How does publicly exposing a repressive regime’s secret collaborators affect respect not only for its victims but also for the collaborators themselves? This intriguing question drives Juan Espindola’s excellent examination of German postunification Vergangenheitsbewältigung, or the project of coming to terms with the past. Its challenges include the legacy of the Stasi, the notorious East German secret police, whose web ensnared the highest ratio of participants to citizens in the European communist world. Their prodigious work left behind 111 kilometers of files. Among the least powerful participants were “unofficial collaborators”—inoffizieller Mitarbeiter, or IMs—tasked with secretly informing on people they knew, or groups they infiltrated. After reunification, they (along with other Stasi participants) faced both potential dismissal from public-sector positions and public exposure via citizens’ access to the Stasi files. Espindola argues that these transitional justice measures raise important, largely unexplored questions about respect in a society that seeks to both face its past injustices and build a unified, democratic political community.

Scholarly interest in the murky, treacherous Stasi world is not new, nor is attention to respect for victims. Espindola’s key original contribution is his focus on “respect for persons”—a multidimensional concept, measured by the extent to which people relate to one another as agents with interests worth defending—as a concern that threads through the communist period to the present, and on its relevance to perpetrators as well as victims. It is, he argues, central to the nature of the wrongdoing, when IMs (themselves treated disrespectfully by the Stasi and the regime) behaved in a way that both disrespected their victims and undercut their own claim to respect, including self-respect. The postcommunist unmasking of IMs simultaneously realizes this loss of status, while also restoring it to the victims. More broadly, exposure and the public discussions it prompts (ideally) help reorient community norms. The question then becomes whether the IMs should be able to regain societal and self-respect, and if so, under what conditions. And if appropriate conditions are met, what demands does this place on victims? Must they be willing to respect their betrayers?

Espindola answers these difficult questions by developing a theoretical framework drawn from classical and modern philosophical perspectives on the nature of respect and self-respect, and then applying it to empirical evidence from the German case. He works toward grounding abstract concepts in “native intelligibility,” or how actors themselves understand what they are doing (p. 29). He explains the philosophical arguments clearly and succinctly, in a conversational, accessible tone. Further, he contextualizes the study by examining West Germany’s grappling with the Nazi past, the nature of the East German regime and Stasi operations, and both transitional justice measures and German legal recourse against exposure of past bad behavior, based on the “right of personality” (Persönlichkeitsrecht), which is centrally concerned with respect for persons (p. 73).

Espindola’s empirical evidence consists of several cases where IMs and their victims struggled over the legitimacy of exposure. He considers how issues of respect are raised in their competing claims and in the political and media discussions they prompted. He weighs these claims against a nuanced assessment of the IMs’ responsibility, including factors that deepen or mitigate it. More broadly, he examines how exposures and ensuing debates can have unintended consequences, such as offering a sense of exoneration to the not-fully-innocent, and, conversely, promoting the view that all East Germans were complicit in the regime and therefore now unworthy of trust and respect. Finally, the author considers the ways in which apology (personal and public) might allow IMs to regain lost respect, including from victims, and thereby become full members of German society, with no barriers to participating at any level.

In applying complex philosophical concepts to a real-life, messy, evolving situation, Espindola’s book makes several important contributions. One weakness in both some transitional justice scholarship (especially in its early stages) and in its practice is conceptual ambiguity, where notions such as “truth” and “reconciliation” are put forward as policy goals without being clearly defined or their relationship to other goals and policies revealed. A second weakness comes from assuming that such goals are worthy, without sufficiently delving into trade-offs and complications. A third is lack of empirical testing of transitional justice outcomes, which can be difficult to tease out and measure. (For example, by what criteria can we assess “reconciliation,” and even if we define some, can causal links to processes be proven?) Espindola’s study addresses all three: it meticulously explores many facets of respect and how it is implicated in transitional justice methods, even when not explicitly identified as a concern; it considers the complexities of contending claims for respect, and discusses ways of managing when they conflict, as well as the strengths and weaknesses of all key perspectives; and it identifies compelling, concrete measures by which to evaluate concern for respect in relation to IM exposure, noting how it has changed over time.

This final strength also points to an issue on which Espindola’s argument could be challenged. His analysis leads him to conclude that if IMs demonstrate that they recognize the harm they did and apologize properly (which involves important criteria), society—including victims—is obliged to consider them reconciled and restored “to their status as full-fledged members of the polity” (p. 202). In essence, the author argues that the value of respect requires that “the repentant perpetrator should be spared further reproaches, and she should be treated, if possible, as she was treated prior to her wrongdoing, or as close to possible as that. Otherwise reconciliation is an empty word” (pp. 236–37). Espindola acknowledges that “destroying the ledger of moral failures” requires a certain “leap of faith,” and the necessary “default political trust presumes basic decency and commitment to fair play” (pp. 224–25). He further recognizes, regretfully, that the majority of Germans are not inclined to this view.

Here, he points to the case of Kerstin Kaiser, a prominent politician in Die Linke (a party with roots in the East German Communist Party) who fully and publicly apologized for her youthful role as an IM (she was recruited at age 18), which, she claims, harmed no one (she followed up with her “victims” after the regime’s fall). Nevertheless, she has been prevented by negative public pressure from becoming a government minister, and appears relegated to the lower Brandenburg–state level of political involvement. Espindola makes a good case for Kaiser’s having met the standard for a proper apology, but his normative requirement that the public forgive, take a leap of faith, reconcile, and trust seems based more on abstract moral reasoning than on empirical evidence supporting this perspective’s assumptions about a general human ability to truly reform and become trustworthy (most specifically in the political sphere) after a history of poor moral choices, even if those were mitigated by circumstances, and even if there is an apology.

One promising case does not offer sufficient basis for such a sweeping conclusion, and other examples that Espindola uses elsewhere in the book of unrepentant, bullying, and self-interested IMs seem to justify society’s wariness (admittedly, he does not point to an obligation to reconcile with them). Whether most people can be forgiving under such circumstances is also an open question. Indeed, if Transitional Justice after German Reunification has a weakness, it is that it devotes significantly more attention to abstract philosophical analysis than to the concrete, confounding human stories that constitute the Stasi past. Ultimately, philosophical reasoning is unlikely to untangle and reorient the legacy of an institution bent on undermining societal trust, but Espindola also recognizes this, ending by observing that “public unveilings are a nonideal mechanism for achieving (imperfect) justice. Ideally, their promoters should work toward smoothing the roughness of public exposures” (p. 247). His work offers wise and thoughtful considerations for doing just this.