The following is Irit Dekel‘s contribution to JiC’s ongoing symposium on Mark Drumbl and Barbora Holá’s new book, Informers Up Close. Irit is an Assistant Professor of Germanic Studies and Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington. To see all of the other submissions to the symposium, click here.
In Informers Up Close Mark Drumbl and Barbora Holá aim to understand both the act of informing and informers themselves. In this beautifully written volume, Drumbl and Holá make sense of what informers did and how subjective values of the Communist era in Czechoslovakia both affected informer worldviews and knowledge formation of informer actions. As its title promises, the book offers a microscopic analysis of Czechoslovak secret police (StB) files about informers and individuals they informed upon, their own writing, those of recruiters and bureaucrats, the state, and its operatives in what was given to or withheld from citizens in Communist Czechoslovakia. The authors use the most detailed elements of human experience and social mechanisms to draw a larger picture of how informing came to be and was sustained and how informers were caricatured and denounced after the regime ended. A central finding of the book is that informing dynamically takes shape as an intimate and relational act of social navigation. The authors conceptualize StB informers as victims who victimize.
Drumbl and Holá focus on ‘everyday collaboration’, such as denouncing a spouse or refusing to report on a close friend and still being useful to the state. Their sensitivity to detail enables them to paint a multi-faceted picture of informing and informers beyond their case study. While the archived StB files constitute the epistemological foundation of Informers Up Close, the authors helpfully incorporate extensive content from a robust array of secondary sources: accounts in the “Memory of Nations” oral history archive, academic literature, newspaper articles, informal discussions they have conducted, and literary works. For instance, reading the recruitment proposals the authors show, rather than tell, the salience of individual interpersonal connections amid the intricate structure of the bureaucracy. Understanding informers in this way, the authors shed light on multiple aspects of transitional justice after conflict or regime end. The book also opens space for future studies of the residual effect of authoritarian regimes, the lingering emotions that first moved the informers and sustained their actions; and after the regime’s end morphed into a shared disdain toward informers and their acts, and into the lingering distrust and anger toward that time.
As a sociologist and ethnographer who focuses on memory in contemporary Germany and on witnessing, my discussion of this fascinating book follows questions its authors encourage readers to consider: (1) What files do? (2) What to do with files? (3) The ‘memory’ of files: and how to understand with them, or the long- lasting impact of narratives built upon the figure of the informer for the post-communist societies.
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