After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the political reunification of Germany, the new all-German government made the extraordinary decision to open most of the files of the East German secret police, nicknamed the Stasi. Some of the files had been removed by the Stasi before the communist government fell; some disappeared during the confusion occurring at the time of the reunification; and some of the files were deliberately destroyed or withheld by the new government. But in my case, five thousand pages of file materials were intact and the gaps were relatively minor. For the most part, therefore, I was able to find out what actually happened in the half year that I sat in the Stasi Investigation Prison Hohenschšnhausen on suspicion of espionage.
From 1959 through 1961 I lived in West Berlin, writing my doctoral dissertation for Yale University on the foreign trade system of the Soviet bloc, using East Germany as a case study. In the course of my research, I conducted about thirty-five interviews in East Berlin, primarily about planning and decision-making in foreign trade. I also asked questions about the price-setting process for trade with other communist nations and, to place my research in perspective, about the East German economy in general. I consulted various libraries in East Berlin and read materials unavailable in the West.
