters that are his setting to produce a meticulous, grassroots examination of (to quote Timothy Garton Ash) “the quieter corruption of [East Germany’s] mature totalitarianism.” Supplemented by a series of interviews both with former secret policemen and those they watched over, The Firm is well done, even if Bruce’s approach has meant that the grand guignol of the Stasi’s formative years is passed over too lightly for his book to be viewed as a truly comprehensive analysis of that organization’s malignant DNA. The worst aspects of the later, more discreetly brutal, decades also escape the scrutiny they deserve. There’s little on the fates of those “the firm” (the Stasi’s smug nickname for itself) considered its most serious opponents. Their cases would have been handled by (and usually in) East Berlin.