Gary Bruce's The Firm: The Inside Story of the Stasi is a well-written look inside the Ministry for State Security (MfS, or Stasi) of East Germany. Combining archival research with extensive interviews, The Firm focuses in particular on two Stasi district offices, in Perleberg and in Gransee, north of Berlin. Neither district was in theory terribly crucial to the GDR's national security, though Perleberg did abut West Germany—this is not a cloak-and-dagger narrative about espionage in East Berlin. It is the very quotidian nature of Perleberg and Gransee, however, that allows us to formulate a new set of questions about the Stasi than have previously been asked: how did the Stasi function in everyday life, apart from hotbeds of dissidence or Cold-War intrigue?

Indeed, what is striking about Bruce's study of the two districts is just how interpenetrated the Stasi was in everyday life in these places where there did not seem to be a pressing need for state security. In particular, Bruce's work is illuminating when he discusses the vast network of informers recruited by the Stasi, as well as when he explores the internal culture of camaraderie that was created and sustained within the “Firm.”

The first piece of this picture is Bruce's discussion of the methods used by the Stasi to build their ranks. First of all, as Bruce notes, one did not apply to join the Stasi—one had to be asked to apply for candidacy by the Stasi themselves. They had a profile of the type of person they wanted: the person should ideally be from a working-class background but show ambition, and his/her background needed to be free of any political suspicion, such as past association with anticommunism or relatives in the west. More than that, though, the ideal candidate was a model of “mainstream” East German culture. Any questionable character traits or nonconformist behavior (excessive drinking, womanizing, homosexuality, drug use, gambling issues, long hair, odd choices of clothing, etc.) were serious strikes against someone. Women, too, were rarely recruited to join, and those who did rarely progressed up the ranks of the organization. Then, if a candidate passed the initial screening, he was sent to the Potsdam College of Law, which was in reality the Stasi Officer Academy, and this was the only one. The result was an ethos that was part military and part cult; the Stasi members saw themselves as an elite society, as Chekists, sworn to defend the ideal of socialism and the Socialist Unity Party. They considered themselves superior to other organizations and institutions in East Germany, including the army, as well as to ordinary East Germans. Even the janitors and kitchen staff in the MfS held military ranks. They were also paid like an elite, making significantly more than the average East German citizen.

Bruce's descriptions of everyday life in the district office paint a picture of camaraderie and collegiality. Many of the former Stasi officers interviewed by Bruce recalled with fondness the routine of getting to the office, shooting the breeze with fellow officers over coffee to start the morning, settling in to review case files, and then breaking for lunch at the cafeteria at the nearby municipal building. In other words, there was little drama. Life in the “Firm,” it seems, consisted of the endless work of recruiting networks of informers, and if the saying that a cop is only as good as his informer is true, then the Stasi was very good indeed. The Stasi raised the practice of recruiting informers to an art form—as a Stasi manual on recruitment itself proclaimed—and built an elegant, complex, and highly organized system of different types of collaborators, organized into six distinct categories. Indeed, as Bruce helpfully notes, when these informants are considered, the Stasi was, proportional to the GDR's population, the most far-reaching secret police force in the world, more so than even in the U.S.S.R.

What is so interesting about the Stasi's methods as Bruce describes them is that the informants were not pressured into becoming collaborators—they were cultivated, slowly, cautiously, by agents, almost like being groomed to join a cult, and only when the agent and his superiors felt the time was right, they revealed the truth about their identity to the candidate. Then, they were given the option of becoming an informer, and they had to sign an oath stating their willingness. There was little coercion, if any, at least at first. Informers were expected to work with the Stasi out of sheer persuasion, or perhaps some material benefits, but never through duress. The Stasi knew a long time ago what it seems certain modern security organs in the west have forgotten: information obtained under duress is almost always worthless, whether from informers or suspects.

As Bruce writes, however, in the 1980s the pressure to meet quotas of informers became impossible to fill; Stasi agents, especially in districts such as Perleberg and Gransee where the pool of potential informants was small to begin with, began to recruit informers who they knew were of little importance and even less reliability, simply to play the numbers game demanded by the party. The “Ideology of Tons” that governed the planned economy came to dominate the work of the Stasi as well.

Perhaps the most fascinating part of this study is Bruce's section on the practice of Zersetzen, coordinated campaigns to ruin the lives of certain people who were identified as problem makers, such as pastors who gave subversive sermons. Zersetzen involved such things as spreading false rumors to damage or destroy people's reputations, careers, and even their families (the planting of false love letters from fabricated extramarital affairs was a particularly effective method of destroying marriages). The Stasi, Bruce reveals, did not need to rely on physical violence; destroying reputations was just as effective.

There are a few problems with the book: several sections where terms, people, or situations are explained twice as though they were being introduced for the first time. The first chapter on Perleberg and Gransee under the Nazis is superfluous, and the decision to giver monikers to his interview subjects, in addition to their pseudonyms (i.e., “The Realist” or “The Ambitious Socialite”) is also regrettable from a stylistic standpoint. Overall, however, the merits of this book vastly outweigh its shortcomings.