Informers, Archives, and Memory in Central and Eastern Europe

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Brief Description

This roundtable examines the role of informers in Hungary, Czech Republic, East Germany, and the former Yugoslavia from the 1950s to 1990 and considers how transitional justice dealt with informers following 1990. One central link is the secret police files as archived in each of these countries and the ethical, political, and legal questions that surround the opening of archives to the public. The construction of memory, therefore, is a central unifying theme. Roundtable participants have each authored books or articles on informers or archives in these jurisdictions. Additional themes include the deployment by post-Communist governments of the archives for informational and political purposes, the usefulness of secret police files as historical records, the turn to mechanisms such as lustration, reparations, and clarity laws to secure transitional goals, the etiology of how and why ordinary people ended up as informers, the duality of informers as victims and victimizers, social reconstruction and reconciliation, trust, and any generalizations that might (or might not) be drawn from the Central and Eastern European experiences in this regard. A contrast is made between state surveillance and the intersection of contemporary technology and corporations in the amassing of information about private citizens.

Sub Unit

• Politics/Law

Chair

• Laszlo Borhi, Indiana U Bloomington / Hungarian Academy of Sciences (Hungary)

Roundtable Speakers

• Laszlo Borhi, Indiana U Bloomington / Hungarian Academy of Sciences (Hungary)

• Mark Drumbl, Washington and Lee U

• Douglas E. Selvage, Humboldt U Berlin (Germany)

• Barbora Hola, Vrije U Amsterdam (Netherlands)

• Sanja Pesek, American U