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none of these employees were ever interrogated when such investigations
still made sense. Many of them managed to secure other positions. None
of the employees who were regularly involved in advising foreign guest
scholars were suspected of being linked with the
Stasi,
although the like–
lihood was very high. Due in part to the lack of a legal basis on which
to take strict measures against the Communist establishment, but also to
the naivete and carelessness of the democratic forces, the bulk of state se–
curity materials on scholars and scientists was systematically shredded or
"misplaced." These failures, along with the shrewdness of the Communist
functionaries, enabled the latter to cloud the extent of their real respon–
sibility and cover up their abominable deeds.
That some of the state security informers among East German intel–
lectuals had genuine academic merits complicated matters. For example,
one of the most influential East German Slavists at the University ofJena
was exposed as an active, long-term informer for the Ministry of State
Security. Among other things, he had written slanderous character–
izations of the prominent German poet Reiner Kunze, yet he was
"democratically elected" to his former position by his subordinates and
stubbornly refused to give up his academic and administrative post until
Kunze himself confirmed his actions. Yet this scholar had organized the
first international Mikhail Bakhtin conference in East Germany in 1984,
held against the fierce resistance of Soviet officials, and he had invited
such well-known scholars as Yuri Lotman, one of the world's foremost
semioticists.
In
another case, a professor of literature from Leipzig University had
been recruited as an informer in the 1960s and 1970s. After a scandal in
his family, he was regarded an unreliable source and dropped by the
Stasi.
After 1985 he became one of the active supporters of
p erestroika
and
glasnost,
which took some courage in the GDR. He voluntarily re–
tired without ever having made his former
Stasi
ties public. Another case
is that of an historian who spied for East Germany in the United States
in the 1970s.
In
1979, when his identity was disclosed, he and his wife
had to escape to the GDR. There, he became one of the first historians
to introduce quantitative methods in the humanities, methods that were
viewed as questionable and incompatible with orthodox Marxism-Lenin–
ism. He encountered fierce resistance from his more dogmatic colleagues,
despite his substantial services to the Communist state.
Such cases were handled quite graciously, and the people involved
were given a chance to make a new beginning (for example, the former
spy was never persecuted). A professor of American literature, who in the
mid-1980s was allowed to accept a Fulbright - an indicator of other af-
