PhD project

For the Federal Intelligence Service (Bundesnachrichtendienst, BND), East Germany’s state and society were a key field of action for intelligence and reconnaissance efforts under the conditions of the Cold War. However, the role that the BND took on in the system competition between the two Germanies is a field of research that has hardly been studied in historiography – this is especially true for the time ranging from the beginning of the social-liberal coalition until when German unification had been fully achieved. This doctoral project aims at grasping the history of the BND after 1968, based on sources that have gone hitherto unnoticed or become only recently available. Its main focus is on the way intelligence on the German Democratic Republic (GDR) was evaluated and prepared by the BND departments responsible for evaluating the political and social conditions in the GDR.

By way of an extended intelligence history, the project investigates the sources and content of the BND’s intelligence on the GDR as well as its political and ideological premises, narratives, images and linguistic patterns, which informed their preparation and the way they were passed on politically. The central focus here is the role that secret intelligence on the GDR played in intra-German policy (Deutschlandpolitik) during the phase of detente and intra-German cooperation in the 1970s and 1980s, which is of key importance for writing the political and social history of the old West German Federal Republic.